These days, it seems everyone is either a spy in Moscow, or suspected of being one. It’s one of the more fun parlour games of the Moscow expat community, to guess which of your acquaintances is a spy. In fact, it turns out that the central defender of my football team, a nice bloke called Paul Crompton, is ‘the Moscow head of MI6’ according to the FSB. So that’s why he kept running off the pitch into the bushes – we thought he was incontinent.

Even I have fallen under suspicion, particularly because some people misread the Eurasia Foundation, one of the NGOs supposedly funded by MI6, as the Eurasia Heritage Foundation, which supports this web-site.

My Russian colleagues, and even my friends and family back home, have frankly told me they suspect me of being a spy. My mother even rang up to see if I had been expelled. I find their suspicions deeply gratifying. I love the fact people could seriously believe I was a well-connected, cold-blooded, ruthless secret agent for the British government, rather than the disorganized, over-excitable and frequently ill-informed young hack that I am.

I fear, however, it is less my personal characteristics that make them think I’m a spy, and more the simple fact that I’m a Brit living in Moscow. Such is the great tradition of spying between Britain and Russia, that any Brit living here, no matter how unlikely, is always going to fall under some suspicion of being a spook.

Both Russia and Britain love to revisit this grand tradition of mutual espionage, which this latest spy scandal has enabled them to do. It reminds them both of their glory days, of the two empires playing cat-and-mouse during the Great Game in central Asia, or of MI6 and the KGB in their pomp in the 1940s and 1950s. For both Russia and Britain, spy stories like these help console us for our loss of imperial status, by making us believe we are still great powers.

Britain, following the collapse of the British Empire after World War II, turned to such popular fiction as Ian Fleming’s James Bond stories or John Le Carre’s Smiley books, finding in fiction the great power status they no longer held in reality. The British government might have been unable even to defeat Nasser’s Egypt in reality, but in fiction, 007 never lost.

Likewise, in the years following the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia turned to Akunin’s Fandorin, or TV series like ‘KGB V Smokinge’, to bring back those glory days when Russian intelligence services were a global force to be reckoned with, rather than an outfit increasingly focused on money-laundering in the Caucasus.

And now, thanks to this scandal, both the British and the Russians can feel like the good old days have come back again, when we were great, when we were spies.

The fact, however, is that neither of us is particularly relevant any more. MI6 is unlikely to send its best agents to Russia, because they know that, for all its truculence, Russia is no longer a threat to the West. Its global significance is mainly as a supplier of energy. One western diplomat quoted in the Times tried to pretend that this growing role in the energy sector made Russia worthy of a host of foreign spies. “A spy in Gazprom would be invaluable”, he claimed. Then why not simply buy shares in Gazprom, and demand information as a shareholder?

Russia may genuinely still regard the UK as a threat, but what interesting secrets could the UK have to hide any more? The date of the release of the next Harry Potter book?

But still, we occasionally like to snarl at each other, like old men in adjacent hospital beds, because it reminds us of the days when we still had secrets worth spying on. The only thing worse than being spied on is not being spied on.

Julian Evans, a British freelance journalist based in Moscow

January 25, 2006