A son seeking justice for Litvinenko
Ahead of an inquiry into the 2006 poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko, the Russian agent’s son Anatoly talks to Peter Marshall about family life with his father and the long struggle to emerge from the shadow of his murder.
He’s there, unnoticed in the background, cropped from newspaper photos, out of frame on the TV news. After a childhood upended by exile, treachery and the grief of his father’s assassination, Anatoly Litvinenko is relieved to have been comprehensively overlooked.
His father, Alexander Litvinenko, had a more ambiguous relationship with publicity and it didn’t end well. First he was a Russian agent in the shadows for the KGB against Moscow’s enemies. Then he was holding press conferences denouncing Vladimir Putin and the Kremlin’s security apparatus.
Even his death, slow and inexorable, a spectral figure in a London hospital bed, was photographed for the world’s front pages. His hair fallen out, his skin yellow then ashen, his face scored with pain: this was uniquely gruesome and public.
We knew Alexander Litvinenko, an agent who had crossed from Moscow to what was supposedly a safe haven in Britain, had been poisoned. But with what? When the tests from the Aldermaston Atomic Weapons Research labs finally revealed he’d been dosed with the radioactive isotope, polonium 210, it seemed beyond belief. So the murder weapon was a nuclear device?
What we didn’t see, and could scarcely imagine, was the news being broken to young Anatoly as he and his mother were given 10 minutes to evacuate the family’s home in Muswell Hill, north London, before investigators in chemical suits moved in.
