This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2006, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.

The evil Russians are back.

They had gone away for awhile, replaced by good-guy Russians like Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin (that lovable, drunken buffoon of a democrat who stood on a tank and declared the Soviet Union dead). After four decades of nightmares about the Evil Empire, Americans in 1990 awoke to the happy realization that they had won the Cold War and that their old enemy was now trying to remake itself as a democratic ally.

But in typical American fashion, we quickly lost interest in Russia, and 9/11 refocused U.S. attention on an entirely new nemesis from an alien culture in a different part of the world. Americans had to cram on Islam and Islamists (what's a Salafist?), on Sunnis and Shiites. The Russians receded even further into the background.

But the bizarre poisoning death of former KGB agent Alexander V. Litvinenko using an exotic nuclear isotope most Americans had never heard of has tended to refocus the short U.S. attention span on dark doings in Mother Russia, if only briefly. Suddenly we are back in the Kremlin world of John le Carre novels and spy vs. spy, of puzzles wrapped in enigmas. If there can be a bright side to an excruciating death, it might be that Americans will begin to pay some attention again to the Russian slide from democracy back toward authoritarian government. If Vladimir Putin's security service really did have a hand in Litvinenko's death, what does that mean?

And if Litvinenko was killed by someone else, who may be trying to discredit the Russian president, what does that mean for Russia and its future as a democratic state?

So far, there aren't answers to these questions. There are competing conspiracy theories.

But Americans probably are dimly recalling that people who study Russia have been concerned for some time about the direction this huge and vastly rich nation - in terms of natural and human resources - may be taking. The main issue is whether Russia is run by its government or by organized crime, and what the relationship is between the two.

Americans should stay tuned. Because there's more to Russia than Boris and Natasha, expatriate NBA basketball players, tennis stars and supermodels. And there's much more at stake.