‘Remember Trotsky!’

25 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

Both crimes fall into an accelerating pattern of actions intended to silence all effective dissent and revelation. According to the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), 13 Russian journalists have died in contract killings unambiguously linked to their work since 2000. Naturally, CPJ will not be drawn on the potential involvement of the Kremlin, but the government’s reaction to the killings is telling, says Nina Ognianova, the group’s Russia co-ordinator: ‘What we can say is that the Russian authorities, in their failure to properly investigate and prosecute crimes against journalists, have fostered a climate of impunity, in which reporters are afraid to cover sensitive subjects and enemies of the press are encouraged to continue killing journalists. Unless authorities act to overturn this cycle of impunity, the roster of dead journalists will continue growing with terrible consequences for Russia’s press corps and the public.’

The mainstream media are now almost completely in the hands of Kremlin allies and state-run companies. Private property is under attack and foreign investors are increasingly nervous after the Yukos oil company nationalisation and the undermining of BP’s contract in Sakhalin. Georgia is under economic and rhetorical siege from Moscow, its citizens expelled from Russia, their businesses shut down on trivial pretexts. Young people are being encouraged to join the Putin youth movement Nashi (Ours). Fascism looms.

Apologists will say that under Yeltsin the country threatened to fall apart, and that Putin is a necessary corrective. They will go on to say that Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the erstwhile owner of Yukos now imprisoned in a radioactive Siberian gulag, needed to be brought to heel. They will call Berezovsky a crook and cast doubt on Litvinenko’s motives. They will say that the Georgian president Mikhail Saakashvili and the Ukrainian Moscow-baiter Yulia Tymoshenko simply head opportunistic clans seeking to exploit their countries.