Will Storr writes: Tucked into the Millennium Hotel on London’s Grosvenor Square, the Pine Bar is a place of hush and shadows. Dark wood panelling, leather seats and black shaded chandeliers cosset those who seek discretion in style. Head barman Norberto Andrade has hidden many celebrities in its recesses during his 27 years of service, including James Bond stars Sean Connery and George Lazenby.

The three Russians who ordered drinks on the chilly afternoon of November 1, 2006 had little of the lethal glamour one might expect of spies. True, two of them were smoking cigars and drinking gin. But the other, a fair-haired man whose slightly angelic face and wide eyes gave him a look of worried alertness, was dressed inelegantly in a khaki t-shirt, jeans and denim jacket. He sipped green tea as the smokers, complaining about the small British measures, ordered several rounds of drinks at once. Andrade placed their orders on a tray, but when he reached their table, one of the men obstructed him. The moment had an unforgettably hostile edge to it. He struggled to put the drinks down, finally managing to sit them next to the tea pot.

The men eventually left, and Andrade cleared the table. As he poured the remaining tea away, he noticed that the consistency of the liquid that tipped into the sink was strange. Gooey. He couldn’t have known it as he puzzled over its weird yellow tinge, but the man who’d been sipping the tea was a 43-year-old Russian dissident called Alexander Litvinenko, and the tea itself, draining away into the London sewers, was lethally radioactive.

Litvinenko lived in north London’s desirable Muswell Hill; he left the Pine Bar and arrived back home around seven. He changed his clothes, sat down to a chicken dinner prepared by his wife, Marina, and spent the evening watching Russian news online. Four hours later, he went to bed.

Before long, however, he was up again — vomiting with such violence that Marina began to panic. She brought him wet towels, dosed him with magnesium tablets. Nothing seemed to work. During the night, his temperature plummeted, yet he begged for the windows to be opened so he could gulp down more of the freezing November air. “It looks like they’ve poisoned me,” he said to his wife.

The next night she called an ambulance: doctors took a cursory look, diagnosed a stomach infection and sent him home. But two days later he was sicker yet. His doctor immediately sent him to Barnet General, a bright local hospital not far from his home. When Litvinenko told the medics his theory — that he’d been poisoned by the Russian security services — they suggested he call a psychiatrist. The probability, they thought, was that his sickness had a far more routine cause: food poisoning from an unfortunate lunchtime dose of sushi.

The doctors treated Litvinenko with a heavy dose of antibiotics. And yet his body continued to break down. Three days after admission, he was being fed through a tube. His hair was falling out, and Marina gathered it in little bundles from his pillow and pyjamas. As the medics tested Litvinenko for AIDS and hepatitis, he kept telling them: I’ve been poisoned. [Continue reading…]

Anna Nemtsova writes: The officers nervously cocked their rifles as the crowd began to swell. The Kirovsky police station in the capital city of Russia’s Dagestan region was now under siege. But the angry cohort outside the station walls on May 27 wasn’t composed of the bearded, gun-toting militants one might expect in this insurgency-racked region, but a crowd of enraged women in hijabs and ankle-length dresses. It wasn’t the first angry mob the officers had faced down, but a crowd of only women was unprecedented. Their dry faces wrinkled by sleepless nights, the women stormed the courtyard looking for their husbands and sons, locked in the basement cells, where they were thought to be beaten or, worse, tortured with electricity.

Yelling at the top of their lungs, the women, mostly Salafi Muslims, demanded that police let in their lawyers. Desperate to make sure that one of the women’s sons, a 19-year-old named Abdurakhman Magomedov, detained a few hours earlier, was not hidden in a trunk of a police car, the women blocked the driveway. They yelled that they would blow themselves up if the authorities didn’t answer their demands. After a few phone calls and text messages went out, hundreds of the women’s infuriated male relatives and friends drove up to the police checkpoint. With iPads and cell phones held aloft, they began taking photos of the men in uniform.

The Dagestan insurgency began with the spillover of militant activity following Russia’s harsh crackdown on neighboring Chechnya in the late 1990s. Although the region is traditionally Sufi, militant Salafi imams have been making inroads in the North Caucasus since the collapse of the Soviet Union. In recent years, the region has been the scene of a vicious cycle of violence and repression: police and special forces have arrested thousands of young Salafists throughout the North Caucasus republics, which in turn has driven more young men — and increasingly women — to various jihadi groups that aim to establish an Islamic state encompassing the entire North Caucasus. With thousands of active fighters, the insurgency in Dagestan is now reportedly the largest in the Caucasus. [Continue reading…]

The New York Times reports: A senior Russian general threatened on Wednesday pre-emptive attacks on missile-defense sites in Poland and elsewhere in Eastern Europe in the event of a crisis, underscoring the Kremlin’s opposition to the Obama administration’s plans and further undermining relations between the countries.

While Russian officials have said previously that the antimissile sites could become targets in the event of war, the threat of a pre-emptive attack was new.

The remarks from the general, Nikolai Makarov, the chief of the General Staff of the Russian armed forces, coming just days before Prime Minister Vladimir V. Putin is set to assume the presidency again, might signal a move to a more muscular foreign policy than that pursued by the departing president, Dmitri A. Medvedev.

They also seem likely to further inflame an already tense relationship. In recent months, the Kremlin has resisted Washington’s entreaties to pressure the government of President Bashar al-Assad in Syria and has given a cold shoulder to the new American ambassador, Michael A. McFaul, with prominent commentators and politicians accusing him of trying to foment revolution in Russia.

General Makarov was speaking at a conference in Moscow on antiballistic missile policy, hosted by the Russian Ministry of Defense. In his speech, one of many spelling out opposition to the plan, he went on to specify the type of Russian short-range missiles that might target locations in Eastern Europe.

Stephen Cohen interviewed on Democracy Now!

Masha Gessen writes: Watching an authoritarian regime disintegrate is like watching an episode of the American television series House, MD. Someone who was enjoying an active lifestyle at the beginning of the series is experiencing multiple organ failure 15 minutes later, with the doctors frantically trying to figure out why, and which vital organ is going to go next.

A friend sent me a link to a programme broadcast on Russian national television recently (the link was to a YouTube clip, since most people I know do not have actual working television sets – the habit of watching TV has quietly died among the educated class here over the last 10 years). For over 10 minutes it made fun, crudely and openly, of Vladimir Putin’s annual televised Q&A session. “What do you make of this?” my friend wrote. “Is this fake?” It was not fake. And what I made of it is that television, the most vital of organs in a state like Russia, is failing.

NTV, the channel on which the show was broadcast, is owned by the state gas monopoly, Gazprom, which has a large press holding. Technically, the channel does not have to take orders from the Kremlin, but in the past 10 years (since it was wrested away from its founder) it just has. And now it is just going to stop.

The thing about harsh authoritarian regimes is it’s not laws, or courts, or the rigid government hierarchy that makes them run. It is fear. And once the fear is taken out of the equation – suddenly, for the vanishing of fear is always sudden – it becomes clear that these courts, laws and hierarchies do not work. Everything just starts falling apart.

That is what happened here 20 years ago: institutions just stopped taking orders from the Kremlin. The media stopped fearing the censors who still sat in their offices at every media outlet. The police stopped applying absurd regulations, enabling the birth of private enterprise. Ultimately, the heads of the Soviet Union’s 15 constituent republics lost their fear – and the empire fell apart, in what by history’s standards was the blink of an eye.

Alexei Navalny

The Associated Press reports: Alexei Navalny has done more than any other opposition leader to lay the groundwork for the protest movement now challenging Prime Minister Vladimir Putin’s 12-year grip on power. His reward came last weekend when he took the stage before tens of thousands of cheering demonstrators.

Working the crowd like a firebrand preacher, Navalny had people responding to his calls with cries of “Yes” and “We are the Power!” His role now looks set only to grow.

The 35-year-old corruption-fighting lawyer and popular blogger has inspired and mobilized many in Russia’s young Internet generation, who until recently had seemed reluctant to get up from their laptops.

He reaches tens of thousands through his blog, consistently among the top three on Live Journal, and has more than 167,000 followers on Twitter.

He has tapped into deep anger throughout society, particularly over the corruption that pervades public life and the generous subsidies sent to the restive mostly Muslim regions in southern Russia. Navalny’s description of Putin’s political party as the “party of crooks and thieves” and his call to “Stop feeding the Caucasus” have become catchphrases of the opposition.

The Kremlin has woken up to the threat posed by the charismatic and ambitious Navalny, but efforts to silence him have only added to his stature.

Navalny was arrested after leading a protest march in defiance of police the day after Dec. 4 parliamentary elections. The shameless falsifications that had helped Putin’s United Russia party retain its majority outraged many Russians, and more than 5,000 joined what turned into the largest anti-Putin demonstration in years. Navalny was jailed for 15 days, but the protests only grew.

When he was released last week, Navalny said he felt that he had been “jailed in one country and freed in another.” Dozens of camera crews had waited into the early hours of the morning for his release, in a sign of his growing fame.

He was one of the most anticipated speakers at Saturday’s rally, which drew an estimated 70,000 to 100,000 people in the largest protest in the country since the demonstrations that swept away the Soviet Union two decades ago.

Reuters reports: Putin said on Wednesday that he was ready for dialogue with the opposition after the biggest protest against his 12-year rule at the weekend but added he was at a loss for a leader to hold talks with.

“The dialogue should take place,” Putin told reporters. “In what form? I will think about it. They should formulate some kind of shared platform … Who do we talk to?”