BBC forgets Cold War role and kowtows to Putin

When people like this complain, you take notice. Vladimir Bukovsky spent 12 years in Soviet prison camps before being deported in 1976. Oleg Gordievsky was Britain’s top KGB defector. Both are British citizens. So was their friend, Alexander Litvinenko. They and other Cold War veterans are alarmed by BBC Russian service’s coverage of Litvinenko’s murder.

They blamed the Kremlin for his poisoning. Russia, of course, insists that the murder was staged by its enemies (chiefly Boris Berezovsky, the exiled billionaire businessman and arch-critic of the Kremlin).

The BBC management is right to be careful when covering sensitive stories. Russia regards Berezovsky as a criminal. It also wants to extradite Ahmed Zakayev, another exile, who represents the remnants of the elected pre-war Chechen government. Russia insists he is a terrorist (though the soft-spoken actor has always denounced terrorist outrages perpetrated in the name of his cause).

But caution is one thing. Pusillanimity is another. The Russian service’s coverage of the Litvinenko story, the complaint goes, largely ignored Messrs Bukovsky, Gordievsky and Zakayev. That would be odd. They all knew him well. They have powerful arguments about his death, what it says about the Kremlin under Vladimir Putin and how the UK should react.

One programme did use extensive clips of all three men. But it was repeated only once (normally it would have gone out around five times); it disappeared from the web site after only two days, instead of the normal week. The producer, apparently, received a severe reprimand.

The BBC contests the complaint vigorously. It makes some reasonable points: it was to the BBC Russian service that Litvinenko gave his last broadcast interview. Zakayev also appeared in another programme. The signatories of the letter were interviewed, then and at other times. Yet there is a paradox: the interviews about the Litvinenko case that the BBC cites in its defence were for the very programme it is now disowning.

People who heard it say that it was punchy and certainly gave a lot of space to the Kremlin’s critics (though it put the countervailing view as well). By the standards of the domestic BBC, that would be nothing unusual. But perhaps not by the standards of the Russian service, whose editors have - at least in the view of many hawkish British-based listeners - lately been erring on the side of caution. Annoyingly, the BBC declined to make a copy of the banned programme available so it is hard to judge whether its punchiness outweighed professional balance.

To those who worry that the Kremlin’s tentacles already reach dangerously far into western institutions, the story has a dismal ring to it. They think the BBC’s twitchiness reflects its desire to hang on to its use of transmitters inside Russia. Several of these have already been cancelled by the authorities (though the difficulties predate the Litvinenko affair). Following this week’s expulsions, the remaining frequencies may be at risk too. But what is the point of having broadcasts if you cannot broadcast freely? Russians have plenty of tame radio stations to listen to.

In the dark days of the Cold War (when people such as Gordievsky were risking their lives for the UK) the BBC Russian service was a splendid contrast to the Soviet bloc’s propaganda stations because it was both fair and incisive. It would be disastrous if it was now soft-pedalling its criticism of the Kremlin. The BBC bosses are energetically countering their critics, but seem untroubled that they have lost their confidence in the first place.

• The writer is central and eastern Europe correspondent of The Economist.

When people like this complain, you take notice. Vladimir Bukovsky spent 12 years in Soviet prison camps before being deported in 1976. Oleg Gordievsky was Britain’s top KGB defector. Both are British citizens. So was their friend, Alexander Litvinenko. They and other Cold War veterans are alarmed by BBC Russian service’s coverage of Litvinenko’s murder.