Were it not that a man has died, the Litvinenko affair might be viewed as the most extraordinarily effective publicity campaign for the new James Bond movie. It has everything that once made 007 so successful. There are a host of shady spies, unseen masterminds in the background and a mystery poison that has led to luxury hotels, a fleet of aircraft and even an entire football stadium being checked for radioactivity. It produced reports yesterday of Alexander Litvinenko having suggested to a female Russian academic that they team up to exploit his many contacts in the Russian security services and then blackmail several prominent figures and an excited front-page headline somewhere else that read: “Revealed: how Russia is biggest spy threat to Britain.”
The effect has been to suggest that the Cold War is not quite history. The collective rush to judgment to pin blame directly on Vladimir Putin, as Litvinenko did so spectacularly from his hospital deathbed, is breathtaking. The Russian President has been portrayed as if another Ernst Blofeld, the sinister founder of Spectre, stroking his white cat while calmly deciding whether or not to terminate his enemies.
It has been widely concluded that — whether or not Mr Putin endorsed this specific “hit” — “the lid has been lifted” on his regime. This supposed “democrat”, it has been declared, is the heir to Lenin, Stalin and several of the brutal Tsars before them.
It is not merely my desire to avoid an encounter with polonium-210 that makes me cautious about this emerging consensus. The counsel of John Reid, the Home Secretary, both publicly in the House of Commons and, apparently, privately in Cabinet, “not to make assumptions” about this astonishingly murky saga seems to me to be wise.
The notion that we have somehow travelled back in time 30 or 40 years, with Russia once more to be treated as the menace that it used to be to Britain and the British, is dangerous nonsense.
The more that we learn about Mr Litvinenko and his circle, the more confusing matters become and the longer and more diverse grows the list of those set of people who may have wanted him murdered. He was involved with past members of the KGB (the forerunner to the FSB), whom he had accused of killing innocent Russians in apartment blocks in 1999 to revive the conflict with Chechnya, current FSB operatives, people with connections to organised crime, various anti-Putin activists and a series of Russians living in Britain either by choice or in involuntary exile.
Mr Litvinenko met his end after receiving a dose of radioactivity 100 times that required to kill him — making it virtually certain that the murder was detected. One might have expected a more sophisticated effort from a state security service. The chances are that the police will never know all of the details behind this incident.
What can be asserted is that it was as much about events in London as in Moscow. If the “lid has been lifted” on anything by this bizarre tale it is the extent to which our capital city has become the centre for intrigue focused on Russia. Londongrad is home to a host of billionaires and their associates who are either still in favour with Mr Putin yet seek the shelter of a alternative base if that relationship ends, or are sworn foes of those who occupy the Kremlin. In that respect, it is hardly surprising that a substantial number of FSB intelligence agents are located in this country. The crucial difference between now and the Cold War, nevertheless, is that their primary task is to spy on other Russians, not to seek out secrets from deep inside Westminster or Whitehall.
As for the nature of the Russian President and his administration, this has to be placed in perspective. Mr Putin did not inherit an emerging Sweden from Boris Yeltsin in 2000 but a nation in a state of economic and political anarchy.
Not only the Warsaw Pact but also the Soviet Union itself had collapsed ignominiously, a surreal Parliament with large contingents of unreconstructed Brezhnevites and unrepentant ultra-nationalists had arrived, a form of cowboy capitalism meant that lucrative assets had fallen into the hands of the oligarchs — and the entire mad show was nominally in the hands of a man who was rarely sober. That there was a yearning for order and that Mr Putin was popular for imposing it is unsurprising.
Russia is plainly not a democracy if the point of comparison is the countries that lie to the west of its borders. If the reference is to its vast southern boundary, however, then Mr Putin begins to look as if he is presiding over a model of political pluralism.
The acid test of whether Russia is best thought of as a permanently authoritarian place, rather than on a rollercoaster ride to a form of liberal democracy, is whether Mr Putin changes, contorts or ignores the provisions of the Russian constitution and seeks a third term in office when his present mandate expires in just over a year’s time. Only at that moment should demands for Russia to be removed from the G8 be taken remotely seriously.
Britain and the United States would be foolish to want to isolate Moscow. The idea that we are on the brink of a new Cold War is not merely wildly fanciful but a potentially disastrous distraction. The principal threat to our national security today is the Islamist terrorism that has already resulted in one attack on the London transport network but which has the ambition and many of the means to be far more devastating.
The Kremlin is a natural ally to Downing Street and the White House in this struggle. James Bond is very entertaining. In the real world, we should not recast Russia as the enemy.
