Service answered that such matters were ‘highly contentious’. There were few reliable sources. And the phenomenon wasn’t new. Organised crime had rooted itself in the USSR after Stalin’s death. It had truly flourished under perestroika, and had grown exponentially under post-communist conditions. The ‘corruption of the political process’ visible with Yeltsin had continued under Putin, Service said.
Russia, of course, wasn’t the only country with criminality at its core. Organised crime has penetrated practically every state in Latin America. Likewise Africa. And the state is geographically more extensive than just the capital. In Mexico, for example, criminal gangs have subverted entire regional administrations.
There was crime in other parts of Europe, too. Italy under the Christian Democrats harboured a huge mafia problem in the south – and in the north as well. In Italy, though, mafia interests never wholly predetermined public policy.
Service offered his own taxonomy as to what ‘mafia state’ meant. He gave ten definitions. He agreed that the ninth offered the best fit when talking about contemporary Russia: ‘a state in which criminal methods and organised crime play a substantial part but which also has countervailing features’. Undoubtedly, ministers and other top Russian officials were keen to enrich themselves. At the same time, Service told the tribunal, ‘not everything that happens in the Putin administration is unconstitutional and illegal and run for criminal purposes’.
It was illuminating. At times the conversation between Emmerson and Service took on the quality of a highbrow BBC or NPR discussion. Putin wasn’t Stalin; his popularity was, ‘alas, real’; like interwar Germany, post-1991 Russia was tempted towards extremism after economic depression and military defeat. Service said he didn’t see many positive sides to Putin. He was bad enough without the overdrawn comparisons made by some Russian democrats to Hitler. And he was the ‘luckiest ruler of the twentieth century’, who had benefited from a steeply ascending oil price.
There was some disagreement on method. Service took the long view: that the truth about Putin would emerge but that we’d have to wait. ‘It will be knowable eventually. It always is. We now know a lot of what we needed to know for decades about even Joseph Stalin. So I am confident that one day we will know about Putin, but it will be too late then. It will just be a matter for historians and not for people engaged in public affairs.’
Other witnesses took a less detached view. Litvinenko’s co-author Yuri Shvets, the former KGB agent, pointed out that ‘active measures’ – such as state assassinations – were always authorised at the highest political levels. This was, Shvets said, one of the KGB’s main traditions. It would be unthinkable for an FSB general, whether Viktor Ivanov or anybody else, to murder a political dissident without Putin’s express approval.
Speaking by video-link from the US, Shvets said that KGB ‘rule number one’ was to cover your back. That meant getting permission from your superior; in Russia the most important decisions were made by just one person. ‘I rule out the possibility that a decision to assassinate Sasha [Litvinenko] or anybody else outside of Russia would have been made without approval of the top authority of Russia, which is Vladimir Putin,’ Shvets told the inquiry.
In Litvinenko’s case, there were special factors as well. As Goldfarb put it, Putin’s conflict with Berezovsky and Litvinenko was deep-rooted and highly personal. ‘Nobody in his right mind, knowing how things run there [Russia], would authorise such an operation when one could be sure that Mr Putin would take a very close look at it after the fact,’ Goldfarb said. He characterised Litvinenko’s killing as not just a crime of politics but an emotional act – a work on Putin’s part of ‘passion’.
There were other good reasons to believe that Putin authorised the operation, Goldfarb added. One was polonium – non-state players couldn’t get hold of it. Russia’s atomic industry ministry would give it to the FSB only with presidential permission. Goldfarb cited a lengthy interview Putin gave state TV on the annexation of Crimea. The president boasted the operation had worked so smoothly because ‘I personally micro-managed it.’
There were few leaks from inside Putin’s Kremlin. What happened in its corridors was an enigma.
What there is is a literature from earlier times: a previous generation of Soviet spies had given details of Litvinenko-like operations. Goldfarb mentioned Sudoplatov, the Soviet intelligence chief whose department, the Administration for Special Tasks, was responsible for sabotage, kidnapping and assassination of enemies abroad. Sudoplatov’s book corroborated rumours that the KGB had a poisons institute – Lab X – set up by order of Lenin. It functioned throughout the Soviet period. ‘As to whether it still exists, I don’t know,’ Goldfarb said.
If Soviet practices were anything to go on, orders to murder political enemies were never written down. There was no documentation for missions of the highest secrecy – only an oral instruction. (In an interview with Nick Lazaredes in 2003, Litvinenko recalled how in December 1997 he was summoned to the Lubyanka, the KGB and FSB HQ. His deputy boss Alexander Kamishnikov berated him for arresting rather than ‘removing’ criminals, in other words, snuffing them out. He showed him a copy of Sudoplatov’s memoir and said: ‘That’s what you should be doing.’)
Conversations like this were usually phrased in an oblique way. Sudoplatov recalls how in 1937 Stalin summoned him to discuss the fate of Yevhen Konovalets, a Ukrainian nationalist sentenced in absentia to death. Stalin urged Sudoplatov to exploit Konovalets’s personal weaknesses. Sudoplatov said that Konovalets liked chocolates. When the meeting broke up, Stalin asked him if he understood the political importance of his mission.
Six months later, Sudoplatov met Konavalets in Rotterdam and presented him with a box of chocolates containing a bomb. He walked away; it blew up soon afterwards; the target was killed. Stalin was pleased.
Sudoplatov also masterminded the operation to murder Leon Trotsky, carried out in Mexico in 1940 by a communist agent, Ramón Mercader, using a small, sharp mountain-climbing pickaxe concealed under a raincoat. The previous year Stalin had summoned Sudoplatov to the Kremlin and in the presence of Laventry Beria, head of the NKVD secret police, said that Trotsky should be eliminated. The plan was discussed in euphemistic terms. Sudoplatov writes: ‘Stalin preferred indirect words like “action”, noting that if the operation was successful the party would forever remember those who were involved and would look after not only them, but every member of their family.’
The spy chief carried out further operations against other Ukrainian nationalists, some of whom were executed by injections of poison, under the guise of medical treatment. These murders were made to look like natural deaths, Sudoplatov said. Assassinations continued after Stalin’s death, always sanctioned at the highest level of the Communist Party.
According to Sudoplatov, the KGB’s special toxicological department fascinated successive Soviet bosses, including Gorbachev. ‘Our leaders were always interested in poisons; afterward the doctors who were involved in these experiments were purged,’ he wrote.
Inevitably, Sudoplatov was himself arrested after Stalin’s death. He spent fifteen years in jail before being released in 1968. At first, he had no doubts about the morality of killing Trotskyites and fascists – his country’s enemies. Later, he regretted the way in which communism chewed up so many innocents, including those who fought bravely against the Nazis.