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Broken homes, broken empire
Alexander Valterovich Litvinenko was born on December 4, 1962, in a hospital in Voronezh, 300 miles south of Moscow, a university town where his father was a medical student specializing in pediatrics. He arrived one month before term. He weighed 2.4 kilograms, around six pounds. His mother, Nina, remembered a difficult birth. She fretted he might not survive. Then a woman in another bed in her ward at the Soviet-era hospital told her that all eight month babies became famous--an adage that noone would deny in Litvinenko's case, though not in the manner his mother would have forecast or preferred. Even so, who could have imagined that a child of the U.S.S.R would secure renown in such a bizarre manner, so far from home?
In 1962, Nikita Krushchev was in power in Moscow and the Soviet empire spanned a half a globe, from central Asia to the Baltic and the Pacific, its satellite states patrolling the line that divided Europe. The Soviets had been the first to put a man in space--Yuri Gargarin--in 1961, a huge propaganda victory over the United States, challenging Americans with the shocking implication that communism, progress and technology were not incompatible. This sprawling, secretive empire was not shy of confronting American power. Litvinenko was born in the year of the Cuban missile crisis that pushed the United States and the Soviet Union to the brink of nuclear war. True, Krushchev had offered a kind of liberalization after the death of Josef Stalin, permitting the publication of the works of Alexander Solzhenitsyn and famously decrying the Stalinist cult of the individual. But Krushchev also led a muscular drive to cement Soviet influence. He approved the crushing of the Hungarian revolt in 1956, the building of the Berlin Wall in 1961. And at home, the state's writ ran unchallenged, its power exercized through the taut sinews of the K.G.B. and other internal forces created to forestall dissent. Soviet troops occupied garrisons across Eastern Europe. Soviet spies tunneled into the Western political establishment. When Alexander Litvinenko was born, the Cold War was decades away from any thaw and the Soviet Union was years from collapse. None of that brought direct comfort to ordinary citizens struggling to meet ends meet, find an apartment, a telephone line, a car, a television set. The economy ran to order, according to the principles of scientific socialism. Save for the elite, and those with scarce American dollars or British pounds to finance themselves, there was no abundance. The output from the collectivized farms failed to keep pace with the growing population. The harvests were often poor. The shelves in the roubles-only food stores were never full, usually empty. Lines formed. In grim concrete apartment houses, ordered up by Krushchev himself to ease a dire shortage of dwellings in post-war Russia, communal heating failed and sputtered. The Russian winter had no mercy.

Litvinenko's life spanned his land's liberation and emasculation--from oppressive superpower to something far less than that, yet something far more than an ordinary nation; a diminished land that dreamed of glory revived. He was a child of history.
"We lived in a small room in a hostel in Voronezh," Nina Belyavskaya, Litvinenko's mother, recalled in an interview, sitting in the same two-bedroom apartment outside Moscow where her son spent some of his early years, while his father moved on to the northern Caucasus and Russia's Far East.

"We went hungry and cold because there was no food in the shops, no meat in Russia at the time. We used to buy bones."

When she spoke in the summer of 2007, Nina Belyavskaya was 67 years...

 

The November 2006 poisoning death of Alexander Litvinenko in London drew headlines around the world as investigators tried to learn what was slowly killing the 44-year-old former Russian agent. Cowell's story digs deeply--sometimes almost too deeply--into the background of Litvinenko and assorted associates. Simon Vance has a clear British accent, and he varies his voice ever so slightly when quoting one of the assorted spies, politicians, and businessmen who spin their way into Litvinenko's life. Listeners expecting tales of James Bond-like escapades will be disappointed; Litvinenko was simply a soldier who rose in ranks--until he questioned authority. The book's highlights are its focus on radioactive materials and a key account of an attempt on a spy's life decades earlier. M.B. (c) AudioFile 2008, Portland, Maine

 

Cowell employs meticulous reporting and numerous interviews with participants to re-create the hotel meeting, but best of all is his recap of the gripping forensic investigation that showed Litvinenko had been poisoned with a minute trace of a rare but deadly radioactive isotope, polonium-210. Investigation showed the substance probably was sprayed into the teapot from which the murdered man was served. Cowell has a "CSI"

 

Litvinenko and Putin both were trained as KGB agents, but while the former was part of the heavy-handed and corrupt domestic service, Putin was educated for foreign service. It was in that directorate that many Russian nationalists believe the idealistic patriotism of Lenin's original secret service, the Cheka, lived on. The service's murderously brutal but incorruptible founder, Felix Dzierzynski, conceived of the Cheka as the "sword and flame of the revolution"

 

As one of his early associates, the Latvian Martins Lacis, wrote: "The Cheka is not an investigative organ: it is the battle organ of the party of the future. . . . It annihilates without trial or it isolates from society by imprisoning in concentration camps. Its word is law."

 

Cowell's "The Terminal Spy"

 

Alan S. Cowell was the London bureau chief of the New York Times when the events narrated in this book reached their climax. Previously, Cowell served as a correspondent for Reuters and the New York Times in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. He has been based in twelve capitals and reported the news from around ninety countries and territories. Cowell is married and has three children. He is now based in...

The Terminal Spy by Alan S. Cowell
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