Alexander Litvinenko continues to exert influence from his Hampstead grave. Few people had heard of this passionate, unpredictable man until his death by polonium210 poisoning in November 2006. Litvinenko was a former KGB officer who turned against Putin and the Russian security services. Last year he was given British citizenship. The book he wrote — and whose preface he did not live to co-sign with Yuri Felshtinsky — is his last imprecation against a regime he detested. Litvinenko and Felshtinsky wanted to turn western public opinion against Putin. They also sought to persuade Russians that their president, who enjoys immense popularity in their country, leads a homicidal kleptocracy.
The book is the latest version of a text first produced five years ago. In 2002, they wrote chapters that, they thought, proved that the official rationale for the war started against Chechnya in late 1999 was a fabrication. Terrorist bombings of apartment blocks had occurred in September in Moscow and elsewhere. Hundreds of innocent citizens were killed. When the outrage was blamed on Chechen separatists, popular feelings rallied to the government’s cause. Putin, the prime minister of Russia at the time, was ready by December to hurl the Russian army into Chechnya. The invasion was unimaginably savage. There were tens of thousands of deaths and half the population of the region fled over the borders. Chechnya was reduced to a moonscape.
Several commentators, including Litvinenko and Felshtinsky, proposed that it had been the Russian security agencies who had arranged for the blocks to be bombed. The alleged motive was to induce people to accept the government’s call for a war. Other public critics included the journalist Anna Politkovskaya and the billionaire Boris Berezovsky. Politkovskaya wrote a great deal about conditions in Chechnya; she was assassinated in Moscow in October 2006. Berezovsky spoke out fiercely against the Putin administration before escaping to Britain, where he obtained asylum and continues to fulminate against the Kremlin.
Litvinenko turned for help with his work to the historian Felshtinsky. Their skills complemented each other. Litvinenko knew the ways of the KGB and its successor organisation (the FSB) from the inside. He had studied the techniques of liquidation, infiltration and manipulation. He understood how the Russian security services, recovering their confidence after the collapse of the USSR, were striving to assert their control over Russian politics. Felshtinsky brought a different expertise to their enterprise. Having emigrated as a student in 1978, he returned to Moscow to undertake doctoral research on the Socialist-Revolutionary party, which for a few months operated in a coalition with Lenin’s communists. His historical publications exhibited a single- minded ambition to prove that murky deals were done behind the screens of contemporary official pretence.
Back in 2002, their jointly written book failed to appeal to established publishers in the West. Putin was usually given the benefit of the doubt by most commentators. He was also being kissed and hugged by George Bush and Tony Blair, who wanted his cooperation in “the war on terror”. With Berezovsky’s discreet support, Litvinenko and Felshtinsky printed their text privately and were mostly ignored. In 2004, they updated their material and shipped 5,000 copies to Moscow. The whole crateful was impounded. It has taken Litvinenko’s murder for the book to appear in this updated edition. The analysis will no longer be overlooked abroad; and copies will probably get through to Russia. The chapters give as vivid a condemnation of the Putin regime as has yet been written.
The book is undeniably dense, but it does provide a pile of fresh details. Particularly important is the testimony of Achemez Gochiyaev. It is he who was first charged with having committed the terrorist outrage. Gochiyaev ran a small food-distribution business in Moscow, renting premises in the apartment block that was bombed there. He now lives in hiding but agreed to bear witness for the co-authors. It turns out that Gochiyaev is a Karachai and not a Chechen. The Karachai are a people of the north Caucasus but the Russian authorities thought this quite enough for them to pin responsibility for the apartment-block bombings on the Chechens. Gochiyaev wildly contends that Putin intends to use him again as the pretext for an invasion of the Karachai-Cherkess republic in Russia. Otherwise, though, his testimony is measured in tone. The problem is that it is unverifiable. Until and unless an impartial investigation takes place, the truth will lie hidden. The Russia media are now too cowed to do a proper job.
A few Russian politicians have dared to step out of line. These once included State Duma members Sergei Yushenkov, Vladimir Golovlyov and Yuri Sche-kochikhin. Yushenkov and Golovlyov were gunned down; Scheko-chikhin died from suspected poisoning as his skin peeled off and his hair fell out. The book reveals the contact that existed between the authors and the deceased parliamentarians. The question is whether these killings were interconnected or not. The authors think so. But proof as yet is lacking.
Perhaps the most remarkable chapter is about an obscure instance of nonbombing in September 1999. Police in the city of Ryazan discovered sacks of explosives in an apartment block around the time of the Moscow bombings; they also found that the FSB was involved in depositing them there. FSB leader Nikolai Patrushev had to do some fast explaining. Supposedly the sacks contained sugar, and the FSB was merely conducting an experiment to see how effectively the public would react to a terrorist alert. The story soon underwent many changes, losing all consistency. The likelihood is that a genuine bomb massacre had been thwarted.
Litvinenko and Felshtinsky give the names of only a few of their informants for fear of putting their lives at risk. They argue that the best they can do is to present their findings and challenge the Russian government to refute them.
Yet the book is also a covert polemic by the Berezovsky-ites. Serious economic and political corruption surely did not arise in Russia only in the late 1990s. Business-men who got rich quick rarely did so by adhering to legal norms. The natural assets of the country were looted by the entrepreneurial “oligarchs” who invented every imaginable scam. Putin got after them when elected as president. Berezovsky had until then led a charmed life while assisting the Yeltsin family in its financial operations. Alex Gold-farb, interviewed regularly on British television as Litvinenko’s best friend, is known as Berezovsky’s right-hand man; and Litvinenko and Felshtinsky were supported by Berezovsky in their research work. The book needs to be read in this light.
But certainly it puts a case that requires a reply. Sitting astride his gas pipelines, Putin is ignoring the gauntlet tossed at his feet. We may never discover why Litvinenko was murdered and who ordered the killing. Even Putin may not know. But perhaps Litvinenko’s televised death agony will make it harder to brush the Chechen tragedy under the carpet at those chummy power breakfasts organised for Putin in western capitals.
