BusinessWeek Logo
Book Excerpt July 1, 2008, 11:27PM EST

Putin's Labyrinth

(page 2 of 2)

Litvinenko, a political exile, was poisoned with Polunium-210 in London Natasja Weitsz/Getty Images

A truly serious outrage came after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the U.S., Viktor said. Putin was among the first to reach President George W. Bush with condolences and an offer to provide any needed assistance. It wasn't long before Bush requested that Russia acquiesce to the establishment of a U.S. military presence in Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan, from which an offensive would be mounted against the Taliban-ruled government in Afghanistan. The American President promised that the bases were temporary and only for the Afghan attack, said Viktor. He recalled Putin giving a positive response, saying: "We've got to help our friends."

A year and a half later, the active phase of the Afghanistan campaign was concluded. The Kremlin asked when the United States intended to withdraw. Viktor paraphrased the American reply: "This is a zone of our strategic interests, and we're not leaving."

Vyacheslav Nikonov, a dapper 51-year-old historian and Kremlin insider, said America's assertion that it intended to stay in Afghanistan pushed Putin beyond his threshold of patience. "I heard it from the Kremlin, 'We're fed up,'" Nikonov told me. "It's 'You guys do what we Americans want or the relationship is terrible.'"

And that was the end of Putin as sometimes-friendly interlocutor. Putin told off Washington, saying it had "overstepped its national borders in every way." When the U.S. said in 2007 that it would install antimissile devices in Poland and the Czech Republic, Putin's commander of missile forces threatened to re-aim Moscow's nuclear rockets at the installations. Then Putin struck the West's true soft underbelly: energy. He forced both Royal Dutch Shell (RDS.A) and France's Total to sell controlling shares in their Russian oil properties to state-run companies at low prices and warned that a similar fate might await Britain's BP (BP) and the biggest company of all, ExxonMobil (XOM).

Meanwhile, a series of ugly events caused even greater consternation among Putin-watchers. Most prominent was the slaying of Alexander Litvinenko, a former Russian intelligence agent living in political exile in London, who in November 2006 was poisoned by persons unknown with Polonium-210, a radioactive isotope.

Putin's fingerprints were not on every untoward event. They didn't have to be. Rather, it was the complicity of his inaction. A high-profile murder can go unsolved anywhere. A hostage situation—as with the 2002 Chechen terrorist seizure of the packed Moscow theater where the musical Nord-Ost was playing—can go awry even when police are highly skilled. But after the third, fourth, or fifth such outrage, it becomes clear that something fundamental is amiss. At the very least, in Putin's Russia the state cannot be counted on to protect the lives of its citizens. At worst, hired killers and those who employ them have reason to believe that they can carry out executions without fear of the law. I came to view Litvinenko's assassination in particular—and the spectacular use of polonium to kill him—as emblematic of the dark turn that Russia had taken under Putin's rule.

I don't mean to suggest that other countries occupy a higher moral plane than Russia. The post-9/11 world has upset many people's presumptions—including my own—that the West can lay claim to generally noble status. In fact, a comparison of contemporary events in Russia, the West, and elsewhere in the world suggests that distinctions between countries and cultures have become barely discernible.

Except that they haven't. Notwithstanding America's image problems abroad during the George W. Bush years, the U.S., Europe, and large swaths of Asia are not places where journalists such as the crusading Russian writer Anna Politkovskaya are freely assassinated, defecting spies poisoned, or theatergoers gassed to death by their own police, as was the audience of Nord-Ost.

If you are a citizen of Russia, you are more likely than a person in any other G-8 nation to die a premature death, and to do so in a bizarre or cruel way. When I say premature death, I'm not thinking disease, infant mortality, or an automobile accident—though Russians die at a far higher rate in all these categories than citizens of the other seven countries. I mean the kind of death experienced by Litvinenko, Politkovskaya, and the 129 victims of Nord-Ost—all deaths that were countenanced or at least tolerated by the Russian state.

Excerpted from PUTIN'S LABYRINTH by Steve LeVine. Copyright © 2008 by Steve LeVine. Reprinted by arrangement with Random House Publishing Group.

LeVine is a correspondent in BusinessWeek's Washington bureau.

Reader Discussion

 

BW Mall - Sponsored Links