Dmitry Peskov, official spokesman for the Russian president, likes a joke. Visitors to his Kremlin office last week noticed that the screensaver on his computer is a series of revolving quotes from George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four: “Big Brother is watching you”, “war is peace”, “freedom is slavery”, “ignorance is strength”.

Since Mr Peskov works from the same building from which Stalin operated – and now speaks for Vladimir Putin, who is often accused of establishing a new Russian autocracy – this is all rather daring. Or tasteless. Possibly both.

Mr Peskov speaks with the relaxed good humour – and even the accent – of an American spin-doctor. But listening to some of what he had to say, I experienced a strong sense of déjà vu – and it was not the US that was brought to mind. It was China.

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I keep being told that there is no such thing as the rule of law here in Russia. And now I know it’s true. That was never a penalty.

For those of you who have not been following events in Moscow, I refer to the Russia-England football match, and the unjustly awarded spot kick that turned the game. This evening I had decided to give maximum space to my inner moron – and so quietly excused myself from a dinner with Russian NGOs, in favour of watching the match on television. All England needed was a draw – and with just 20 minutes to go, we were winning. Wayne Rooney – that epitome of all that is finest in English manhood – had put England ahead. But then came the imaginary penalty, awarded against poor, bewildered Rooney. Then another Russian goal (fluke) – and we had lost.

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I will be in Moscow later this week which should be fascinating since I haven’t been for a couple of years. For reasons too tedious to go into, I won’t be able to do the blog from Russia. So, after this post, there will be a short period of silence.

In preparation for the trip, however, I’ve been talking to lots of people. The single most memorable conversation I have had about Russia was with a "senior administration official" in Washington,a few weeks ago. The man in question is not generally regarded as a hardliner or a hawk. But his view of developments in Russia was extraordinary bleak. Here are the edited highlights:

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The Russian decision to expel four British diplomats sounds like a straightforward tit-for-tat response to the British decision to kick out four Russians. In fact, as the FT pointed out, the Russians have gone a little bit further than expected - by also extending the diplomatic cold war to co-operation on terrorism and tougher rules on visas.

Still, I think that both sides are keen to keep a lid on the dispute. The economic interests at stake are huge and could be easily damaged if the Russo-British row really gets out of control. That still seems to me to be likely to keep the dispute within bounds. If there are any Marxists left in the Kremlin, I’m sure they would agree.

But the revelation that there may also have been an assassination attempt aimed at Boris Berezovsky - the exiled oligrach and fierce critic of President Putin - certainly complicates matters. Killing one Russian dissident in London is bad enough. But if this becomes a habit… Incidentally, there is a brilliant piece by Edward Lucas on Berezovsky in the Daily Mail, which I think goes a long way to capturing the ambiguity of the man and what he represents.

The story of the alleged murder attempt was broken in Britain by the Sun newspaper - Britain’s best-selling paper, which is usually bigger on soap stars and footballers than on Russian exiles. In a bid to make the story appealing to its readers, the Sun described Berezovsky in the following fashion in its front-page splash:
"Mr Berezovsky, 61, an Arsenal fan and ex-pal of Chelsea owner Roman Abramovitch".

I wonder whether Sun readers came away with the impression that Berezovsky might have been targeted as part of a particular vicious dispute between supporters of rival football teams?

Yesterday evening was an interesting exercise in "compare and contrast". It started with drinks with Nancy Pelosi, the speaker of the House of Representatives, at the American ambassador’s residence in London. And then it was onto a dinner with Boris Berezovsky, former oligarch and arch enemy of Vladimir Putin.

It is striking how national loyalties kick in and override partisan disputes, once senior Americans are overseas. Mrs P is over in Europe primarily to discuss climate change. But when I suggested to her that a Democratic Party president might be a little more willing to reach an international agreement than the present incumbent of the White House, she was clearly reluctant to put the boot into George W. Bush. Yes, she agreed the Democrats are in general a bit more fired up about climate change than the Republicans. But the important thing is to identify "things we can all agree on" - Democrats and Republicans, Europeans and Americans. Unfortunately, the area of agreement she identified didn’t seem to go much beyond - "climate change is happening, it’s a big problem and something needs to be done about it."

I asked her if it was a problem that the Europeans still seem wedded to the Kyoto approach, since Kyoto is such a dirty word in Congress. She took a pragmatic approach. If you want to bring something like Kyoto back, "you would have to call it something else."

After a while the ambassador arrived to usher the speaker away for photos. We shook hands. Or rather, we didn’t.

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Yesterday I had lunch with Mikheil Saakashvili, the president of Georgia. Saakashvili is one of the most media-friendly heads-of-state I have ever come across. He is fluent in millions of languages and seems to enjoy the company of journalists - there were three FT people there yesterday, as well as a smattering of presidential aides.

"Misha" was on jovial form. (The dining room of the Ritz is a convivial spot) But there is no disguising the pressure that he and Georgia are under. Having an angry and paranoid Russia as your neighbour does not make for a relaxing life. Back in March, there was a helicopter attack on government buildings in Georgia’s Kodori gorge - which the Georgians assume was the work of the Russians. The Russians claim the Georgians attacked their own buildings to make Russia look bad.

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Some events make a big splash the next day - and quickly disappear from the news. And then there are others that take a while to sink in - but which grow in significance, the more people have a chance to think about them. Vladimir Putin’s speech to the Munich security conference on February 10th falls into the latter category.

Putin’s speech was startlingly blunt. He told his audience that he was going to "avoid excessive politeness" and he was as good as his word. The most striking passages were his attacks on American foreign policy. How’s this for example - "Today we are witnessing an almost uncontained hyper use of force - military force - in relations, force that is plunging the world into an abyss of conflicts." As well as laying into American unipolarity which "can be no moral foundation for modern civilisation", Putin attacked specific western policies on issues like Nato expansion, arms control and missile defence.

The vehemence of his attack took many in his audience aback, even at the time. But senior British, German and American officials seem, if anything, more shaken after having had some time to reflect on Putin’s words. Senator John McCain was in the audience and gave a fairly robust response to the Russian president. But McCain’s people say that some of their Russian contacts have since told them that they should regard Putin’s speech as the equivalent of Churchill’s "iron curtain" speech in Fulton, Missouri. A senior European diplomat says that Chancellor Merkel’s advisors in Berlin were "still reeling" from Putin’s broadside, days later.   

A senior British minister says that Putin’s speech fits into a trend of increasing Russian nationalism that has been evident for some time. He says that the British have tried to explain that they support the spread of freedom and democracy to places like Ukraine because they are in favour of freedom and democracy - not because of any desire to encircle Russia.

But Putin does not believe this for a moment.

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In the US, outstanding investigative journalists win Pulitzer prizes. In Russia, they get shot. Browsing through the shelves of recent books on modern Russia it is chilling to realise that the authors of two of the most interesting volumes – Anna Politkovskaya and Paul Klebnikov – were subsequently murdered.

It is another killing – the poisoning in London of Alexander Litvinenko, a former Russian agent – which is today’s cause célèbre. Yegor Gaidar, a former prime minister, is also in hospital – perhaps another victim of a poisoning.

British policemen are heading to Moscow to try to get to the bottom of the Litvinenko case. But one cannot be entirely optimistic about their chances. The unsolved poisoning is an old Russian tradition. Historians are still arguing about the role of poison in the death of Ivan the Terrible in 1584 – as well as in those of Rasputin in 1916 and Maxim Gorky in 1936.

This is an extract from Gideon Rachman’s regular Tuesday column in the FT - the remainder is available for FT.com subscribers here

It is unfortunate that the murder of Alexander Litvinenko has coincided with the release of a new Bond film in Britain. The result has been that the British media has been tempted to treat the assassination of a British citizen as just an extension of the Bond series – witness the headline in the Sun newspaper, "From Russia with Lunch".

But I must say that the papers probably accurate reflect the public mood. The Litvinenko killing has become one of those “water cooler” stories, which are the subject of fascinated conversation by lots of ordinary people. And to judge from the conversations I’ve overheard in London, the tone is pretty much one of hilarity. At a breakfast with a bunch of corporate types last Monday, somebody made a reference to "Russian sushi" to guffaws all round. Then on Saturday I was at a lunch at the Carlton Club, the home of Tory London (not my usual hang-out, I assure you) and the old gentlemen could scarcely contain their mirth as they discussed the poisoning. But while Vladimir Putin may be regarded in much of Britain as simply the latest in a long line of amusing Bond villains, that is a signal that the Russians seem to have lost the public-relations battle about responsibility for the killing. Whatever the real truth, in all the casual conversations I’ve overheard, everybody seems to assume that the order to kill Litvinenko came from the Kremlin.

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