Litvinenko’s murder shows why Putin’s Russia will never prosper

 Will Hutton

Russia can use command-and-control economics to create a Gazprom. It can never create a Google, an Apple, a BBC, a Siemens or even the Anglo-Saxon rock’n’roll culture. For that, it would need the rule of law and all the open democratic structures that support it.

Sir Robert Owen’s languid upper-class vowels and baggy London clubland suit don’t capture the indefatigable essence of the man. 

He represents the best of the British tradition of the rule of law. His report into the circumstances of the death of Alexander Litvinenko released last week is a classic of the genre – scrupulously evidence-based, impartial and judicious. It is what a rule-of-law society should produce.

Litvinenko, Owen judged, was murdered in London by the Russian government because, as an ex-KGB agent, and later of FSB (the KGB’s successor), he had become an influential, vocal and effective opponent of a profoundly corrupt state security structure. 

A book by Litvinenko – Lubyanka Criminal Group – presented evidence that the Russian security service is deeply entwined with organised crime, both in Russia and elsewhere in Europe, including with the mafia. In a second, if less convincing, book he claimed that the Russian services colluded in blowing up apartment blocks and blamed Chechen terrorists.

After fleeing Russia in 2000, Litvinenko had gone on to help not just Britain’s MI6, but the Spanish and Italian security services in unmasking FSB involvement in criminal activity.

But it was only after Russia’s passing of the 2006 Extremism Law, justifying extra-territorial killings of Russians making allegedly libellous statements about the government, that Vladimir Putin was able to hit back at a man who, days before he was poisoned, had accused him of being both a paedophile and the man behind the assassination of the journalist Anna Politkovskya.

Owen is judicious. The polonium-210 that poisoned Litvinenko could only come from a state nuclear reactor and could only be given to the FSB with the go-ahead of Putin or his circle.So strong is the back-covering culture within the FSB that the director would only give the go-ahead for his arms-length operatives to kill Litvinenko with Putin’s backing. 

The need to get rid of Litvinenko was acute. But unable to interview either of the two men who travelled to London allegedly to murder their quarry, Owen can arrive at only a qualified conclusion: “The FSB operation to kill Mr Litvinenko was probably approved by… President Putin.”

The events are horrifying enough – any Londoner could have been harmed – but perhaps even more telling is the window it provides into today’s Russia. This is a world of routine contract killings, always deniable because they are delivered at arm’s length, by a state security service intertwined with clandestine gangsters.

The KGB was the security wing of the Soviet Communist party. The FSB is Putin’s personalised security wing. Its job is to wreck the reputations – and even kill – all those who challenge the regime. 

Not even China mandates the killing of its nationals anywhere in the world if they say something that President Xi Jinping considers libellous. This is the law not even of a communist dictatorship, but of a tsar. The reaction to Litvinenko’s death in Moscow was carelessly gleeful: a traitor had received his just comeuppance.

Owen’s brief biographies of the key actors in the drama are also telling; they are fierce Russian nationalists passionate to avenge what they portray as cumulative slights from the west. 

Concepts such as the rule of law, checked and balanced government, democracy and an autonomous, self-governing civil society are western viruses that will only contaminate the homeland and its capacity to do what it needs to extend Russia’s proper place in the world. In this climate, the FSB works with any tool to hand.

The rule of law – impartial judgments that can be referred to independent higher courts based on the balance of evidence around clear jurisprudential principles and deliberatively legislated democratic law – is the cornerstone not merely of liberty, but of prosperity and our civilisation. Britain is blessed because it is a rule-of-law society. Russia, for all its military power and abundant resources, is damned because it is not.

The growing evidence is that economies such as Russia’s or China’s can use command-and-control mechanisms to grow into middle-income per head countries. But to become high-income per capita countries is infinitely harder. 

All the energies of civil society and workforces have to be harnessed to create great self-standing organisations. These, by developing their own purpose and cultures, can marshal the immense amounts of information that are at the core of the modern economy – and then produce at scale.

Russia can use command-and-control economics to create a Gazprom. It can never create a Google, an Apple, a BBC, a Siemens or even the Anglo-Saxon rock’n’roll culture. For that, it would need the rule of law and all the open democratic structures that support it.

Yet, we can’t be complacent: current British political culture is very feeble on the rule of law. There was a Litvinenko inquiry only because the government lost a high court case opposing it, fearing the international ramifications (giving offence to Russia). Its response has been beneath feeble. 

But then with honourable exceptions – Michael Gove, Dominic Grieve, Ken Clarke – today’s mainstream conservatism is more interested in entrenching permanent Tory dominance of the House of Common than in acknowledging the crucial role of checks and balances in upholding a rule-of-law society.

It will neuter the second chamber, write European courts out of any role in the British legal system, gerrymander the number of seats in the Commons, make Scottish MPs second class and emasculate the BBC. In its aims to Torify Britain, it is more Putinesque that it cares to acknowledge – and British civil society can be vulnerable just like Russia’s.

Meanwhile, Labour has no firmer grip – New Labour flouted international law to invade Iraq and its Corbynite successors share a Putinesque worldview that the pernicious west is the source of all evil. For Corbyn, the rule of law is an ideological concept, the handmaiden of capitalism, and liberation movements worldwide are right to distrust it in their struggle against western imperialism or its surrogates. 

To possess military power capable of defending us and other rule-of law societies is wrong as a matter of principle. Putin’s gangsters and contract killers can be trusted never to threaten us; Trident is an expensive bauble.

Alexander Litvinenko, dying in agony, left a last letter cursing Putin and declaring his pride in becoming a British citizen – because of what Britain stands for. Sir Robert Owen has done more than uncover the truth. He has offered a fierce reminder of the importance of the rule of law. Let’s hope it is heeded across our political culture.

Original

Yet, we can’t be complacent: current British political culture is very feeble on the rule of law. There was a Litvinenko inquiry only because the government lost a high court case opposing it, fearing the international ramifications (giving offence to Russia). Its response has been beneath feeble. But then with honourable exceptions – Michael Gove, Dominic Grieve, Ken Clarke – today’s mainstream conservatism is more interested in entrenching permanent Tory dominance of the House of Common than in acknowledging the crucial role of checks and balances in upholding a rule-of-law society.

It will neuter the second chamber, write European courts out of any role in the British legal system, gerrymander the number of seats in the Commons, make Scottish MPs second class and emasculate the BBC. In its aims to Torify Britain, it is more Putinesque that it cares to acknowledge – and British civil society can be vulnerable just like Russia’s.

Meanwhile, Labour has no firmer grip – New Labour flouted international law to invade Iraq and its Corbynite successors share a Putinesque worldview that the pernicious west is the source of all evil. For Corbyn, the rule of law is an ideological concept, the handmaiden of capitalism, and liberation movements worldwide are right to distrust it in their struggle against western imperialism or its surrogates. To possess military power capable of defending us and other rule-of law societies is wrong as a matter of principle. Putin’s gangsters and contract killers can be trusted never to threaten us; Trident is an expensive bauble.

Alexander Litvinenko, dying in agony, left a last letter cursing Putin and declaring his pride in becoming a British citizen – because of what Britain stands for. Sir Robert Owen has done more than uncover the truth. He has offered a fierce reminder of the importance of the rule of law. Let’s hope it is heeded across our political culture.