London – the frontline of a Russian PR war

The weapons in London’s three-cornered war are not high explosives, nor even gas pipelines, but stories about them. The battlefronts are seminars, think-tanks and dinner parties. Not since Alexander Herzen’s days has London been a better place to argue over Russia’s future.

The biggest and richest protagonist is the Kremlin, or more accurately the sprawling mass of business and political interests connected with it. Their aim is simple: to rehabilitate Russia’s reputation. Events, they say, have proved the doomsayers wrong: far from crumbling, Russia is flourishing. It is an essential energy supplier and a reliable one. Critics are either crazy cold warriors, or applying ludicrous double standards, or a paid agent of President Vladimir Putin’s critics, or all three.

The critics of the Kremlin have two main camps. One is Boris Berezovsky’s. The exiled Russian oligarch can’t outgun the Kremlin pound for pound, but his money is well-targetted to do the maximum damage. Putin, he argues, is not just a dictator, but a murderous one. The Russia security services organised the bombing of apartment blocks in Moscow in 2000 to create a climate of fear in which Putin could take power. They also murder their opponents, such as Alexander Litvinenko, a Berezovsky loyalist poisoned with radioactive polonium in a London hotel last year.

The other camp supports Mikhail Khodorkovsky. A one-time oil tycoon locked up in Siberia on fraud charges that his supporters say are trumped up. They fight on two fronts - highlighting their backer’s legal plight, and sponsoring hard-hitting academic and think-tank work that undermines the Kremlin’s claim to dependable respectability.

The two anti-Kremlin camps do not co-operate. Khodorkovsky’s lot regard Berezovsky as the epitome of what went wrong in Russia in the 1990s, and their own man as the emblem of modern business, brought down by greedy Kremlin thugs. They shun the Chechen cause; Berezovsky has befriended it. The Kremlin’s propagandists depict Berezovsky as a terrorist sympathiser, and Khodorkovsky as a self-serving crook.

The battlefront is in British institutions - media, financial, academic and official - and on London’s social circuit. The Kremlin has done best in London’s morally myopic financial world. Russian companies are a spectacularly lucrative line of business for brokers, bankers, lawyers, accountants, and PR-chiks (a wealthy, mainly male species not to be confused with the homonymous English ‘PR Chicks’, though the latter benefit too). London’s pro-Kremlin Russians have struck up a close friendship with Ken Livingstone, the Mayor of London, and sponsor a popular and entertaining winter festival in Trafalgar Square. Spent well (like the winter jamboree) or badly (as it mostly is) the tide of money washing through London is proving the Kremlin’s best ally. "Nobody wants a reputation as a Russophobe these days: it’s bad for business," says one Sovietologist turned banker.

But the other two camps have their successes, too. The Litvinenko murder was a disaster for the Kremlin. The British media gleefully unleashed every Cold War cliché - a kneejerk reaction, perhaps, but one that proved fully justified by Russian officialdom’s sullen and obstructive behaviour towards British investigators. This week a book co-authored by Litvinenko and Yuri Felshtinsky, "Blowing up Russia", which rehashes the evidence (disturbing and never satisfactorily explained) about official collusion in supposed terrorist outrages was republished. A press conference to launch it was cancelled at short notice because of unspecified threats to Felshtinsky’s life.

The confiscation of Shell’s Sakhalin gas fields and the looming likelihood of a similar raid on the mighty BP also hurt the Kremlin’s cause. Yet the mood in monied London is still largely positive; in thinking London it is increasingly negative. The battle continues.

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

The weapons in London’s three-cornered war are not high explosives, nor even gas pipelines, but stories about them. The battlefronts are seminars, think-tanks and dinner parties. Not since Alexander Herzen’s days has London been a better place to argue over Russia’s future.