‘Remember Trotsky!’

22 November 2006

Neil Barnett recalls his encounters with the poisoned spy who has had the bearing of a marked man for years. The Russian intelligence services, Litvinenko told him, are purely political organisations, whose only purpose is to shore up Putin’s power

Sitting on his bed dressed in a shiny tracksuit and trainers, Litvinenko was a pale, watchful figure, a Putin-like grey man who could vanish into the crowd without difficulty. But at the same time he showed flashes of boyish charm distinctly unlike the Russian leader. He wanted to discuss the Russian state’s abuse of Interpol international criminal arrest warrants to blackmail businessmen and intimidate opponents living outside Russia. It was 2002 and Litvinenko’s patron, the dissident oligarch Boris Berezovsky, also living in London, faced extradition to Russia. The story was interesting, but hard to shift in the British press: too much ‘inside baseball’, too obscure.

But Litvinenko himself was a fascinating figure. I wanted to know what had driven him to confront his old masters so directly, and how he managed the fear that must bring. He described how he had discovered evidence of FSB involvement in the 1999 ‘apartment bombings’ in Moscow and Volgodonsk that had been a prime casus belli for the new Chechen war. Litvinenko — a lieutenant-colonel at the time he decamped — described how local militia in the city of Ryazan caught some men planting what seemed to be explosives in the basement of an apartment block in the early hours of the morning. The men identified themselves as FSB officers and claimed that the bags of explosives in reality contained sugar, and that they were conducting an ‘anti-terrorist’ exercise.

Litvinenko told AP, ‘I have direct proof that in Ryazan there was not sugar in the building, but hexogen; that the explosive device was not a dummy, but real; and that the explosive device was put there by FSB officers on instructions from their superiors.’ He then said of the successful explosions elsewhere, also using hexogen, ‘Those bombings were organised by the Russian special services.’ In other words, he alleged that the FSB were blowing up hundreds of Russians in their beds to create such panic that the population would clamour for authoritarian measures.

‘Are you ever threatened, do you ever feel in danger?’ I asked. Litvinenko stared disconsolately at his trainers as if this was a question he couldn’t begin to answer adequately. Then a roar of laughter came from the armchair across the room, in which sat his friend, the veteran dissident Vladimir Konstantinovich Bukovsky, a vast and jovial Russian bear wrapped in tweed, who could not be more different from Litvinenko. As a neurobiologist, he had exposed the Soviet use of mental institutions against dissidents, and spent 12 years in the Gulag as a result. In 1976 Moscow swapped Bukovsky for a Chilean communist leader, and he moved to Britain.