In London, Russians feel a familiar chill

Here in Moscow on the Thames, it was a calling card from home.

A former KGB agent who has settled in London to raise his family gets a warning that his name is on an organized crime hit list, then falls ill from a mysterious poisoning. Theories involving the Kremlin and sinister business figures tumble around town like blinis from a hot pan.

Suddenly, the elegant Mayfair townhouses with window-box geraniums and the Chelsea gastro pubs with designer vodka don’t seem so far from Russia after all.

The apparent attack on Alexander Litvinenko has reminded London’s 300,000-plus Russian community that the long, often-menacing arm of Slavic capitalism and politics is only a 3 1/2 -hour Aeroflot flight away.

“We are thinking about this and discussing this, but to tell you my opinion, it’s not just murder and poisoning -- it’s politics,” said Elena Ragozhina, who edits New Style, a magazine for Russians in London.

“This kind of situation exists with all countries which started new to capitalism,” she said. “All new business is sometimes quite -- not dangerous -- but not so quiet, not so relaxed. And if you will read books about how business started in America and other different countries, you will find the same examples.”

Over the years, London has attracted exiles and emigrants from many lands. The 21st century so far has belonged to the Russians, many of them millionaires who brought their capital to Britain, which provided security, investment opportunities, favorable tax laws and good restaurants.

“In general, the main reason people come here is safety. And we see this place as much cleaner, with a higher standard of living. There’s a developed financial sector, many potential investors and partners, and a booming property market,” said Dimitry Antonov, a native of Novosibirsk, in Siberia, who works for a Ukrainian oil and gas holding company in London.

The businessmen who would never leave home in Moscow without a team of bodyguards often travel solo in London, he said. “It’s a little bit more civilized.”

Except when it’s not. Except when somebody eats a bowl of soup at a sushi restaurant in Piccadilly Circus and winds up having poison as dessert.

Friends think Litvinenko’s accusations of skulduggery by Russian authorities landed him in London’s University College Hospital, where he remains in serious condition.

On Tuesday, doctors said it was still unclear exactly what sickened the 41-year-old Litvinenko.

Although a leading toxicologist initially said his symptoms were consistent with thallium poisoning, other doctors said Tuesday that was unlikely. But they said it could not be ruled out that he had ingested a radioactive form of thallium.

Litvinenko wrote a book accusing the Kremlin in a series of Moscow apartment bombings in 1999, and was reportedly making contact with an Italian KGB expert thought to have information on the killing last month of Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya.

The Italian contact, Mario Scaramella, said Tuesday at a news conference in Rome that he had alerted Litvinenko to an e-mail he had received warning that both of their names had surfaced on a hit list connected to organized criminals in St. Petersburg. The same criminals may also have been behind Politkovskaya’s slaying, Scaramella said.

The Russian government has called suggestions that it was involved “nonsense,” and some commentators in Russia have pointed the finger back at the tangled web of expatriate politics in London, which is at least a part-time home to many of Russia’s wealthiest oligarchs and some of its most persistent political dissidents.

The most famous is Roman Abramovich, the billionaire oil tycoon who started cashing out of Russia when the Kremlin began moving back into the oil industry and wound up as the richest man in England. He owns the Chelsea football club, a townhouse in Belgravia, a flat in Knightsbridge, a 400-acre estate in Sussex, three yachts and a private jet.

He and others have Russified the city, a trend evident in the annual Russian Season Ball, a rush on the Kandinsky exhibit at the Tate Modern, and the $8-million diamond necklaces quickly snatched up on Bond Street.

A few Russian emigres find solace not just in Britain’s tax laws, which allow their earnings to sit comfortably unnoticed offshore, but in sympathetic political leaders who have resisted attempts by the Russian government to extradite its opponents. Among them are the Chechen resistance’s foreign minister, Akhmed Zakayev, whom the Kremlin calls a terrorist, and billionaire Boris Berezovsky, wanted in Russia on fraud charges.

The inscrutable Berezovsky, under a grant of political asylum, has used London as a base of operations for delving into countless political intrigues in Russia and Ukraine. He has bought up Russian newspapers, funded civil rights organizations and generally made no secret of his intention to unseat President Vladimir V. Putin.

Litvinenko’s association with Berezovsky has fueled speculation about possible suspects and motives, the most convoluted of which centers on Berezovsky poisoning him to make Putin look bad.

Others see Berezovsky as the next potential target.

“A person such as Boris Berezovsky, I think he might feel a little uncomfortable after what’s happened,” said Boris Yaryshevskiy, a political science student at the London School of Economics and president of the school’s Russian Society.

“But the rest of the community, who are most of them law-abiding [and not connected to politics], I think it doesn’t really matter for them.”

kim.murphy@latimes.com