The Litvinenko operation was aimed not just at Litvinenko himself, but also at his boss, the exiled anti-Putin oligarch, Boris Berezovsky. The FSB’s assassin, Andrei Lugovoy, spent the evening before the murder sitting in Berezovsky’s office, spreading polonium on to his furniture, making a show of Berezovsky’s vulnerability, only to spare him and kill his lieutenant. Putin was saying, ‘We could have killed you, but we didn’t; you are at our mercy…’
State-run Russian television offered the usual tongue-in-cheek denial – ‘It wasn’t the Kremlin who did this, because it had nothing to gain from killing Litvinenko’ – before identifying the real target of the exercise. ‘If the Kremlin wanted to exterminate its opponents, think about it…,’ said the smiling presenter. ‘Stalin had Trotsky knocked off, not Trotsky’s chauffeur. Not Trotsky’s dog … Litvinenko isn’t Trotsky. I’m sorry, but Litvinenko is Trotsky’s dog!’ If the FSB had murdered ‘Trotsky’s dog’, they had murdered him at his master’s heel. The message was clear: we know this is a Western country, we know you think you are protected; but we have the power and you are not safe.
In Stalinist times, the communist leadership despatched teams of assassins around the globe to hunt down ‘traitors to the Motherland’. During the brief window of East–West rapprochement under Boris Yeltsin, that sort of thinking was abandoned, but Vladimir Putin has brought it back. A law passed in July 2006 gave the security forces the explicit right to kill enemies of the state at home or abroad. ‘Special operations divisions of the Federal Security Service [FSB],’ states article 9.1 of Federal Law No. 153-FZ, ‘may be deployed, by decision of the President of the Russian Federation, against terrorists … located outside the territory of the Russian Federation in order to eliminate a threat to the security of the Russian Federation.’ Specifically mentioned as legitimate targets are people, such as Boris Berezovsky, who call for political change in Russia, described in legal jargon as ‘individuals … aiming to forcibly change the constitutional system of the Russian Federation’. It’s a formula that allows the FSB wide discretion, and it has been widely deployed. FSB commanders no longer need to request permission to kill; the law is in place and no one is going to punish them.
Speaking about the poisoning of Alexei Navalny, Putin laughed at calls for an investigation. ‘Who needs him [Navalny]?’ he sneered. ‘If somebody had wanted to poison him, they would finish him off.’
When he was asked in March 2021 if he thought Putin was a killer, Joe Biden had no hesitation in answering in the affirmative. Decisions on the legitimate use of force are made by the leaders of many states and this in itself does not make them murderers. Force may be justified if it is used in the public interest, following a proper legal process and when no other means is possible. The key phrases are ‘due process’ and ‘in the public interest’. The arbitrary and unjustified decisions taken by Putin, or by his entourage with Putin’s consent, meet none of these criteria. They are common criminal acts of violence and murder carried out in the venal interests of corrupt individuals.
CHAPTER 21
MAKING MARTYRS
When Alexei Navalny flew back to Russia on 17 January 2021, I’m sure he knew he would be arrested and sent to jail. He had been poisoned five months earlier by the Russian secret police, the FSB, on the orders of Vladimir Putin. His crime was to reveal the corruption and self- enrichment of the president at the expense of the Russian nation.
I had myself travelled exactly the same path 18 years earlier, so I understood better than most why Navalny took the deliberate step of being imprisoned, possibly for a long time. As I explained earlier, I knew that when I confronted Putin in 2003, I was likely to be arrested.
I had pointed out the corruption in Vladimir Putin’s Kremlin and Alexei Navalny had done the same. After he was poisoned, he had been flown for treatment to Germany and could easily have stayed in relative safety abroad. He chose to return because he had wanted to make a difference to the future of Russia, but he was arrested at the gates of Moscow airport. Like me, he was tried on nonsensical charges of embezzlement. A court in February 2021 sentenced him to three-and-a-half years in a labour camp; and in February 2022 he was put on trial again, facing charges that carried a maximum penalty of 15 years.
Will Navalny’s sacrifice change things? I hope so. I can say with certainty that my denunciation of corruption in the Kremlin, followed by my ten years as a political prisoner, made many more Russians aware of the big questions facing our country today. It gave me the opportunity to continue promoting the values of freedom and democracy. Putting Alexei Navalny in jail and keeping him there may seem like a solution for Putin, but it creates a very public martyr that the world will find hard to ignore.
For the Russian people, even those who dislike figures such as Navalny, there is a recognition that the willingness to suffer persecution and imprisonment is a token of integrity in the pursuit of a moral cause. Memories remain strong of Soviet-era dissidents such as Sergei Kovalev, Anatoly Shcharansky, Lyudmila Alekseeva and Nobel Peace Prize winner Andrei Sakharov. Navalny in jail is a rallying point. For much of the Russian intelligentsia it makes the situation black and white – you can either support Putin and the continuation of the status quo in Russia, or you can support the fight for democracy, through Navalny.
There have been calls for me to take a more central role in opposition politics, which is something I have considered doing in the past. But I do not wish to repeat the example of Boris Berezovsky, who came to London and railed against Putin without achieving much, before ultimately asking the Kremlin to allow him to return to Russia and dying before he could do so. Instead, I am committed to working with all the representatives of the progressive opposition, including Navalny, Garry Kasparov, Andrei Pivovarov, Dmitry Gudkov and others. I want to contribute something constructive, taking an objective view of East–West relations, to propose solutions that will benefit the people of Russia, America and the world. Now, with history hastening its march, I am convinced more than ever that the future lies with us. There is ample and growing evidence that the Putin regime is becoming desperate, resorting to ever greater violence and repression to thwart the aspirations of the Russian people. The decision to invade Ukraine was an irresponsible gamble with genuine potential to rebound on Putin and his cronies. This is the moment to find hope and to take action.
Alexei Navalny at a court hearing in Moscow, February 2021
In the spring and summer of 2021, there was a very public display of the Kremlin’s despairing struggle to hold back the tide of change. The wall of an electrical substation in St Petersburg’s Pushkarsky Park became the setting for an exploration of memory, truth and freedom that summed up the dynamic of a regime gripped by panic. Overnight on 14 July, a banner appeared on the substation wall. In the style of the Beatles’ Revolver album, it depicted a series of faces that most Russians would recognise, including the murdered investigative journalists, Anna Politkovskaya and Anastasia Baburova, the murdered opposition politician, Boris Nemtsov, the slain human rights activist, Natalya Estemirova, and other victims of the struggle for freedom of expression.
The inscription on the banner, ‘Heroes of recent times’, was a homage to those who had been brave enough to ask questions of Vladimir Putin’s regime and have lost their lives as a consequence. It was also a reference to a mural that previously, briefly, had adorned the substation wall, a smiling image of Alexei Navalny, titled ‘A hero of the new era’.