Challenging the Kremlin

Death puts a different value on a person, usually a smaller one than in life. Sometimes, how- ever, the opposite happens. For instance, how many medieval Archbishops of Canterbury can most of us name off-hand apart from St Thomas Becket? In some cases, death makes the man. It is likely that Alexander Litvinenko will be another example. He died in London on 23 November 2006, poisoned slowly and painfully with polonium-210 radiation. His murder, in circumstances recalling some of the fruitier episodes of Cold War espionage, brought him instant global celebrity.

During his life, he and his fellow author, the historian Yuri Felshtinsky, had found it impossible to find a publisher for their book Blowing Up Russia. Now there is a British edition. Translation rights to 13 countries have been sold since January, as have the film rights. Martin Sixsmith, who reported on the collapse of Soviet communism as the BBC’s correspondent in Moscow, has rushed out an account of Litvinenko’s death, and of the events that led up to it. Litvinenko’s widow Marina is also hard at work on a book on the case, as is the New York Times correspondent Alan Cowell. In Russia, meanwhile, Alexander and Natalya Pankov have already published a thinly disguised version of the murder in the form of a sensational thriller entitled Breakfast with Polonium.

Litvinenko was a career soldier whose dedication and talents led to his recruitment by the KGB in 1988. By 1998 he was a lieutenant-colonel in its successor organisation, the FSB, then under the command of the recently appointed Vladimir Putin. In November of that year Litvinenko and four colleagues appeared at a press conference and announced to an astonished world that their senior officers had ordered them to murder several prominent Russian citizens — the most significant of whom was Boris Berezovsky, a billionaire politician who served in Yeltsin’s government.