The Skripal Case Follows an Old Soviet Script

With U.K. Prime Minister Theresa May rather confidently pinning the attempted murder of former Russian intelligence officer Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia on the Russian state, the past is fully upon us -- several different pasts, in fact.

To better understand what's going on, skip the BBC TV series "McMafia" and dip into "Babylon Berlin," the recent high-budget German production set in Berlin during the Weimar Republic. Berlin's Russian community was enormous in those days, as it is again today: It was in the 1920s that Charlottenburg, the borough in which I live now, was first nicknamed Charlottengrad. In "Babylon Berlin," an emigre cell works to get a shipment of Russian gold to Trotsky and thugs sent by the KGB predecessor and working out of the Soviet embassy massacre the Trotskyites. In Volker Kutscher's novel "The Wet Fish," upon which the series is based, a Russian tells the German protagonist, "We Russians live here among ourselves, and we regulate our own affairs. We don't like it when Germans meddle in our affairs."