* At the Movies *
“It’s not really a new Cold War,” said a world-weary lady at a London wine bar. “It’s more like a cryogenic war. It’s been sitting like a stiff in a freezer somewhere up in Moscow and now Putin’s taken it out and brought it back to life.”
She was right about the stiff. His name was Alexander Litvinenko and his death last November, by polonium poisoning, has almost instantly joined the ranks of London’s most infamous murders. That’s no small feat in the town that gave the world Jack the Ripper. If you don’t know the details, look up last week’s reportage on this same virtual space or look for the documentary soon in a theater near you.
Rebellion: "The Litvinenko Case", co-directed by Olga Konskaya and Andreï Nekrasov, premiered in late May at the Cannes Film Festival. The whole affair was flush with dramatic timing. Thierry Fremaux, the festival’s Artistic Director, added "Rebellion" to the screening schedule at the last minute. The decision was almost thwarted when bad weather in Russia delayed delivery of the final print. One review called "Rebellion" “a red hot exposé of the present-day Russian klepto-oligarchy.” The credits roll pretty quickly. A number of the technical contributors opted not to be identified. Going public has clearly put the directors in harm’s way. For a start, Nekrasov’s home in Finland was ransacked before the last cut was complete.
"It could be some thugs, you know," Nekrasov told reporters at Cannes, as if anyone believed him. Finnish police have blamed drunken vandals. But if so, these culprits were clever lads. A copy of the now famous photo of a dying Litvinenko was strategically positioned on Nekrasov’s bed as part of the hooligan’s handiwork. Apparently they didn’t have a horse’s head handy.
The Cryogenic War Hots Up
Meanwhile, back in London in late May, the Crown Prosecutor asked for the key suspect in the Litvinenko murder to be extradited to London. Kremlin spokesman Dimitri Peskov told Sky News: "Claims originating in London are bordering on stark raving madness and are not worthy of the Kremlin's official reaction." No one seems to have advised him that Brits love anything which is raving mad. Nonetheless, on June 1 Russia's foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, did react. He accused Britain of using the Litvinenko case as a political assault weapon. “We are against that," Lavrov said, escalating the war of words.
His statements came a day after a press conference in Moscow which featured chief murder suspect, Andrei Lugovoi. He used his media moment to accuse the British government and, in particular, MI-6 (the Bond guys) of being involved Litvinenko’s murder. He claimed that the late spy was a double agent for the Brits and said he knew this because they had attempted to recruit him too.
Litvineko's father, Walter, immediately and colorfully characterized Lugovoi's claims as "horse-shit,” adding that as a former KGB agent, Lugovoi, could not have made his remarks without Kremlin approval. The Kremlin denied everything - again - except what Lugovoi actually said. It was like watching volleys during the finals at Wimbledon
Then came the hardware issues.
The Rockets (and Defense Shield’s) Red Glare
On the eve of the G8 summit in early June, Putin threatened to aim Russian nuclear missiles at European cities for the first time since the Cold War. He explained that this was in response to America’s announced plan to erect a missile defense shield in Eastern Europe.
"It is obvious that if part of the strategic nuclear potential of the United States is located in Europe we will have to respond," Putin told reporters. British security firmly waffled, calling this statement either “a bluff or a smokescreen.” Tony Blair warned that he was going to set Putin straight at the G-8. The British press announced that there had been “a catastrophic breakdown” in relations between Moscow and the UK and maybe the rest of Europe. Putin claimed that he didn’t know where his hardware might be aimed because "it is up to our military to define these targets, in addition to defining the choice between ballistic and cruise missiles. But this is just a technical aspect." As Tom Lehrer wrote in his classic song on nuclear war, “once the rockets go up, who cares where they come down. That’s not my department, said Werner von Braun.”
Meanwhile, In Estonia, they were fixing their firewalls.
The Cyber War
Estonia, formerly a part of the old Soviet Union, was recently hit by riots after a Soviet statue commemorating Red Army soldiers, killed by the Nazis in World War II, was removed from downtown Talin. Pro-Kremlin youth groups in Moscow blockaded the Estonian embassy and harassed the Estonian ambassador. Beginning late in April, and continuing into May, an unprecedented cyber attack crippled web sites operated by Estonian government ministries, banks, media outlets, and other companies. Computers all over received "denial of service" messages. Numerous web sites were forced to shut down. The Estonian government traced much of the traffic clogging to Russian computers. The Russian government denied any culpability.
A spokesman for the Estonian defense ministry aptly noted: “If a bank or an airport is hit by a missile, it is easy to say that is an act of war. But if the same result is caused by a cyber attack, what do you call that?"
“This is a delayed confrontation between the Soviet past and the European future,” an Estonian MP told the UK newspaper, The Observer. Condoleezza Rice was reportedly pissed.
"I suppose we are in the eye of the storm," said a former factory worker. "It's a shame... everything was going so well."
Putin’s Future and Some Surprising Comments
Now we come to Vladimir Putin’s own words. Who is this guy? Well, recently he identified himself as Gandhi’s true heir and called his critics on their hypocrisy about human rights issues.
“Let us look at what is happening in North America,” he exclaimed. “ It is horrible. The torture, the homeless, Guantanamo, detention without normal court proceedings.”
Putin is scheduled to leave office in March 2008, but political observers have begun to speculate that after he’s been out of office for one term, as obliged by the Constitution, he might stage a comeback. On his post-Presidential plans, Putin muses “I know that I will be working. But where, I cannot say.” At 54, he adds: “I have not reached my retirement age and it would be silly to sit at home without doing anything."
At a dinner party Putin hosted recently for the Western press, he took a pot shot at British political parties and their electoral system. "In Russia, unlike the Labour Party," he reportedly remarked, “the next president (of Russia) would be chosen by the people." Gordon Brown, take note.
As for all the cryogenic war talk, Putin declared: “I am not President of the Russian Federation to bring our country to the brink of catastrophe, on the contrary. I am a pure and absolute democrat,” he said. “But you know what the problem is - not a problem, a real tragedy - that I am alone. There are no such pure democrats in the world. Since Mahatma Gandhi, there has been no one.”
He dismissed any Russian involvement in Estonia’s technology problems, by saying: “Given the rise of digital television and the Internet, even if we wanted to control all of that, it would be impossible”.
Whose side is God on? As the G-8 rambled to a close, the Russian Orthodox Patriarchate's external relations department issued a statement calling upon all parties to "stop this extremely dangerous development which is able to destroy the new architecture of East-West relations."
Putin must have been listening since, at the last minute, he propositioned Bush with the idea of placing a U.S. Missile shield in Azerbijan in exchange for not re-targeting Russian missiles at Europe.
So Bush invited Putin to vacation at his family’s compound in Kennebunkport in July where they would talk it over. Putin accepted. If a deal can be struck, we may have a new reason to “Remember the Maine.”
