A man’s death is no longer treated with sorrow but is accompanied by ruthless interpretations and scandals. That is the way the story goes with Anna Politkovskaya and Sasha Litvinenko. Murder of the latter featured the headlines last week.

I knew both of them intimately and this very fact ties the two murders in my conscience. We had been working with Anna Politkovskaya in one newspaper for many years and I helped Sasha Litvinenko to write the book about his defection from the KGB.

It was in October after the funerals of Politkovskaya that Litvinenko gave me a call and we talked all night through about Anna, about possible murderers and those behind the murder. In November they called me from the BBC Russian Service and told that Sasha had deceased. They were asking for a comment – well, I could give one but I doubted the format. Though who cared then? They said three hours were left before the air; I had three bloodcurdling hours of night and sorrow…

The first image coming to my mind is a late autumn evening in London. Sasha, sportswear on, is sprinting along the park alley, I am sitting on the bench and smoking, stopwatch in my hand. “How is it?” asks Litvinenko. “Good enough to send you fetch the beer morning after”, I show him the stopwatch. He beams with joy. I’m more than reluctant about sport and can’t help cutting jokes. “You won’t be running after spies any more – no fun since you don’t have the document of KGB officer. Or maybe this time you will be the one who escapes. If so there’s no sense in running at all – you can’t escape them”. “Haven’t I already?” he smiles cunningly.

His escape was much a scandal and a thrill with dozens of theories and thousands of speculations. He was not a white collar, not just a spy with code keys and secret addresses. He was the special services’ field officer, their dogsbody. FSB (a former KGB) were in panic for he knew too much. Litvinenko didn’t have direct access to the state secrets – before he fled he had been fighting terror and corruption. But in the country where all the state bodies were steeped in corruption this issue turned out to be a state secret too.

Another consideration is that Litvinenko had been working in a special FSB office fighting criminal organization – URPO. This FSB unit “neutralized people constituting a threat to the state”, i.e. was charged with extrajudicial killings. You know how it works: there’s an inveterate criminal and they just can’t get him by legal means, that’s where a bullet eliminates the problem. This simplified approach to justice is extremely dangerous when only the System itself is authorized to decide who constitutes a threat and who doesn’t.

A year and a half before he fled, Litvinenko organized a renowned press conference where he invited his colleagues and accused FSB of committing crimes. They hoped someone would hear them. As a result the insurgents were put under pressure: Litvinenko was put in jail on a false charge. And when he was acquitted by the trial, they faked another and another charges – they were letting him know that he would not get away with it.

The pursuit only ended when he fled Russia. November 1, 2000 Litvinenko applied for political asylum in Great Britain. November 1, 2006 he was poisoned. (November is also the month he got married.) There’s something sacred about the way Freedom and Death were intertwined in his life.

The second image. Litvinenko is calling me in the middle of the night just like he usually does and announces: “I’m going to have the photos shot by the surveillance cameras in front of Anna’s house. You know I’ve been working with those people – can remember most of them…” I interrupted him saying it was much better to have short memory but a long life…

It was George Orwell who once phrased that power is not a means but an end. I believe he was right. And my strong conviction is that “sacred” killings are rather the result of the struggle for power. If the struggle for power coincides with the wartime (and that’s what the 1999 was in Russia), the victor will be a man with epaulettes. I can’t but pay tribute to Litvinenko who once observed: “Have you noticed that the state is administrated on the same pattern as the secret services are – internal regulations of the agencies are predominant over federal laws while the Constitution is a kind of a veil?”

I remember your words, Sasha. “What is the genuine skill of the field officer? The deceit, with no other goal but the deceit itself. It is central to deceive the enemy and to control the alternative sources of information”.

Akram Murtazaev is a laureate of The Russian Journalist Award “Zolotoye Pero” ("The Golden Pen").

December 1, 2006