An interesting evening at the annual party thrown by Ekho Moskvy, Russia's last remaining outspoken political radio station. (I say outspoken, rather than independent, because it's actually owned by the state-owned Gazprom Media.) The venue: the Praga restaurant, once a top Soviet nightspot, now a monument to mid-1990s kitsch, complete with fake malachite pillars and gold lame curtains. The star guest, among many minor Duma members, retired Kremlin apparachiks and assorted diplomats: Andrei Lugovoi, alleged poisoner of former KGB officer Alexander Litvinenko, wanted for murder by the British Crown Prosecution Service. Lugovoi looked, as usual, cheerful and well, sporting a bright orange tie in an apparent ironic reference to the liberal sympathies of most of those present (supporters of Ukraine's pro-Western, anti Moscow 'Orange' revolution). Despite the best efforts of Ekho's editor in chief Alexei Venediktov to introduce Lugovoi to the British Ambassador, Sir Tony Brenton, the latter managed to avoid an undiplomatic encounter with the UK's Most Wanted over a table groaning with stuffed pheasants, vodka and Chablis.

Your correspondent managed a few minutes with the alleged murderer, but the conversation was too banal to repeat here. To the direct - and not perhaps very tactful - question, "Did you kill Litvineko?" Lugovoi has developed a standard, deliberately flippant, answer: "Its not clear who was out to kill whom!" Mark Franchetti, Moscow correspondent of the Sunday Times, who is currently producing a BBC documentary on Lugovoi, says that ordinary Russians come up to Lugovoi in the street, pat him on the back and congratulate him with a nod and a wink. Indeed at the Ekho party Lugovoi's brief appearance was the source of an excited buzz, and lots of corny jokes along the lines of "Lugovoi's pouring the wine, be careful!"

One loves Moscow, of course, for its endless parade of phantasmagoria, its Gothic juxtapositions of wealth and poverty, its excess and its cynicism. But to see a substantial chunk of the country's political elite hob-nobbing on the best of terms with a man accused of such a notorious act of international nuclear terrorism was a new high - or maybe low - for me. Something like Leonard Bernstein entertaining the Black Panthers in his Manhattan penthouse, perhaps, but without the self-delusion or the idealism.

As I sit writing this I cannot get a quote out of my head - I believe its either Malcolm X or Louis Farrakan, but can't find it on the 'Net. It was said of America in the 60s, but applies very much to Russia today. "We lost our religion, our culture, our God - and some of us, by the way we act, we even lost our minds." Morally, this country is utterly adrift. That can be exhilarating. But mostly, its terrifying.