There’s A Reason Russians Are Paranoid

Taken from The New York Times, 03.12.06
By STEVEN LEE MYERS

BEING prone to conspiracy theories, as Russians certainly are, doesn’t mean that someone is not conspiring against them.

That, in essence, has been the response here to the poisoning of Aleksandr V. Litvinenko, the secret agent turned exile in London who died on Nov. 23 — a case that only grew murkier last week with the discovery of radioactive traces aboard three British airplanes and another mysterious illness in Moscow.

Mr. Litvinenko’s slow end, the intrigue of his final healthy days, his deathbed statement accusing President Vladimir V. Putin of culpability (in English, some Russians noted suspiciously) — have nurtured a widely held view here that it was all indeed a conspiracy, only not the one embraced by Mr. Putin’s critics.

It was, from this point of view, not a plot by the Kremlin to silence a critic, but one by its enemies to discredit the Kremlin, the obvious suspects being Mr. Putin’s critics in exile or, of course, President Bush, the Central Intelligence Agency or the West (generally).

Or it could have been a plot by a faction inside the Kremlin to make it look as if a competing faction inside the Kremlin had done it.

“There is too much evidence” to think otherwise, said Stanislav A. Belkovsky, a political scientist here with ties to Mr. Putin’s Kremlin.

Actually, there is not much evidence at all, only questions and suspicions — which is, by the way, equally true of the accusations against Mr. Putin, no matter how fervently his critics believe them.

Every country has its conspiracy theories, of course, and the Spy vs. Spy dramas of the cold war and Hollywood have given life to a fair number of them. But they thrive here in the fertile ground of the Russian imagination as they do in few other places.

The Soviet Union’s leaders obsessed over conspiracies, real and imagined. They also rewrote history so regularly, fabricated so many economic reports extolling progress, covered up so many embarrassments like the Chernobyl disaster that few here ever believed they knew the whole truth about anything. And the absence of truth is where conspiracy theories take root.

This remains so, and Mr. Putin is at least partly to blame. He has stifled the news media, and the day-to-day operation of the Kremlin is again as opaque as it was in Soviet times. And there is the inconvenient fact that the Kremlin’s critics — including a number of journalists — keep dying in circumstances that investigators have yet to solve.

Mr. Putin’s entire presidency has been wrapped up in conspiracy theories, starting with his abrupt rise to power as Boris Yeltsin’s successor in 1999. That fall, a series of apartment bombings killed 243 people, fanning popular support for the second war in Chechnya, Russia’s separatist region. From the start, the bombings were viewed with suspicion, especially after the discovery of federal agents planting what turned out to be explosives in the basement of another building. (A training exercise, officials finally said.) In Russian politics, the violence clearly played to the advantage of hard-liners like Mr. Putin.

A vocal adherent of the theory that Russian secret services conspired to bomb their own citizens to bolster the Chechen war effort was Mr. Litvinenko, a former agent of the secret service he accused in a book he jointly wrote, “Blowing Up Russia: Terror From Within.” The book was published with the help of Boris A. Berezovsky, the self-exiled tycoon who lives in London and has become Mr. Putin’s fiercest critic (the feeling is, evidently, mutual).

Aleksei A. Venediktov, a radio host and executive editor of Ekho Moskvy, said the failure of the government to investigate the bombings thoroughly has nurtured distrust. In the same way, there are those who believe the authorities know more than they have told about the terrorist school siege in Beslan, in which 332 hostages and rescuers were killed in 2004.

“As long as the public is not informed, conspiracy theories will multiply and grow,” Mr. Venediktov said. “This does not mean there is no conspiracy.”

His theory? It was neither Mr. Putin nor the secret services. In fact, few here believe Russia’s leaders would have been so obvious as to use a radioactive isotope; it was used, instead, so people would think so!

Mr. Venediktov said a death squad working outside of government control killed Mr. Litvinenko to frighten the political elite into insisting that Mr. Putin, stay on for a third term whether he wants to or not. By law he must step down in 2008.

“The people who are behind this murder want to lay the responsibility in the future on Putin,” he said, in order to make him afraid to leave office lest he be prosecuted.

In the Russian press, where objectivity is as elusive as ever, even darker theories abound, almost always pointing the blame away from Mr. Putin’s Kremlin and back toward his accusers. Izvestia offered four on Thursday. According to one, Mr. Litvinenko was selling radioactive materials on the black market. Another: he and Mr. Berezovsky were making a nuclear bomb to help Chechnya’s separatists.

These theories about Mr. Litvinenko are not just ideas on the fringe. The chairman of the upper house of Parliament, Sergei M. Mironov, noted that the deaths of Mr. Litvinenko and Anna Politkovskaya, the journalist who was murdered in October, took place on the eve of trips by Mr. Putin to Europe. “I do not think the coincidence was accidental,” he said.

When news emerged last week that Yegor T. Gaidar, a former prime minister and critic of Mr. Putin’s, had fallen ill a day after Mr. Litvinenko died, an ally of Mr. Gaidar’s, Anatoly B. Chubais, linked it to the deaths of Mr. Litvinenko and Ms. Politkovskaya, but not to Mr. Putin. Mr. Chubais, the head of Russia’s electric company, offered a grand conspiracy theory involving an attempted coup against Mr. Putin.

The logic behind the conspiracies — let alone the facts — can sometimes be hard to fathom, but a Kremlin spokesman, Dmitry S. Peskov, said that many people in London, exiles and their supporters, were all too ready to believe anything that reflected poorly on Russia. “It is a negative heritage of the old times,” he said.

Pressed, he suggested that “commercial interests” lay behind Mr. Litvinenko’s charges.

Even Mr. Putin himself struck a conspiratorial tone, questioning the origins of Mr. Litvinenko’s last statement. “If such a note really appeared before Mr. Litvinenko’s death, then a question arises: why this note was not made public when he was still alive?”