On screen, it looks like the real Alexander Litvinenko, as in the photo that went around the world in November 2006. Dying, his hairless head under the effect of poison, the former Russian spy exiled in London was living his hours after drinking tea contaminated with polonium 210, an extremely rare radioactive substance. Before giving up the ghost, he had denounced a state murder signed Vladimir Putin. A mini-series broadcast from January 19 on M6 retraces the investigation by the British police and the fierce fight of Marina Litvinenko, the wife of “Sasha”, to obtain justice.
She is the implicit heroine of this story, portrayed by a larger-than-life actress with short hair and an elegant look. A story documented as close as possible to reality “so that viewers can have no doubt about the truth”, testifies Marina Litvinenko. Before the broadcast in France of Polonium murder, the case Litvinenko, L’Express spoke with this dignified and determined woman, who won her first victory in September 2021, when the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) found the Russian state “responsible” for the murder of her husband. “This judgment is only part of the record of the crimes of the Putin regime. One day, it will be integrated into a much larger trial”, hopes the widow of the dissident.
Actress Margarita Vladimirovna Levieva plays Marina Litvinenko in the series “Litvinenko”, broadcast on M6 from January 19, 2023
© / ITV STUDIOS
Sasha’s Prophecies
“My husband’s poisoning and the invasion in Ukraine are two sides of the same coin, evidence of Putin’s unbounded cruelty. Sasha’s murder should have alerted the world to what this man is capable of. Many time he tried to warn Westerners, to no avail. My husband knew the Russian security services from the inside. In 1997, when he was assigned to the unit in charge of organized crime, he realized that all his investigations established links with the top of power and the top brass of his organization, the FSB.In short, Russia was a mafia state.
In his book Blowing Up Russia: Terror from Within (co-authored with Yuri Felshtinsky, ed. SPI Books, 2002), he went out of his way to prove that the 1999 “terrorist attacks” in Russia, which favored Putin’s election as president, were fomented by the FSB. While in 2001, in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks, the Americans were tracking bin Laden, another monster was emerging behind the walls of the Kremlin. And Sasha had warned: if you don’t stop him, he will start a war where thousands of people will die. We are there, we just have to fight this criminal. Remember this, Western peoples: never get tired of supporting Ukraine. You live in democracies where your leaders react to public opinion. If you start saying: ‘we’re fed up with this war, we want to heat normally and pay less for our energy’, your elected officials risk turning away from this war. The future will only be worse.”
The complicity of Westerners
“Americans and Europeans were neither deaf nor blind to Putin’s regime. They believed that through economic support, by building political ties, the climate could change in Russia. It was a big mistake. After sixty -ten years of communist propaganda, you can’t do miracles. A country can’t rock at all. Of course, some individuals who had never adhered to this ideology quickly became westernized. But most people in Russia felt betrayed by the fall of the USSR, they felt they lost a lot in this post-communist economy, they preferred a life in the nails, predictable – even if that meant in poverty -, rather than an uncertain adventure. On this soil of spite, politicians began to stir up patriotic ideas and to say that all our neighbors wanted to crush Russia. This ideology won.
But unfortunately, the Russians are not the only ones to have accepted Putin’s regime. The West has allowed the emergence of this monster. When Putin sat down at the big table at the G7 and G20, it was a recognition, including in the eyes of the Russians. Western companies paid huge sums in advertising on state television. What did they receive in return? Propaganda. You were watching an advertisement for an American product and the next second you heard the evening guest say: ‘the West wants to kill us and has always hated us’! For years, this dissonance did not bother the West. Business was king. Today, I believe things have changed. The United States must now ask itself the question: what does democracy mean? Is it a fight for human rights or do we just want to be the leading economic power, even if it means making a pact with authoritarian regimes by turning a blind eye to their crimes?
After Putin
“Russians live under Putin’s control, driven by fear and the idea that they alone won’t make a difference. Sometimes I talk to people back home who ask me, ‘What can I do?’ There is no civil society or civil rights in Russia, people are slaves to the regime. But as soon as you change your perspective and say to yourself: ‘I am no longer a slave to anyone and I believe in certain values’, Putin can no longer bully you. Nobody knows what can happen then.
In 1991, no one anticipated that the Soviet Union would collapse so brutally, nor imagined the outcome of this cataclysm. The Soviet economy was not as strong as predicted and collapsed like a house of cards. Yet it was much stronger than the Russian economy today. When the latter sinks, I fear a grim future. Many scenarios are imaginable. The Russian Federation could be dissolved in a form never seen before, peacefully or not.
We have regions which have their own oil and gas resources, but which may no longer belong to Russia. Moreover, nationalism has become so strong, cultivated in the context of war, that ultranationalists, even fascists, could take power. We are also not immune to a military junta being imposed. After all, the military is still blamed for all evil in this war. One day they may want to get their revenge.”