Word: litvinenko
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Whatever the final outcome of the cases, the deaths of Litvinenko and Politkovskaya have chilled Russia's already frosty civil society, and revived memories most Russians would prefer to forget. Back in the bad old days of Soviet rule, fear was prevalent. People who spoke up against Kremlin authoritarianism knew what to expect: harassment, isolation, imprisonment and worse. Most people dared to grumble only in the relative safety of their own kitchens, but a hardy few - advocates of freedom such as Andrei Sakharov and Natan Sharansky - made their dissent public...
...standard, however, the past few weeks have been grim ones for activists. In addition to the deaths of Politkovskaya and Litvinenko, Lev Ponomarev, a veteran campaigner, was arrested and jailed for three days in late September for organizing a memorial for the victims of the Beslan school hostage tragedy. His crime: holding an unauthorized rally. In early October, Manfred Nowak, a United Nations rapporteur on torture, was forced to postpone a fact-finding trip to Chechnya and the northern Caucasus after he was told that his intention to visit detention facilities unannounced and interview detainees would contravene Russian...
Conceivably, the deaths of Politkovskaya and Litvinenko will awaken the West to the realization that all is not well in the new Russia. A Russia that is prosperous, in which there are goods in the stores and food on the table - that is a Russia that is in the interest of all the world. But a Russia where the powerful - whoever they are - feel free to defend their prerogatives in any way they choose is one that brings back bad memories. Russia's leaders should not be surprised if they discover that, outside its borders, those who have wished...
...former spy lay dying in a London hospital--of what he didn't know. (It wasn't until after his death that Scotland Yard realized that the rare compound killing Alexander Litvinenko, 43, had left traces of radioactivity nearly everywhere he had been on Nov. 1.) But Litvinenko wanted the world to know who killed him, not how it was done or where. In a statement released after he died last week, the fierce critic of Russia's government directly addressed the man he said was responsible for his death: "You may succeed in silencing one man, but the howl...
Whoever did kill Litvinenko wasn't an amateur. British authorities announced last Friday that he had ingested a radioactive toxin, polonium 210, and that police had found traces of it in three locations: a sushi bar where Litvinenko had eaten lunch, a hotel he had visited on the same day and his home. Polonium 210 is so rare and volatile that the assassin would have needed access to a high-security nuclear laboratory to obtain it. Moscow denies that it had anything to do with the death. At a meeting with European officials in Helsinki, Vladimir Putin called the death...