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Russia adores slaying suspect

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Times Staff Writer

If you’re looking for Russia’s most notorious international outlaw, try his new office in parliament.

Andrei Lugovoy, the prime suspect in the 2006 radioactive poisoning death of a former Russian spy in London, is a celebrated figure these days in the Russian capital. Not only has Moscow brushed aside extradition requests from Britain, this onetime bodyguard has just been elected to the marble halls of the Duma, the lower house of parliament.

Lugovoy says he was framed. But that doesn’t stop him from basking in the adoration showered on someone widely seen as a symbol of anti-Western defiance.

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“I’d like to personify Russian citizens who, at a difficult moment in their lives, display courage and fortitude,” Lugovoy said during a rare interview last week in his Moscow office.

Lugovoy’s presence in parliament epitomizes, for observers at home and abroad, the bold us-against-them atmosphere pervading Moscow. The boyish 41-year-old is a thorn in the side of the British government, which has unsuccessfully lobbied Russia to turn him over to stand trial in the killing of Alexander Litvinenko.

With his sporty carriage and bashful grin, the tow-headed Lugovoy doesn’t look like the embodiment of neo-Soviet tensions between Russia and the West. But when he talks, he sounds the part.

He refers to the fall of the Soviet Union as a blunder. He says he wants Russia’s military might to return to the sweep and power of its Soviet heyday. He accuses U.S. intelligence agencies of plotting the Sept. 11 attacks “because they needed to create a certain mood.”

“I don’t agree that the Cold War is back. It has never ended,” he said. “Any normal Russian person in the 1990s didn’t see anything from the West except insults and humiliation.”

So is this payback time? Lugovoy laughed a little, then spoke deliberately.

“I don’t agree with this biblical saying that if they hit you on one cheek you should turn the other cheek,” he said. “If they hit you on one cheek, you hit them back with a fist.”

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Implicit in Lugovoy’s popularity, in the public’s enthusiastic reaction to his name, is the underlying assumption that he killed Litvinenko. Not that anybody ever comes out and calls him a killer. But that idea hangs over him: Lugovoy is suspected of spiking the former spy’s tea with radioactive polonium-210, traces of which turned up in hotel rooms, restaurants and airplanes he was in during his trip to London.

“He would definitely become a national hero of Russia should he confess that he killed Litvinenko and that he was trying to kill [London-based Russian dissident Boris] Berezovsky,” said Alexander Prokhanov, editor of the nationalist newspaper Zavtra. “In the eyes of the majority of the Russian population, both Berezovsky and Litvinenko are ugly, renegade traitors and symbols of evil.”

During a recent appearance on a Russian talk show, the host waited until the very end to ask Lugovoy whether he had killed Litvinenko.

At the question, Lugovoy burst into laughter. “No,” he said.

“Then who did?” pressed the host.

Lugovoy responded with an elaborate shrug and a grin.

Speaking in his office last week, Lugovoy flushed and half-smiled when the thorny question of the killing came up. But he insisted that he met with Litvinenko only to discuss business opportunities in Britain. As for the radiation, he said he was framed.

“It’s as if we were supposed to leave those marks so the whole case could be put on me,” he said.

Tension over Russia’s refusal to relinquish Lugovoy has driven a series of reprisals, such as the mutual expulsion of diplomats and the harassment of workers at the British cultural center in St. Petersburg.

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But Britain is merely a tool in a U.S. project of domination, Lugovoy said in the interview. “The United States, with Britain, is striving to once again apply double standards to subjugate other countries to their will,” he said.

As Lugovoy strolled through parliament last week, passersby froze and whispered to one another. A lawmaker bounded to his side and asked for a photograph with him.

Long before he became a famous outlaw, Lugovoy’s personal history was an illustration of the Byzantine maze of modern Russian history. Every man in his family, going back generations, has served in the Russian military. One grandfather fought Japan; the other stormed Berlin during World War II, which Lugovoy refers to by its Soviet moniker, “the Great Patriotic War.”

Born in Soviet Azerbaijan, Lugovoy was recruited by the KGB out of military school. He bristles at the suggestion that he was a spy, arguing that he has always worked as a personal security chief.

He was transferred to the Kremlin’s presidential security detail in 1992, and visited the White House three times as a bodyguard to Russian leaders.

It was in the “corridors of power,” he says, that he first met the wealthy men who eventually would set him up in business: Georgian Badri Patarkatsishvili and Berezovsky, the tycoon who fell out with Russian President Vladimir V. Putin and is now listed among the Kremlin’s most hated enemies.

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By late 1996, Lugovoy had left his $500-a-month government post for a $5,000-a-month job running security for Russian public television. He soon branched out, scooping up contracts for his new security firm in the wild days of Boris Yeltsin’s presidency.

Like most of the people who made it big in post-Soviet Russia, Lugovoy wasn’t afraid to get his hands dirty. He was imprisoned for more than a year for helping to organize the failed prison escape of former Aeroflot official Nikolai Glushkov, jailed for fraud.

But by the time he traveled to London for his meeting with Litvinenko, business was booming for Lugovoy: He’d added significant holdings in a soft drink company to his portfolio.

Today, he says, his life has been upended.

“There are all these questions around me and, you know, I will have to live until the end of my life with this taint, and I can’t do anything about it,” he said. “I have to put up with it.”

Lugovoy says he lost millions in business contracts after he was named by the British prosecutor’s office. And as a wanted man, he is a prisoner in his own country.

“If he steps a foot out of Russia, he will be arrested,” Britain’s ambassador to Russia, Tony Brenton, told the Reuters news agency in December. “We want him.”

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To hear Lugovoy tell it, he was at his lowest point when he was approached by Vladimir Zhirinovsky, head of the improbably named Liberal Democratic Party of Russia. One of the country’s most outrageous politicians, Zhirinovsky is known for his ultranationalistic rhetoric.

He invited Lugovoy to join his party’s ticket for the December parliamentary elections, and a grateful Lugovoy accepted.

“I was a drowning man to whom a helping hand was extended,” Lugovoy said.

Many analysts here believe the Kremlin lurked behind the alliance. Lugovoy’s ascension to parliament, they say, was a message to the world.

“I’m absolutely sure the state has blessed this,” said Alexander Konovalov, president of the Institute for Strategic Assessment in Moscow. “Because he demonstrates in the public mind that we’re strong enough to ignore the statements of the British.”

“It’s shameful to Russia to allow such a man to join the parliament,” Konovalov added.

As for Lugovoy, he’s hoping to reinvent himself as a politician.

Much of his conversation lingers on the themes of regaining Russian strength, holding firm against Western pressure and restoring national pride.

“Russia should not allow a unipolar world. Our bombers should be on duty around the world and our submarines should be on patrol across the world’s oceans,” he said. “Russia is a great country and should behave as such.”

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megan.stack@latimes.com

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Sergei L. Loiko of The Times’ Moscow Bureau contributed to this report.

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