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By Root 1089 0

breezily, “Hi, guys.” This was none other than Yuliy Dubov, author of the sensational novel Oligarch, and no mean oligarch himself. He too has a warrant out for his arrest from the Russian Prosecutor-General’s Office, for embezzlement involving Zhiguli cars but principally because of his friendship with another oligarch in exile, Boris Berezovsky, who also now lives in London. In a London theatre Yuliy Dubov was charming, while in Moscow you couldn’t have broken through his oligarchic security cordon for love or money. He proved to have a delightful wife, and in the interval ran off to the bar without ceremony to get drinks. He even told us how many stops on the Underground it was from here to his house.

My heart warmed to see how amazingly London’s ordinariness heals people spiritually, but I was to make an even more amazing discovery. Boris Berezovsky himself, I found, is also recuperating morally here.

Like anyone else, he attends parents’ meetings at school. You have to admit, that speaks volumes for Britain’s ability to bring a Russian citizen back to normality, and serves to confirm that today Britain is the most attractive country in Europe for those forced to emigrate from Russia. Apart from Berezovsky, Dubov and Zakayev, London is home to Alexander Litvinenko [assassinated in London by the FSB in November 2006], the ex-FSB officer who came into irreconcilable conflict with his Ministry for refusing to kill Berezovsky without written instructions from his superiors, and then fled to Britain with a false passport by way of Ukraine.

All of them are people to be reckoned with and grandees in their own circles, despite all having warrants for their arrest as criminals issued by the Prosecutor-General’s Office. They are, of course, very different people, but have some things in common. They are all friends here, not only with each other but also with Vladimir Bukovsky, who is respected as the patriarch of Russian dissidents and political émigrés in Great Britain, who acknowledge him as the leader of their unplanned assembly of new political exiles.

THE PATRIARCH

When someone no longer refers to the British Prime Minister with a clipped “Bler,” but enunciates a long, drawling, diphthongised “Blai-er” as the British do, he is quite clearly no longer embedded in Russian society. Berezovsky, Zakayev and Litvinenko still come out with a curt “Bler,” but Bukovsky now says “Blai-er.” His alien pronunciation in no wise diminishes the immense attractiveness of this unique man with his palpable inner freedom. Political émigrés of every persuasion are drawn to him.

Bukovsky’s home is a rather dank, rather small, very English house in the university town of Cambridge. Its owner has been through the mill in a way the rest of us can only guess at. Ten years of labor camps and specialist psychiatric hospitals in his former homeland, followed by decades in exile. He lives here incredibly modestly, but very precisely, as becomes a dissident, without evident luxury and with just a single fireplace to warm the room. This is fuelled by a mountain of wine corks piled to the left of it. These indicate frequent, forgivable departures from its owner’s asceticism. Bored by the adults’ conversation, Tolya, Alexander Litvinenko’s eight-year-old son, who already mixes Russian words with English and writes poetry in English, busies himself with setting fire to the corks.

Bukovsky is not young. When he says “we” he means “the British.” That said, he greets his guests as he always has, wearing his traditional Soviet blue tracksuit with its baggy knees and incongruously offering us Courvoisier cognac dating from 1942, the year he was born. Having warmed ourselves with the brandy, we talk.

Why do you think people who have issues with Russia are again gathering in Britain? Is it coincidence or is there an explanation?

There are two aspects to that. Of course, mostly it is just chance. Akhmed is stranded here for the simple reason that he was invited to England by Vanessa Redgrave and, under our European laws, a person is returned to their country