THE LOW POST: Murder on the Polonium Express

The rumor mill among Russia-watchers is buzzing at an all-time high right now, and from that mountain of gossip several scenarios are beginning to emerge. Each of them has horrible implications. Running through them in no particular order:

The Sechin Theory

Igor Sechin, like Putin, is a youngish spook (born in 1960) schooled in Leningrad. His background is as a translator for Soviet military intelligence, with a specialty in French and Portuguese, with experience working in Africa. He worked with Putin in the St. Petersburg government in the 1990s and is the only advisor whom Putin brought with him at every stage of his career. He's currently the chairman of the board of directors of the oil company "Rosneft," but also is said to be the head of a shadow government of "Leningrad Chekists" who for the past six years have given marching orders to the likes of the Russian General Prosecutor's office and the State Accounting Chamber, the investigative body roughly analogous to our GAO. Numerous news stories came out in the Russian press in recent years identifying Sechin as the instigator behind Putin's vicious campaign against Mikhail Khodorkovsky, former head of the oil company YUKOS, who was jailed in another international scandal.

Not much is known about Sechin, but the few details that have come out are interesting. Legend has it that he likes to turn documents upside down on his desk so that visitors to his office will be distracted trying to read them. He is also said to be unusually ruthless even by Russian political standards and a personage that many people in government would be more than glad to be rid of -- once the protective presence of Vladimir Putin is removed, ostensibly, when he reaches the end of his term limit in 2008.

Which brings us to the "Sechin theory" -- that Sechin and his hard-liner cronies, a group of generally anti-democratic, generally anti-Western and generally low-foreheaded brutes known collectively as the "Siloviki," are trying to force Putin to remain by their side, in government, by binding him to them in blood. The idea here is that whatever thoughts Putin might have had about retiring to a leisurely life of giving speeches in Munich and sipping cappuccinos in Venice with Silvio Berlusconi will very shortly be off the table once he is tied, internationally, to a series of Stalin-like assassinations.

You remove Putin's options for a Western-focused dismount to his political career and you make it very attractive for him to consider a way around his term limit problem -- particularly when the alternative is remaining in Russia while one of his political enemies, perhaps a more "liberal" type like Dmitri Medvedev, comes to power. If a disgraced Putin stays in Russia in that case, he risks becoming the target of future prosecutions and intrigues. Each killing along the lines of the Litvinenko business backs Putin further and further into that corner.

So the theory is that Sechin, who until now has always been known as a creature of Putin, acted independently in this case and ordered the Litvinenko hit as a pre-emptive strike against such possible 2008 presidential candidates as Medvedev and defense minister Sergei Ivanov, blocking their rise with Putin's presumed refusal to step down. He made it as messy as possible, causing maximum embarrassment to Putin, in order to apply pressure on his own political benefactor.

This is the most popular theory right now, and it has a few variations, including:

The Kompromat File

The other factor to consider in the Litvinenko killing is the legendary existence of a supposed treasure trove of kompromat, or compromising information, that exiled businessman and underworld figure Boris Berezovsky is said to have on Putin.