The Litvinenko File [antikvár]

A FUNERAL IN LONDON The afternoon was tinged with the unreal. Riding the Underground to London's Highgate Cemetery, I caught myself reliving Russian funerals from my past. Andrei Sakharov's emotional leave-taking in 1989, when weeping thousands lined the streets of Moscow; the murdered Russian mafiosnik whose burial party I saw decimated by a graveside bomb severed limbs on the cemetery path, a shin and foot in the branches of a tree, the foot still sheathed in one expensive loafer. I shook myself. This was December 2006; north London on a drizzly Thursday. What could the funeral of an exiled former KGB man offer that I hadn't seen before? Highgate Cemetery was drenched in dark December rain. The funeral procession straggled through the puddles of a tree-lined avenue, an outsized coffin perched precariously on the shoulders of eleven ill-matched pallbearers. So here he was. Encased in lead, wrapped in oak, adorned with gleaming brass. More resplendent in death than ever he was in life, here was Sasha Litvinenko, the boy from the deep Russian provinces who rose through the ranks of the world's most feared security service; the man who alleged murder and corruption in the Russian government, fled from the wrath of the Kremlin, came to London and took the shilling of Moscow's avowed enemy. Now he was a martyr, condemned by foes unknown to an agonizing death in a hospital bed many miles from home; now he would lie in foreign soil, in an airtight casket to preserve his body for a thousand years. A hundred yards away, the grey granite statue of Karl Marx rose above the grave of the father of world revolution.