Russia’s thousand-year history is littered with conspiracies and conspiracy theories. Claims by Alexander Litvinenko’s supporters that he was a Russian spy and, last week, by his widow’s lawyers that he was an important agent for MI6, belong in all probability among the latter. Litvinenko was actually a middle-ranking KGB (and later, FSB) enforcer who fell out with the Kremlin and with his former colleagues. He threw in his lot with the Kremlin’s public enemy number one, Boris Berezovsky, and when Berezovsky fled to England in 2000, he fled with him.

From the imagined safety of London, Litvinenko poured out his bile on Vladimir Putin, hurling ever more improbable accusations at the man he once spoke of as his own role model. He directed bitter polemics at his former colleagues in the FSB; he became involved in murky business dealings, with dark suggestions of blackmail plots; and in the end someone’s patience snapped. Litvinenko was poisoned in 2006 by two ex-FSB friends who flew from Moscow and poured radioactive polonium into his tea. No one except those involved can say exactly what their motives were, or who gave them their orders, but Litvinenko had angered many people in many ways.

There were vocal allegations — not least from the dying Litvinenko himself — that the murderers were personally dispatched by Putin. In the course of researching my book on the case, I was not able to verify those allegations. However, the fact that the Crown Prosecution Service said publicly last week that the Russian state had a case to answer suggests that Britain is confident there is a solid link. Far more significant than one man’s death, however tragic, though, is the impression the case has created that Russia is run by a regime that sanctions murder, corruption and organised criminality — as the WikiLeaks document resoundingly put it, that “Russia is a mafia state”.

It is undoubtedly true that the mafia is very powerful in Russia. It always has been. In Communist times, organised crime had close links with the apparat, the Communist bureaucracy that ran the country from the highest levels to the lowliest village council. And after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the arrangement was simply transferred to the new officials in power — easily done, as in many cases the former Communist functionaries remained in their posts. With the old state structures disintegrating in the 1990s, Russia was gripped by a decade of unbridled criminality and mafia power. Business feuds were settled by bullets and bombs, often with the connivance of the police and legal authorities. The co-owner of the building that housed my own office — during the 1980s and much of the 1990s, I was the BBC’s Moscow correspondent — was an enterprising American by the name of Paul Tatum. He was in partnership with some Russian businessmen, whom I often noticed in the foyer.

In the mid 1990s, they told Paul they wanted to buy him out. Paul refused and on the evening of November 3, 1996, a man with a Kalashnikov shot him dead. I saw the ambulance take his body away. No one was ever arrested or convicted and the widely accepted view was that the murderers had bought the protection of the authorities. After the arrival of Putin as President in 2000, things seemed to calm down. There was less overt violence on the streets; criminality became more discreet and — some would say — more carefully controlled by those in power. However, corruption, protection rackets and the intimidation of businessmen continued.

I do not agree with the new Cold Warriors in Britain and the US who see the hand of Putin behind every negative phenomenon in Russian society. That would be just as absurd as the Kremlin’s own contention that all Russia’s afflictions — from demonstrations on the streets to the controversy over Pussy Riot — are orchestrated by the evil hand of the CIA. However, what is undoubtedly true is that Putin has given the security services much greater power and freedom of action than they have enjoyed since the days of Leonid Brezhnev. As a former KGB official himself, and a former head of FSB, Putin celebrated his ascent to power by telling colleagues in the Lubyanka: “Congratulations, comrades. Our forces have succeeded in infiltrating the corridors of power.”

It was only partly a joke. In the past decade, the FSB has become a law unto itself and its agents act with almost total impunity. The security services seem to have been given the go-ahead to enrich themselves by a compliant Kremlin. Since tsarist times, Russia has had a tradition known as kormlenie — literally “feeding”. Instead of the state paying its officials adequate salaries, it has encouraged them to enrich themselves out of the domains they administer. Russians have learned to live with it, but the abuses foster resentment and a distinct lack of consent on the part of the people. At the lowest level, kormlenie means badly paid traffic cops are allowed to make their living by demanding bribes from motorists.

At the highest levels, today’s masters of the Kremlin reward their cronies with the chairmanship of national industries. They do not own the industry per se, but they control its revenues and the tales of bulging Swiss bank accounts are legion. Putin allies have been appointed to run all the key sectors of the economy. Igor Sechin heads oil giant Rosneft; Sergei Ivanov, the country’s biggest arms manufacturer; Dmitry Patrushev, son of the FSB director, controlled the state export bank; Vladimir Yakunin, the railways; and Dmitry Medvedev was previously the chairman of the state gas monopoly, Gazprom. The finances of all these enterprises remain distinctly opaque and, as billions of dollars flow through their books every day, the opportunity for personal enrichment is ever-present.

If the 1990s were the decade of corrupt oligarchs, enriched with the connivance of Boris Yeltsin’s financially and morally bankrupt regime, the oligarchs of the 2000s are inside the Kremlin. With such high stakes in play, it is only natural that the politicians should expect protection from their security forces. While researching my history of Russia’s oil wars, I was shown documents in which a former FSB operative coolly described how his colleagues would commission professional criminals to eliminate political and business opponents, handing out weapons and payments of tens of thousands of dollars.

“Our goals and objectives were to implement unconventional methods in order to resolve the problems of the President of the Russian Federation,” he concludes. The author of the document was Alexander Litvinenko and it is possible that not all the details of his account are accurate. Yet, Litvinenko was personally involved in FSB enforcement operations and the fact that criminal relations between the FSB and the mafia are reported in such a deadpan, matter-of-fact way reflects the deep, long-established links between the two.

Whether or not the Kremlin directly ordered Andrei Lugovoy and Dmitry Kovtun to murder Litvinenko, the two former FSB men have been fiercely protected by the Russian authorities, who have refused extradition requests from Britain and even granted Lugovoy parliamentary immunity. It is a modus operandi that benefits both sides.

— The Telegraph Group Limited, 2012

Martin Sixsmith is the author of Russia: A 1,000 Year Chronicle of the Wild East, published by BBC Books.