Aeroflot was a delight. Friendly, smiling crew, a modern Airbus and edible onboard food… it was hard to reconcile this experience with the hundreds of Aeroflot journeys I had taken in the past, many of them internal flights on rickety old Tupolevs and Ilyushins with broken seat backs and missing safety belts, with peasant traders transporting live chickens and, once, a goat. My abiding memory of those days was of a panic-stricken stewardess rushing to stop a brightly clad Uzbek lighting a portable gas stove in the aisle moments before he would have blown the pressurized cabin to pieces.
But it was not just the air travel that had changed. The welcome at Sheremetevo Airport was now courteous and efficient with none of the ritual humiliation foreigners were previously subjected to; there were gleaming glass and steel high-rises along the road into town and a proliferation of neon signs advertising Western commodities as well as coffee shops and designer stores… something seemed to have changed in the way the city was thinking and acting, something intangible but readily perceptible to anyone who had known the place in the old days. Gorbachev used to talk about ‘new thinking’ - about rejecting the authoritarianism and arbitrary injustice of Soviet times and adopting democratic principles where the authorities can be held accountable for their actions - but these ideals seemed to get forgotten in the chaos of the Yeltsin years. Was Putin's Russia now escaping from the old Soviet stereotypes and the repressive mentality of the cold war? Was it really emerging into the sunny uplands of democracy, tolerance and a law-governed state? As I re-immersed myself in the city I had known so well, I sensed that finding the answers to these questions would be crucial in my quest to uncover how and why Alexander Litvinenko had met his cruel death.
The first hint came from my unofficial taxi driver, who drove an old Volga and took payment in euros. He was a grizzled fifty-year-old with a broken nose and a baseball cap. Early in our acquaintance we drove past the building on the Garden Ring where I once lived as the BBC Moscow correspondent. When I told him that I had lived there ‘a long time ago’ he misunderstood, and jumped to the conclusion that I was a Muscovite who had been taken abroad at an early age by my Russian parents. I didn't disabuse him because the thought seemed to make him immensely well disposed towards me - he called me by the familiar ty instead of the formal vy and lamented the influx of outsiders that had left ‘us Muscovites’ in the minority in ‘our own city’. As he was obviously in a chatty mood, I asked him what he thought about ‘that Litvinenko’ - as all the Russians I met seemed to refer to him - and he shrugged. ‘Akh, it's all politics. I guess it was the spets-sluzhby [special forces] that got him, don't you? He was a traitor. Before this job I was in the Alfa Group’ - my ears pricked up; Alfa Group soldiers were the toughest of the very tough spetsnaz troops - ‘and I think we would have done the same in my day. We would have done it all a bit simpler, though. We used bullets, not polonium.’ It wasn't a great start in my search for the new, caring, sensitive Russia.
Further inquiries produced more encouraging results: talking to a group of younger people on Pushkin Square I heard some sympathy for Litvinenko but widespread scepticism that the Kremlin ordered his death. ‘I think twenty years ago maybe it could have been the FSB,’ said Igor, a tall, well-spoken physics student. ‘That was the old way of doing things. But now I think we are more civilized. Putin is an FSB man, but he is a democrat too. He will not stoop to such things.’ The others in the group were equally impressed by the Russian president, saying he had brought order and stability after the stormy seas of the Yeltsin era. But when I pressed them there was a grudging acceptance that some areas of society, including the security forces themselves, may not have moved on from the old ways of behaving. There was agreement that the FSB was a multi-headed Hydra, with cliques and competing interests, so that it was hard to say if its activities were all under the control of the Kremlin or of Putin himself. ‘I don't rule out the possibility that FSB were involved,’ said Nina, a student of art and design, ‘because they have many goals that they pursue, including commercial goals and goals of self-protection. Maybe some FSB were protecting themselves from Litvinenko. But it does not mean that Russia killed him.’
Drawing a distinction between the activities of the FSB and the will of the state was a common reaction among those I spoke to, as was an almost universal admiration for Vladimir Putin. Could a man like Putin really have sent his killers to assassinate a renegade like Alexander Litvinenko? It was a question that could only be answered in the Kremlin.