Blooming Russians. They're like rats in Londongrad. You're never more than six-feet away from one of them. I'm in Notting Hill (sometimes). Loads of 'em round our way. But who are they? What are they? What do they want? Are they dodgy or are they kosher? These are some of the basic questions that I will be failing to answer.
The Russians of Londongrad are aloof, insular, super-rich, racist, homophobic, and dodgy on the whole. But it's not just round the old hoodski or in the Tea Room at Harrods in the cross hairs of danger and intrigue. Take the 2014 death of property tycoon Scot Young slightly north from the optics of HQ in Marylebone. The 52-year-old bankrupt businessman was found "impaled" on the spikes of an iron fence under his swanky flat in Montagu Square. Was it suicide? Or was it murder most foul? Prior to his death, Young complained to friends and business acquaintances that he was being targeted by "the McMafia," the expat Russian Mob. But it's not just happening in Moscow-on-Thames. There are dodgy Russians and dirty deeds going down all over Blighty. And quite a few of these oily-garchs and expats, it must be said, have come a cropper.
Take the recent letterbox poisoning of Sergei Skripal, a 66-year-old Russian expatriate in the UK. But he wasn't your common or garden White Russian O-No-Garch. Skripal was a top level spook, a former colonel in the FSB, who had ratted on his comrades throughout the Nineties and got busted by his own in 2004. Later Skripal was one of four ex-intelligence officers traded for ten spooks busted by the Feds in Yankland in 2010 (who can forget the charming and alluring figure of Anna Chapman?) Until a few months ago, Skripal and his daughter, Yulia, were happily domicile in England. But traitors to Putin's regime have a tendency to die 'orribly. Skripal and his daughter were poisoned by Novochik, a 1970s and 1980s era Soviet manufactured nerve agent, and scores of other people, including first responders, were affected by this unprecedented attack on UK soil. The Skripals, under round-the-clock armed guard, are still on the mend in hozzy. It had been touch and go for father and daughter for weeks and the quacks feared long term brain damage. Yulia has made a recovery but her double-crossing daddy might emerge from the experience slightly worse for wear. The message is clear: no one rats on Tsar Vladimir and the Russian intelligence community and gets to live. Nobody.
Bah, who can blame Joe Vodka and the Russian finks for cleaning up the mess and cauterizing old wounds? If an insider had caused lasting damage to your network of overseas intelligence officers, would you not do much the same? Notwithstanding the Devil's advocate bit, this isn't the first instance of a Russian expat to die in the UK in suspicious circumstances. Remember Boris Berezovsky? Once reckoned to be the second wealthiest man in Russia, the prominent and colorful piano playing oligarch died in March 2013. But his death wasn't a quiet performance. Berezovsky was found hanged at his Berkshire home. The coroner recorded an open verdict, stating that they were unable to confirm whether Berezovsky had taken his own life or not.
It don't take too much smarts to know that taking out an old comrade and making it look like suicide is much cleaner than rat poison. Case in point, the 2012 case of Alexander Perepilichny. The commodity dealer with the tongue twisting surname was jogging near his home (a gated community in Surrey) when he suddenly collapsed and died on the spot. Witnesses allege that he had vomited a green-yellow bile. Perepilichny had been assisting the authorities with an investigation into a Russian money laundering operation. The case still lingers in the news. As recently as 2017, Buzzfeed reported that American intelligence agencies had given their opposite numbers in the UK "evidence" that he had been killed on the orders of the Kremlin.
Deadly doses featured in the case of former FSB man Alexander Litvinenko. The former Russian spook was poisoned in London in November 2006 by the radioactive substance Polonium-210. Litvinenko, a high level defector and expert on organized crime, was lunching with two Russian dudes (also ex-FSB) when his teapot got mickey finned. His tearful widow said that as he lay dying in his hospital bed, he blamed the Kremlin to the very end. There hadn't been a brazen assassination like that since Georgi Markov got jooked with a Ricin-tipped umbrella by the Bulgarian Secret Service (the Darzhavna Sigurnost or DS) at a bus stop on Waterloo Bridge in 1978.
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Skripal nicked by the FSB in 2004 |
Back to Sergei Skripal, "the spy with the Louis Vuitton bag," and the Novichok nerve gas attack last month in England. The plods reckon that the deadly nerve agent was left on the front door of Skripal's home address in Salisbury and/or sprayed through the letterbox by personnel familiar with the use and application of chemical weapons. We blame the Russian Federation. They counter: saying it's a false flag operation to provoke anti-Russian sentiment in the West. Governments in the West, thus far, including the United States, have expelled over 160 Russian diplomats. Russia continues to deny involvement. The case continues.
According to the spooks and the boffins, the Novichok was developed by the State Institute for Organic Chemistry and Technology at Shikhany, a small town on the Volga River in southern Russia. But how did the nerve agent, a Foliant strain allegedly developed by the Red Army in the 1970s and 1980s, get to Blighty in the first place? Via Halliburton suitcase on an Aeroflot flight from Mockba? Nah. Maybe it was sitting in the UK all along? There are Cold War era arms caches dotted about the UK in the event of World War 3, all of them placed by Soviet agents back in the day. Could they also have a sneaky stash of nerve agents? If the Red finks hid booby-trapped arms caches around Blighty during that historical period wouldn't it make sense to do the same with NBC weapons, too? Go figure.
As for the Russian neighbors; why so frickin' many? Maybe they all want to live close to Harrods now that Knightsbridge has been bought out lock, stock and barrel by Oilygarchs. That's the joke about Russian emigres in Londongrad: they all have to live close to Harrods for shopping. But Russians are all over Notting Hill, too. The Embassy on Bayswater Road is at the foot of Notting Hill Gate. Why do they want to live near that? Search me. On my last visit to Blighty, I heard several Russian conversations at the bar of the Churchill Arms. But that's London. Always changing, always evolving. As for the Embassy, inconveniently situated over the road from HQ, shortly after the Skripal poisoning, I got this text from Fairy Gill (my mother). "It is media central round our way! Camera crews and satellite dishes and lots of police cars. All of them observing the Russian Embassy. Ooh, that Mrs. May, what has she started?"
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Rostov (far right) played by Richard Lynch - an actor who once set himself on fire during a 1970s LSD trip. |
Seeing all those Russians clattering away in the Churchill Arms back in January got me to thinking. If Blighty were a boozer, and the Russians were rowdy customers, wouldn't we be within our rights to chuck 'em out the pub and bar 'em until they can come back and behave 'emselves? But how in the real world do you deal with out-of-control expats who act above the law (Ed. Note: ones who are not British)? Throw 'em out the country? Freeze their capital? No. It's very simple indeed. All Russian troublemakers are easy to identify because they are led by a chap called Rostov. He's a nut job in the KGB who goes around blowing up malls, fairgrounds, schoolbuses, churches, you name it.
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Chuck Norris as "Matt Hunter" in Invasion USA. |
Like all Russians, he thinks Westerners are "weak", "soft" and "decadent". However, there is an Achilles Heel. The only man Rostov fears is an ex-CIA dude called "Matt Hunter" (not exactly a low-key name but he is an American and he lives on an alligator farm in Florida). Once again, it's easy peasy. You deploy "Honter" (how Rostov says it) on the bucolic streets of England with dual micro Uzi sub-machine guns (on a custom DeSantis shoulder rig) to wreak hillbilly havoc on Rostov and the rest of the folks who constitute this new version of the old Red Menace. Next step, loot the corpses for booty and/or escort humiliated survivors to the nearest ATM/Cashpoint to pay a hefty Tony Blair style fine. All of these troublemakers are super-wealthy and that much needed capital can go to the NHS and the BBC. If only life were as simple as the plot of Invasion USA.
All this talk and speculation about death and intrigue makes me think that life back home in England is turning into one of Graham Greene's "entertainments". Guys running amok in London shooting dodgy chaps doesn't seem so far fetched after re-reading A Gun for Sale. Tortured intellectuals, like "D" in The Confidential Agent, seeking assistance for the cause ain't so rare in Londongrad neither. Will I stumble upon a dastardly spy ring back home like the stressed-out protagonist in The Ministry of Fear? Anything is possible these days in Moscow-on-Thames. I'd better be ready for anything and everything.
Until next time...
The Male Trailing Spouse.
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