THE LOW POST: Scum Season

That's the kind of man Putin is. A woman is brutally murdered and one of his first thoughts is to shit on her work in the foreign media. He doesn't even have the shame to pretend that he cares about Anna Politkovskaya, doesn't even feel a need to pull the "Her death is a great loss" game even in Europe. Why? Because he clearly and correctly perceives that there will never be any repercussions in the West for any of this stuff. A hundred Russian journalists could end up with bullets in their brains and the leaders of the West still wouldn't cancel their Asian pajama parties with Putin. Not since he's become such a good capitalist and earned his way into the WTO, and proved himself to be an a very occasionally enthusiastic ally in the war on terrorism, although my memory fails me when I try to recall just exactly where he's ever been of any help to us.

Now we have this Litvinenko story, and the Russian authorities have already weighed in on that one. Litvienko claims that just prior to his illness he had received word from an old Italian source he calls "Mario" who claimed to have information about Politkovskaya's death, raising speculation that he had been poisoned to silence him. But this week we learned that that wasn't true. Early on Monday I saw that Sergei Ivanov, head of the Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR), had announced that we can all relax now, because Russia had nothing to do with Litvinenko's poisoning. According to Ivanov, since 1959, when the Soviets assassinated Ukrainian nationalist Stepan Bander, Russia "has not been involved with the physical liquidation of troublesome Russian persons."

According to Ivanov, Litvinenko's poisoner should be looked for "among his circle in London, probably." Another zarubezhnaya versiya! Naturally, when an FSB agent defects to London and begins investigating the mysterious deaths of various Russian dissidents, the first place to look for his attackers, when he is poisoned, is among the British. Those people are animals! Anyway, the news that Russia is not responsible is a tremendous relief, one I am sure will be shared by the Maxim Sokolovs of the world and his colleagues for the rest of the week, or until Litvinenko's eyes fall out and he dies.

Incidentally, no matter how things look, no one really knows what happened to Anna Politkovskaya, or to Litvinenko, for that matter. There was a strange story reported in Politkovskaya's Novaya Gazeta a few weeks back, just after a former FSB commander, Movladi Baisarov, was shot in Moscow, ostensibly after pulling a grenade on Chechen police (police from the Russian-controlled Chechen region, that is) who came to arrest him. The story argues somewhat convincingly that the murders of Baisarov and Politkovskaya are connected, that both were targeted for execution by members of the police force of Ramzan Kadyrov, Putin's handpicked bloodthirsty scumbag in Chechnya.

So it could have been Kadyrov. It could have been Kadyrov and a faction within the FSB acting independently of Putin for reasons unknown. It could have been the FSB without Kadyrov, trying to set Kadyrov up -- he used to be on the other side, after all, and the FSB types never liked him anyway. Then again, the source for the new Novaya Gazeta story, former Grozny mayor Bislan Gantamirov, is a thieving fuck who could be just about anywhere on the Russian-Chechen map of atrocities and corruption, depending on the time of day and his financial situation at that moment. So who knows. That's the thing about Russia -- there aren't many lists of contract murder suspects that are easy to narrow down. And Litvinenko? Sure, it could have been the FSB, trying to cover up the Politkovskaya business. But according to Litvinenko's own account his friend "Mario" came all the way to London just to show him an e-mail with a list of suspects, something he could have sent via the Internet. Was the FSB merely using the prospect of information about Politkovsksya to lure an old defector to his death? There are whispers about that, too, in certain untamed quarters of the Russian media landscape.

The thing is, we'll never find out. None of these mysteries in Russia ever get solved. In the best-case scenario, a couple of drifters from Dagestan will run a light in the Tekstillshiki district in the near future and wake up the next morning to find themselves unmasked as the murderers of Anna Politkovskaya. Then they'll contract tuberculosis or fall down a flight of steps while awaiting sentence in Lefortovo. Litvinenko will turn out to have accidentally put poison on his own toothbrush. No one will believe any of it, but it will mean these stories are formally over. And Vladimir Putin will be free to go to the next Asian summit. Where, after all, he has nothing but friends, who like to tell lies of their own.

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