The threat from Putin’s Russia

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Resisting fashion and complacency, the journalist Edward Lucas has remained faithful to the political beliefs that he formed as a boy in Oxford in the Seventies. His family’s Yugoslav lodger convinced Lucas that the Soviet Union was a power to be feared. That power, he learned, was “based on the relentless, intrusive, bureaucratic reach of the security services, and their capacity to ruin the lives of those who displeased them”. Lucas’s childhood passions, which still feed his writing, were tales of espionage and the plight of the USSR’s former “captive nations” in Eastern Europe.

When Lucas was Moscow bureau chief of The Economist in the first years of Vladimir Putin’s rule he was almost alone among foreign commentators in insisting that a “spookocracy”, fundamentally inimical to the West, was taking shape in the Kremlin. In certain respects, under Putin, the security services have become more politically powerful now than they were in Soviet times. Secret policemen and their cronies style themselves as a “new aristocracy”, living above the law.

They are among the richest men in the world. Without any sense of contradiction, Russia’s rulers simultaneously serve their own financial interests (which, in large part, derive from control of its oil and gas) and the cause of restoring Russia’s status as a great power. In Putin’s neo-feudal system, power and money are one; lying and stealing can be made to look like forms of patriotism.

The nature of this regime is nowhere more evident than in the case of Sergei Magnitsky. A smart Moscow lawyer working for a Western investment fund, Magnitsky blew the whistle on a $230 million fraud perpetrated by officials in the interior and tax ministries, backed by the FSB, the secret police. Instead of seeing the criminals brought to justice, as he had expected, Magnitsky was himself arrested. Incarcerated in inhumane conditions that destroyed his health, Magnitsky was beaten with rubber truncheons and left to die on the floor of a cell in Moscow’s Butyrka prison in November 2009.

Since then, in the face of international outrage, the Russian state has protected the officials involved in Magnitsky’s death. Lucas relates Magnitsky’s tragedy in unprecedented detail as a frame for his investigative polemic. For him, it is proof that under Putin the Russian state itself functions as a criminal organisation.

To serve its intertwined financial and geopolitical interests, the Kremlin has flooded the West with secret agents, Lucas claims. Who are they? As we know from the FBI’s unmasking of the glamour-puss “illegal” Anna Chapman in 2010, Russia uses seductive women as a state resource. According to Lucas, there may be countless “sleepers” working their way into Western government agencies and strategic economic sectors.

While Chapman is cartoonishly sexy, other agents are stodgy-looking, like the Estonian traitor Herman Simm, whom Lucas tracked down and interviewed in a prison in Tartu. Before his exposure as a Russian spy in 2008, the “portly” ex-policeman Simm had become Nato member Estonia’s highest national security official. Of course, the most successful spies are the ones who never get caught. Lucas invites us to imagine their achievements.

To raise the alarm about the West’s lack of competence and will to face the threat that Putin’s secret agents represent to nations that value the rule of law, Lucas records in intricate but gripping detail London’s most abject failures in a century of spy wars against Moscow.

For all the squalor and sadness of his tales of washed-up traitors, abandoned victims and failed conspiracies, Lucas retains an infectious boyish enthusiasm for the tricks of spy-craft. Yet there is nothing naive in his plea that we take Russia’s commitment to espionage seriously, nor in his insistence that its penetration and manipulation of our public institutions and commercial organisations threatens to weaken democratic nations, leaving us more corrupt and less free.

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