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Abstract
This article examines how Aleksandr Litvinenko's death links the ‘war on terror’ with an emergent New Cold War. Based on an analysis of BBC and Russian Channel 1 news bulletins, it highlights the centrality of the post-imperial legacy of the two sides in the dispute to the manner of its unfolding, and to how war on terror discourse reconstructs national identities and international antagonisms. It draws on narratology to account for Litvinenko's liminal position inside and outside Islam (his deathbed conversion), the Russian security apparatus (his prior conversion from Cold War spy to noble dissident), and the UK (his ‘good asylum seeker’ status).
Acknowledgement
The authors would like to thank the Arts and Humanities Research Council for funding the research for this article, which forms an output of a three-year grant project entitled: ‘European Television Representations of Islam as Security Threat: A Comparative Perspective.’
Notes
1. The book, co-authored with Yurii Feltshinsky, was first published in 2002 (see Litvinenko and Felshtinsky Citation2002), and then re-published in 2007 after Litvinenko's death.
2. To quote the only academic analysis of the affair, ‘to many British reporters … just beneath a surface veneer of 1990s-and-beyond détente … there remains … an innate suspicion of the old adversary Soviet Russia’ (Brighton and McFoy Citation2007, p. 185).
3. For an authoritative account of the historical origins of the Cold War, see McCauley (Citation2003).
4. Gilroy (Citation2005, p. 432) points to British ambiguity over the release of British detainees wrongly held at Guantanamo Bay: ‘Their return to England has been an ambivalent affair that captures the nation frozen between its anti-Americanism on the one hand and its hatred of immigrants on the other’.
5. In the Bond film Casino Royale (2006), the hero fights a post-Cold War terrorist cell in Africa, but in his very first mission as 007, thus disrupting the Bond film chronology, but also merging imperial nostalgia for the origins of the Bond myth with the new, post-imperial context.
6. The continuing dominance of television as a news source is confirmed in a wide-ranging international 2007 Harris poll in which television emerged in number one position in all countries surveyed. The poll predicted that online sources would overtake television in France and the USA by 2012, though not in Britain. Newspapers languished well behind television in all countries (Harris Interactive Citation2007).
7. Downloadable from http://www.llc.manchester.ac.uk/research/projects/etrist/.
8. Programme references include channel and date of transmission. News references are, in all cases, to the main evening (prime-time) bulletins.
9. In the BBC online version, the movement was the reverse: from early reports in which the term ‘dissident’ prevailed, to later ones in which he was increasingly referred to as an ‘ex-spy’ (Brighton and McFoy Citation2007, p. 179).
10. The knee jerk tendency to resort to this narrative was starkly revealed in reporting on the Glasgow airport bombing of July 2007 when the BBC's own account shifted in mid-stream, abandoning the radicalised Asian youth script (‘News from the Middle East …helps radicalise angry young men in Britain and Europe …A small violent minority then head over to Pakistan ..’; BBC 1, 1 July 2007) for a tentative new, hitherto uncited script: that of the international ‘sleeper cell’ lying dormant at the heart of a trusted UK institution: the NHS (‘Were people sent here as sleepers to infiltrate the NHS and to be activated later, or were they radicalised here in Britain?’; BBC 1, 3 July 2007).
11. Interestingly, however, the ‘war on terror’ connection receives more attention in the BBC Online version of the incident, albeit with an opposing interpretation to that of Channel 1: one sentence in a profile of Litvinenko reminded us of his accusation that the FSB once trained Al Quaeda terrorists in Daghestan (Brighton and McFoy Citation2007, p. 179).
12. Following the murder, ‘Expert Online’, a patriotic, pro-government website, published the provocatively entitled ‘Who is fighting against Russia’, in which, while there is but one reference to Israel, where Litvinenko met Leonid Nevzlin, a renegade Jewish-Russian businessman and former president of the Russian Jewish Congress, an undercurrent of antagonism towards Litvinenko's business associates, many of whom were known to be Jewish, is apparent throughout. Available from: http://www.expert.ru/printissues/expert/2007/01/ubiystvo_litvinenko/comments [Accessed 22 July 2007].
13. The incursion of New Cold War rhetoric into Channel 1 reports on the Litvinenko/Lugovoi case is reflected in the gradual appearance of references to Litvinenko as an agent of British special forces, and by the replacement of terms designating Lugovoi as an ex-spy with more neutral epithets describing him as an entrepreneur.
14. The LDPR leader, Zhirinovskii, appointed Lugovoi as his ‘number 2’ in the party. See ‘LDPR Offers Lugovoi Immunity in Duma’. Available online at: http://www.templetonthorp.co.uk/en/news1647 [Accessed 25 July 08].
15. In June 2007, at the height of the extradition battle, Vremia interviewed an ex-FSB operative, Stanislav Lekerev, now a UK resident, who linked Britain's ‘bullying’ strategy to gain legal access to Lugovoi first to its subservience to American intelligence interests, then, outrageously, to the blackmail tactics employed by terrorists such as those at the Beslan and Nord-Ost sieges (Channel 1, 3 June 2007). Here, the ‘state terror’ slur reaches a hysterical pitch unmatched elsewhere.
16. In another confirmation of the mirroring process, the BBC and Channel 1 were acutely aware of one another's coverage of the incident. The BBC Online account referred, for example, to the low priority the story received on Channel 1 and Rossiia, by contrast with NTV, which gave it more prominence (Brighton and McFoy Citation2007, p. 188).