THE LOW POST: Murder on the Polonium Express

The legend goes something like this: Berezovsky allegedly helped Putin rise to power and also allegedly helped engineer a series of apartment bombings in Russian cities in 1999 that Putin used a) to propel him into the presidency and b) to launch a war with Chechen separatists. Subsequently, Berezovsky fell out of favor with Putin and was booted out of the Russian criminal Eden and forced to set up shop in England, where, in defiance of several laws of nature and physics, he continues to walk the earth and speak freely. He would seem to be a prime candidate for assassination, but for some reason he remains alive -- leading to speculation that Berezovsky has a "doomsday device" ready to go off, a vault of compromising materials (videos? documents?) tying the Russian president to a variety of horrible deeds, some of those most probably involving the apartment bombings.

Under this theory, the Litvinenko assassination was again a shot across Putin's bow, probably by Sechin but perhaps by some other faction within the Russian government. Whoever ordered the hit would appear to be sending a message: by killing Litvinenko, a figure who is close to Berezovsky (Boris Abramovich is said to have owed Litvinenko his life, as the latter refused to carry out an assassination order against him while still in the FSB), they are showing that they could also kill Berezovsky, perhaps next. And if Berezovsky dies, "it" all comes out, and Putin's career is finished.

There's an interesting and somewhat disturbing twist to the kompromat angle. Four months ago, Litvinenko published an article accusing Putin of being a pedophile, claiming that Putin tried to cover up evidence of his allegedly sordid past while he was head of the FSB. Litvinenko's article came on the heels of an extraordinarily strange incident in which Putin lifted up the shirt of a small boy and kissed his belly. The incident sparked a minor scandal in Russia and Putin explained himself somewhat maladroitly, saying, creepily, that "I saw this little boy and I wanted to cuddle with him like a kitten."

In his article Litvinenko referred to a passage in a book by former Russian General Prosecutor Yuri Skuratov, who himself left office after a sex scandal in which he was videotaped cavorting with whores in a Moscow apartment. According to Litvinenko, Putin had romps with boys in that same apartment; and in the Skuratov book, the former prosecutor claims that when Putin asked him to quit, he told him that he himself had had sex in that same room before.

I bring this up apropos of nothing, but...Jesus, how weird this story is getting. Mark Foley is one thing, but Vladimir Putin?

Then there's the Berezovsky theory. The bootlicking Russian press, anxious to find a fall guy for these murders that doesn't involve either Putin or an influential Russian politician, has been bandying this one about, and it appears that Boris Berezovsky will eventually be fingered as the chief "suspect" in the killings by the Russian media.

The funny thing is, the theory makes some sense. Not much sense, but some. Although Berezovsky and Litvinenko were supposedly close, the fact remains that Litvinenko was dining with another Berezovsky associate, Andrei Lugovoi, when he was killed. Another Berezovsky ally, Alexander Goldfarb, is the only figure vouching for the authenticity of Litvinenko's "deathbed" letter accusing Putin of the crime, which to me reads like total horseshit. Here's a sample of Litvinenko's supposed anti-Putin last words:

You have managed to make me silent, but you have paid dearly for my silence. You have exposed yourself to be barbarian and ruthless. These are the names by which your most irreconcilable opponents most often call you. You have managed to make one person silent, but cries of protest that will whoop all over the world will sound in your, Mr. Putin, ears till the end of your days...

As one Russian writer I read this weekend pointed out, this letter is so wildly overdone -- even for a notoriously full-of-shit publicity hound like Litvinenko -- that it seems highly unlikely that he wrote it. It recalls two things simultaneously: the hyper-repetitive, blathering style of Boris Berezovsky, and the hyper-repetitive, blathering style of old Russian WWII propaganda movies ("Fascist dog, you've killed me, but you'll never hang us all!"). The fact that a Berezovsky crony shepherded this letter into the press is enough to make anyone suspicious about its origins.