WorldView:The day after Alexander Litvinenko died of poisoning in London, a conference on Ireland and Russia - History, the Rule of Law and the Changing International System - took place at NUI Maynooth. The principal speaker at a session on civil society was former Russian prime minister Dr Yegor Gaidar.
The death of Litvinenko and the murder of Anna Politkovskaya overshadowed the early sessions of the conference. The fate of the Russian journalist shot in Moscow on October 7th dominated a session on the media (which I chaired) in the morning. She was the 12th journalist to be assassinated since Russian president Vladimir Putin came to power in 1999, according to the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists. A journalist from the literary magazine Znamya said she had been at Politkovskaya's funeral and people there had spoken of many more unreported deaths of reporters. The media is so repressed in Russia that Reporters Without Borders this month relegated it to 147th place, behind such countries as Kazakhstan, Somalia and Zimbabwe, on its Worldwide Press Freedom Index.
High-profile assassinations like these raise questions about Russia's stability 15 years after embracing democracy. In the aftermath of the fall of the Soviet Union, the lack of a functioning legal system and the turmoil generated by the transfer of property led to an upsurge in mafia-propelled crime. Today the menace seems to stem as much from the law enforcement organs or their former members.
The most brazen killings have involved politicians, businessmen and journalists. In October they included central bank first deputy chairman Andrei Kozlov, who waged a campaign against money laundering; a prominent Moscow bank manager, Alexander Plokhin; Anatoly Voronin, the business director of Itar-Tass news agency; and a candidate for mayor in a provincial city. The overall murder rate has fallen since its peak in the mid-1990s, but at 15 for every 100,000 people it is still the highest in Europe.
This is not some remote set of statistics. One of the victims of a contract-style killing in Russia was a police major called Ararat. He was my cousin-in-law and a good friend. At 7am on October 13th, 2003, he stepped out of his apartment building and was shot dead at close range by two men who had been waiting in a white car. By the time my father-in-law stepped out of the same building to go to work a few minutes later the police had arrived in great numbers. Practically the first thing they did was search Ararat's eighth-floor apartment. They seemed to be looking for a tape, perhaps with something incriminating against - who knows? Ararat was given a full-dress funeral, with uniformed police lined up all along the road. Were the killers there, perhaps, saluting? A local newspaper alleged that two members of the security services were being investigated for the murder. To this day the family have not been told what the police were looking for, or who was responsible, or the outcome of any investigation. People in Russia are resigned to the fact that there is seldom any accountability for such crimes.
The killing of Politkovskaya reverberated throughout Russia. But the poisoning of Litvinenko has become a watershed in the international perception of Putin's government. Yegor Gaidar told reporter Conor Sweeney just before coming to Ireland that the biggest threat in Russia came from the right. He and other critics fear the country is slipping towards totalitarianism. The West's leverage on Putin on human rights and press freedom has been lost with the Iraq war - it is Putin who now has leverage over the West with Russia's control of gas supplies.
At Maynooth we were looking forward to hearing Yegor Gaidar's opinions on what was going on. However, he did not take questions as he was not feeling well and went to lie down. He returned at 5.15pm to launch his book, Downfall of the Empire: Lessons for Contemporary Russia. He looked wretched. He paused, suddenly put his hand over his mouth and rushed from the room. Participants were asked by the organisers not to come into the corridor where Gaidar, after being violently ill, had passed out. He recovered sufficiently to walk to the ambulance.
When he returned to Russia his daughter Maria and his friend, Anatoly Chubais, head of the Russian electricity sector, suggested poisoning. It suddenly became a big story in the Russian media. Gaidar, whose main contribution to Russia was to usher in a market economy in 1992, has left politics and is only a mild critic of the Kremlin. His mysterious illness would hardly have made news were it not for the fact that it came against the background of the events in London. Now it is portrayed as an elaborate ruse to discredit the Putin administration.
People are being asked to believe conspiracy theories that would provide John le Carré with years of material. The trouble is some may be true.
Litvinenko's most serious allegation was that agents of the KGB successor agency, the FSB, were behind the apartment house bombings in Moscow in 1999, which became the pretext for the Kremlin's war against Chechnya. He had just published a book about it called Blowing up Russia.
The poison used to kill him, polonium 210, could only have come from a nuclear reprocessing plant. Its use required sophistication and expertise. This was a message to dissidents: you will die an agonising death and you will know who did it to you.
We are back to the days of poison-tipped umbrellas. Words such as "dissidents" and "emigres" are again in vogue, just like in Soviet times.
As Politkovskaya warned three years ago: "The shroud of darkness from which we spent several Soviet decades trying to free ourselves is enveloping us again."