Documentary: My friend Sasha

For three years before his death from poi­son­ing, for­mer KGB agent Alexan­der Litvi­nenko had been mak­ing a doc­u­men­tary with his friend Andrei Nekrasov about author­i­tar­i­an­ism in post-communist Rus­sia. Here is that film, the unex­pected end­ing of which made world head­lines at the end of 2006.

Nekrasov sent a let­ter to the Fin­ish news­pa­per HELSINGIN SANOMAT from the bed­side of his poi­soned friend Alexan­der Litvi­nenko called “A let­ter from Rus­sia” say­ing:

The moral­ist incan­ta­tions of the Bush-Blair cru­sade have an uncanny pro­to­type in Brezhnev’s polit­i­cal ver­biage and tonal­ity used to jus­tify his inva­sion of Afghanistan. The gist of the Politburo’s mes­sage, too, was mak­ing the world bet­ter and safer. Which is in stark con­trast with the sparse and dry putinisms on the “anti-terrorist oper­a­tion” in Chech­nya. No glee­ful erup­tions there, no hum­drum preach­ing, no pseudo-philosophical gen­er­al­iza­tions. And instead of all that — success.

Watch it here:

My friend Sasha