‘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

In recent months Litvinenko’s campaign against the Putin regime has reached impressive, if at times slightly absurd, proportions. In July he wrote a piece entitled ‘The Kremlin Paedophile’ on a Chechen opposition website, alleging that the Russian president had sex with underage boys. When he was poisoned he was investigating the recent murder of his friend Anna Politkovskaya, Russia’s most prominent investigative journalist.

If Politkovskaya’s killing was a shameless and open political murder, the attempt on Litvinenko is even more so. A well-placed security source told The Spectator that a poison as rare and exotic as radioactive thallium ‘suggests a state actor, and one with a long-standing interest in assassination techniques’. Poisoning a British citizen on British soil demonstrates a new level of chutzpah even for the Putin regime (which, for the record, rejects any link to the attack as ‘sheer nonsense’).

Vladimir Bukovsky takes a different view. He told me earlier this week, ‘In July this year the Duma passed two very interesting laws. One allowed the security services to kill extremists abroad. The second broadened the definition of “extremist” to include those who libellously criticise the regime. The way they work is to pass a death sentence in absentia, then instruct the FSB or GRU [military intelligence] to carry it out. That said, when I saw Sasha a couple of weeks ago, he didn’t speak about surveillance or threats, but that’s because they had become a permanent feature of his life.’