The Zong

Quick, someone reanimate Ronald Reagan’s corpse! The Reds are back, and they’re pissed that North Korea gets to have so many marches.

In September of 2004, as I’m sure you’ll remember, Russia was completely blindsided when a bunch of cowardly Chechen assholes took a school hostage in Beslan and killed hundreds of innocent people. At the time, an understandably shaken President Putin began a push to institute certain antiterrorism measures that many described as “drastic,” “authoritarian,” and even “dangerous.” I’m sure all this sounds vaguely familiar.

At any rate, Putin signed a controversial slate of legislation in March that, among other things, allows Mother Russia’s “secret services” (shudder) to freely monitor domestic phone conversations. The signing was met with international consternation, and was a reminder that the Russian government had been gradually moving back in time towards the good old police-state days of yore. I’m sure all this sounds vaguely familiar.

Now, more than 2 years after the Beslan tragedy, things are really starting to get juicy from a cloak-and-dagger standpoint. In case the only thing you’ve been reading is Teen People for the last few months, Anna Politkovskaya, one of Russia’s ballsiest investigative journalists, was murdered in an elevator while wrapping up an article about human rights abuses against civilians by the Russian military back in October. This got the attention of the international community, which suddenly took notice that being a curious Russian journalist while Putin is in power is about as safe as being Kim Jong Il’s barber.

“One thing that immediately comes to mind … is that Anna had many enemies, said Joel Simon, executive director of the New-York based Committee to Protect Journalists.

She was at least the thirteenth journalist to have been the victim of a contract-style killing since President Vladimir Putin came to power, according to CPJ.

“She single-handedly incarnated the resistance to the order that Mr. Putin wants to impose on the media,” said Robert Menard, president of Paris-based Reporters Without Borders. “Nobody can imagine this was just a crime committed by common criminals.”

In Washington, State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said the United States was shocked and profoundly saddened by the murder of a journalist who devoted much of her career to “shining a light on human rights abuses and other atrocities of the war in Chechnya” and the plight of Chechen refugees.

Thirteen journalists? Contract-style killings? It’s getting fucking cold in here.

So last week, a “former” KGB agent named Alexander Litvinenko was murdered by being poisoned with something called polonium-210 while investigating her death. Salon.com is out today with a mind-numbing conversation with some guy named Mike Large who evidently knows a lot more about radioactive stuff than my dumb ass:

Litvinenko’s murderer has not been found, but the poison that killed him has: polonium-210, an isotope of uranium discovered by Marie and Pierre Curie and named for Poland, Marie’s native country. Used as part of the trigger in the earliest atomic bombs, including those dropped on Japan, polonium-210 is a highly radioactive substance. The alpha particles it emits can be lethal when absorbed into the human body.

“Polonium, although it does occur naturally, is at the very end of the uranium decay train.

“You need a nuclear reactor, you need a radiochemical laboratory that can handle radioactive material, and then you need a clinical laboratory that can cut it into a designer drug. Now, those facilities are simply not available in other than state enterprises. So countries like the United States, the Russian Federation, Britain, France and Israel are the sort of countries that can do this.”

Large goes on to detail why this substance is really only available to nuclear-capable governments, in a way that makes me feel pretty stupid.

We’ll probably never know what the hell is going on, and while it’s sexy to think that Putin is just trying to get the Berlin Wall rebuilt without any press coverage, it’s probably just as likely that all this is being done to make it look like he’s responsible. Whatever the explanation, I think it’s pretty amazing that here in 2006 we’re reading about KGB agents being poisoned with radioactive isotopes—in newspapers. It’s like Russia hired Tom Clancy to run their frigging tourism board.

- M.G.