Orders to Kill

August 7, 2017
Knight (How the Cold War Began), a veteran Russia expert and historian of its security services, provides a grim, relentless compilation of seemingly state-sponsored murders, suggesting that the abstract threat that Russia poses to the U.S. pales in comparison to the very real, often fatal threat the Russian government poses to its most vocal critics. She opens with a crisp summary of Russia’s long record of political assassinations, followed by an exploration of President Vladimir Putin’s past as a KGB officer and of the connections among Russia’s business elites, vast security apparatus, and political establishment. Then she starts her compendium of the gruesome fates of the state’s critics. Familiar and obscure names populate her roll call of the dead: journalists Paul Klebnikov and Anna Politkovskaya, opposition politicians Galina Starovoitova and Boris Nemtsov, central bank deputy director Andrei Kozlov, and former security officer Alexander Litvinenko, whose poisoning in London prompted uncomfortable levels of global scrutiny. In each case, one dissident notes, it appears a blueprint was being followed: while alleged killers were arrested, prosecutions languished, witnesses recanted, and the state showed little interest in pursuing justice. Knight observes that the West’s need to see Putin as an anti-terror ally has guaranteed a weak international response. This is a vital work for understanding modern-day Russia. Agent: Philip Turner, Philip Turner Book Productions.

A scathing indictment of Vladimir Putin's "police state" that offers compelling evidence of his absolute suppression of any opposition or exposure of the state's corruption. Knight (How the Cold War Began: The Igor Gouzenko Affair and the Hunt for Soviet Spies, 2006, etc.) builds a convincing case for high-level Russian ordering of political murders, from liberal Duma member Galina Starovoitova to outspoken journalist Anna Politkovskaya to opposition leader Boris Nemtsov--among many others. The murder of Kremlin opponents has been a robust tradition since czarist times, gaining Bolshevik impetus under Lenin's Cheka and ferocious momentum under Stalin's Great Purge and the notorious long arm of the KGB. Though Boris Yeltsin dissolved the KGB, it was reconfigured by political necessity as the FSB, with former KGB lieutenant Putin as director. Knight looks at the so-called siloviki (those running the "power ministries") as holding not only the power in the country, but the secrets about one another that maintain that power. When these secrets were revealed--e.g., by journalists or brave government officials investigating Russia's brutal crackdown in Chechnya or the 1999 "apartment bombings"--the victims were marked and murdered Mafia-style, their deaths blamed on "terrorists." The 2006 death by poison of former KSB officer-turned-whistleblower Alexander Litvinenko in London created an international scandal. However, as shockingly blatant as the death was--polonium 210 was such a rare and lethal substance that it could only have been procured by the FSB--the lack of political pressure on the Putin regime by the U.S. and elsewhere has been puzzling and outrageous. Essentially, Knight astutely asserts, Putin brazenly invites suspicions on Kremlin involvement "as a way to intimidate those who oppose him." The author also examines the story of the Tsarnaev brothers, who perpetuated the Boston Marathon bombings and had traveled in Russia, and she concludes with the rule of Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov, who, on Putin's direction, has taken the police state to Stalinist proportions. A vivid, chilling portrait of a Russia grown "scary and unpredictable."

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