The Price Of Dissent
Letter from London is Larry Miller's weekly, in-depth look at news from across the pond.
In 1978 I shared an accountant with Georgy Markov. I still have that accountant, but Markov doesn't, he's dead.
A polite man with an umbrella bumped into him on London's Waterloo Bridge, and said, "So, sorry," as he shot a tiny platinum pellet impregnated with the deadly poison ricin into Markov's leg.
They only found it during the autopsy. Markov was a Bulgarian, whose BBC World Service broadcasts angered the government back home, though it denied any responsibility for the murder.
Markov wasn't stupid. He knew the risk he was taking, and he paid the price.
A few years later, I went to Moscow posing as a tourist. In between visiting museums, I met with Soviet dissidents, walking with them in the woods where the trees did not have ears.
They wanted to be recorded on tape, they were insistent their words should be heard on the other side of the Iron Curtain. They took big risks to tell what they knew.
But then the Iron Curtain came down, and democracy came to Russia. It was no longer dangerous to speak your mind. Unless of course you were Anna Politkovskaya, a journalist and critic of Russian President Vladimir Putin's policy on Chechnya.
She was gunned down outside her Moscow flat last month.
Unless of course you were Alexander Litvinenko, who died last week in London after lingering for three weeks, as his body shut down after being poisoned by the highly radioactive polonium-210.
Toxicologists say this is not your common bathtub variety of poison, but something that would have come from a country with a nuclear capability.
When he died, Litvinenko was investigating the murder of the Moscow journalist. He, too, was a critic of Putin.
Litvinenko, 43, was a former KGB colonel who defected to Britain. He said he was ordered to assassinate a Russian billionaire and refused.
He wrote a book alleging Russian agents were behind the 1999 apartment house bombings in Russia that killed more than 300 people. Litvinenko said it was not the work of Chechen separatists as Putin maintained, but was used as justification for a huge Russian military offensive in Chechnya later that year.
When it comes to Litvinenko's death, Putin says his hands are clean.
Other's are not so sure. Peter Hain, a senior British cabinet Minister accused Putin of presiding over ''huge attacks on individual liberty and on democracy.'' Hain, said Putin's tenure has been ''clouded'' by incidents ''including some extremely murky murders."
The British Foreign Office called in the Russian ambassador diplomatically demanding full cooperation in the Litvinenko investigation.
Questions of Russian involvement have been asked in Parliament, though officially at least, British lawmakers are giving the Russians the benefit of the doubt — for the time being. No doubt, though, in the victim's mind about who was responsible for his poisoning.
From his deathbed, Litvinenko accused Putin of having "no respect for life, liberty or any civilized value."
In a dictated, signed statement the dying man said: "You may succeed in silencing me but that silence comes at a price. You have shown yourself to be barbaric and ruthless. The howl of protest from around the world will reverberate, Mr. Putin, in your ears for the rest of your life."
While it may never be known who ordered his death, Litvinenko, like Markov, like those people in the Moscow forest, and the murdered Russian journalist knew the risks, and he was prepared to pay the price, too.
Four years ago Litvinenko predicted "Russia will rise again" and he would "eventually return to the motherland." That's one dream that died with him.