The North London burial of Alexander Litvinenko was so Coppola-crushingly cinematic that when the film of his demise is made, the director might as well stick with news footage for the funeral. But he will need some imagination to re-create the start of the story.



Litvinenko’s polonium moment confirmed the return of Russia as Intercontinental Poison Agency and all-round snowbooted evildoer – a comeback that began three years ago at a meeting of men in suits. On March 11, 2003, Vladimir Putin told his cabinet in the Kremlin that he was merging three acronyms: the FAPSI, the FPS and the FSB.

The world took no notice. Even Russians yawned, which was the point. This was a very bureaucratic coup; the neat reversal of the single most important episode in the collapse of the Soviet Union. One of Boris Yeltsin’s first acts after the failed putsch against Mikhail Gorbachev was to break up the KGB. Twelve years later, Putin effectively put it back together.

At that meeting, control of Russia’s borders (previously the job of the FPS) and electronic intelligence operations and coded government communications (that would be the FAPSI) came back under the roof of the Lubyanka. The FSB (everything else the KGB used to do, including silencing government critics) was already there. The spies were back in charge.

Litvinenko’s murder may never be solved. For the same reasons, the essential outlines of what happened to him are probably as clear now as they will ever be. He rose to the rank of lieutenant-colonel and minor nuisance in an overmighty, underemployed security apparatus that doesn’t so much combat organised crime in Russia as supervise it.

He found out this for himself when ordered to carry out an internal investigation into allegations of extra-curricular chicanery by a senior FSB commander put in charge of the agency’s activities in the Caucasus in the late Nineties. When he presented his damning report to the then head of the FSB, one Vladimir Putin, it was ignored. Soon afterwards, Litvinenko was fired and sought asylum in Britain. Once granted it, he tried to expose the apparatus that had rejected him. So it ate him.

One of his specific sins was to accuse the FSB of blowing up a block of flats in Ryazan to bolster Putin’s case for reinvading Chechnya. Three others have made this allegation publicly. They are all dead. He also allegedly uncovered an FSB plan to recover foreign assets of the Yukos oil firm, or eliminate their holders. Poking one’s nose into the Russian oil business was always dangerous; poking it into the wreckage of a company systematically crushed by the state because of the political ambitions of its founder, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, was doubly so.

Analysts still anxious to give Putin the benefit of their doubts about his autocratic tendencies call his Russia a “corporate state”. This is jargon for a state in which all key business and industrial assets are controlled by a ruling elite accountable to no one but their Harvey Nicks-addicted wives. “Kleptocracy” is just as accurate.

I have seen this kleptocracy in action. I cannot name the kleptocrat, for my safety and that of the well-known person who took me to his house. Suffice to say he was an ex-KGB colonel busy enriching himself by looting priceless artefacts from a UN World Heritage Site for sale in Germany.

This, on a vastly larger scale, is how Russia is being run. Putin is a former spy. He has surrounded himself with former spies and handed them every lever of power in Russia on condition that they check with him before pulling them. He is neither more nor less dangerous than his hero, but it’s worth bearing in mind that his hero is the dead Soviet premier Yuri Andropov, another former spy.