COLD WAR TACTICS STILL SPY'S TOOLS.

Byline: BRIDGET JOHNSON

AS the new James Bond debuted in ``Casino Royale,'' a new espionage thriller was unfolding that gave serious pause to Russia's progression in emerging from its Cold War past.

The plot begins not with a shaken martini, but with a journalist murdered in cold blood. The plot thickens not with bedroom dalliances, but with a former spy perishing in a London hospital bed. And the villain? Fingers point toward the former Soviet Union -- no stranger to the role.

Anna Politkovskaya was a reporter for the independent weekly Novaya Gazeta and an opponent of Vladimir Putin's administration, covering the Chechnya region, where few other Russian journalists dared to go. Two days before her expose on torture in the region was set to be published, Politkovskaya was found shot dead in the elevator of her Moscow apartment building. Evidence pointed to a contract killing. Police seized her computer's hard drive and other investigative materials she'd compiled from often furtive meetings with sources; photos of the suspected torturers also reportedly disappeared.

``As long as he's in power, Russia won't be a democratic country,'' Politkovskaya once said of Putin.

Enter the spy, Alexander Litvinenko, a former lieutenant colonel in the Federal Security Bureau (the KGB's offspring) who defected to Britain in 2000 and has also been an outspoken critic of Putin. While at the FSB -- helmed at the time by Putin -- Litvinenko claimed there was an attempt afoot to assassinate Russian billionaire Boris Berezovsky. Blowing the lid off the security service's activities made him a thorn in the side of the Kremlin and a marked man. Two years ago, Litvinenko survived a Molotov-cocktail attack on his London residence.

Three weeks ago, Litvinenko had a meeting at a restaurant with a source who claimed to have information on -- you guessed it -- the murder of Anna Politkovskaya.

A couple of hours after the Nov. 1 meeting, the dissident fell gravely ill. Earlier in the day, he had reportedly met two Russian men -- one former KGB -- at a London hotel for tea. The head of Scotland Yard's anti-terrorism branch began investigating as the original suspected poison -- thallium -- was slowly ruled out.

``Somebody has asked me directly, who is guilty of Anna's death? And I can directly answer you: It is Mr. Putin, president of the Russian Federation,'' Litvinenko said in October.

Then he would have the fateful meeting in the sushi bar, where, Litvinenko told Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty after falling ill, the papers he received from his contact pointed to the responsibility of an officer in the Russian special services in Politkovskaya's murder. Litvinenko himself died Thursday.

Russia, of course, denies any involvement in either of the deaths. ``Since 1959, when Ukrainian nationalist Bandera was destroyed, Soviet intelligence and the successor to the first main directorate of the Soviet KGB -- the Foreign Intelligence Service -- have not been engaged in physical liquidation of people unwanted in Russia,'' Foreign Intelligence Service spokesman Sergei Ivanov said Monday. ``Therefore all accusations against the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service look unconvincing, to say the least.''

Dissidents disagree. Russia has muddled from shoe-banging grumps like Nikita Khrushchev in the time of the Soviet Union to perestroika and the oft-imbibing Boris Yeltsin. With Putin at the helm, Russia looked for a time as if it was moving toward respectful entrance into the world community. The United States and Russia signed a trade pact over the weekend that catapults the former communist country toward its goal of entry into the World Trade Organization.

But the communist past is nipping harder at the heels of Russians. Just last month, a Web site editor was fined 20,000 rubles for insulting Putin. Over the past few years, journalists have been killed in still-unsolved cases; others have been sentenced to forced labor.

And two more mysterious deaths that reek of Cold War hits now come into play. What does it take to rebuild an Iron Curtain? The Kremlin seems to have figured it out.