Britain: A tussle with Russia over Shakespeare—and spies

The Russians are up in arms over a staid British cultural center that promotes Shakespeare, said Ben Macintyre in the London Times. The British Council is hardly a threatening institution. Founded in the 1930s to promote “British ideas about education, science, and technology,” the partly government-funded group has centers in cities across the globe where locals can take English lessons and see classic plays. The few times it has attracted criticism, the complaint has been about its relevance, such as when it “inflicted Elizabethan madrigals on bemused Afghans.” Last week, though, the Russian government decided that the British Council was no longer to be tolerated. Claiming that the St. Petersburg chapter had failed to pay Russian taxes, the government ordered it to close. When the British protested, Russian police began harassing the council’s employees, bursting into their apartments in the middle of the night and questioning them. Then Russia claimed that the British Council was a front for “a nest of spies.”

That’s rich, considering that “the Russian government is itself a nest of spies,” said Martin Ivens in the London Sunday Times. Putin, of course, is the most powerful of the former spies. His two top deputies are also both from the FSB, the successor to the Soviet KGB. Russia’s biggest oil company, gas company, shipbuilding company, and airline are all led by men with ties to intelligence. “Russia is not a dictatorship, nor a conventional autocracy: It’s a spookocracy.” Now that London has become a haven for Kremlin opponents such as billionaire Boris Berezovsky, it’s no wonder that Russia has begun harassing British interests “in time-honored KGB fashion.” Russian authorities even detained Stephen Kinnock, the council’s St. Petersburg director, on trumped-up charges of drunken driving.

The real motive for this Russian “intimidation” lies in the Litvinenko murder case, said the London Guardian in an editorial. Russia is furious at Britain’s request for the extradition of Andrei Lugovoi, the former FSB agent accused of the radiation poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko, a Berezovsky aide and Kremlin foe who had gained British citizenship. Britain was within its rights to ask for Lugovoi, who, after all, allegedly committed a murder on British soil. But since Lugovoi was elected in December to the Russian parliament, he now has diplomatic immunity from extradition. At this point, both sides need to back down.

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Why should Britain knuckle under to “blatant blackmail”? asked Con Coughlin in the London Daily Telegraph. “Just how the work of a cultural mission can be equated with the murder of a Russian dissident in London is not clear.” But if Russia insists on harassing British citizens, it will find that two can play at that game. Plenty of Russian millionaires spend more time in London these days than they do in Moscow, and they wouldn’t take kindly to too much questioning from London bobbies. “Making life difficult for both Russia’s super-rich and spooks would certainly concentrate a few minds in Moscow.”