“When the guns roar, the public prosecutors fall silent” Anatoly Kucheren

“As I lie hear I can distinctly hear the beating of wings of the angel of death. I may be able to give him the slip but I have to say my legs do not run as fast as I would like…”

This imaginative reduction of death to a chase is a snippet of the late Alexander Litvinenko’s deathbed statement, released on the 24^th November 2006. I find the beautiful imagery of a black-clad Death (perhaps out of a Terry Pratchett novel) tapping Litvinenko on the shoulder and holding a half-empty hourglass rather beautiful, in stark contrast to the ugly events described within Blowing Up Russia.

Alexander Litvinenko, a former FSB (Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation) agent and Yuri Felshtinsky (a historian and writer) allege that the KGB still controls Russian life due to the infiltration of former KGB officers into the FSB, which was created in 1992 under the name MB (Ministry of Security). Litvinenko dismisses the corruption of the businessmen in Russia nicknamed “oligarchs”, accusing their critics of working for the FSB, and claims that the real oligarchs are those in the FSB and various ministries who are accused in Blowing Up Russia of corruption and mass murder. A key accusation is that the FSB plotted to bring about the two wars with Chechnya to prevent Russia becoming a democracy. It is claimed that the invasion of Grozny caused Yeltsin’s political career to move towards “the edge of an abyss”.

The FSB are also accused of committing acts of domestic terrorism including the Russian “apartment block bombings” in Buynatsk and Moscow. They are also accused of having planned a bombing in Ryazan, which was foiled. The election of Vladimir Putin as President cemented the control of the security services over Russia. An alternative candidate in the 2000 elections was another former KGB agent called Primakov, who pledged to jail 90,000 businessmen. That’s more people than are currently in jail in the UK. Primakov would have to arrest sixty people per day during his four-year term to fulfil this. Makes Blunkett look like a member of the Black Bloc.

The book ends with an appendix containing a transcript of the public commission set up to investigated the bombings in Moscow and Volgodonsk, as well as the “Ryazan training exercise”, at which Felshtinsky and Litvinenko testified. Although the information contained within the book is invaluable to anyone wanting to understand modern Russia, I would criticize the way it is not clear within the book whether a paragraph is written by the authors or quoted from a newspaper article, due to the lack of speech marks. The translation of the book also prevents the style from flowing. I recommend reading up on Russia before starting the book. A general outline such as Robert Service's "Russia: from 1991 to the present". Incidentally, Blowing Up Russia is itself banned in Russia, perhaps because of it's "explosive" nature (according to the News of the World). Another book, this time more focused on Putin, that I recommend is Ana Poliykovskaya's Putin's Russia. If anyone who knows me wants to borrow my copy, I'm willing to lend it.

I’d like to close my account of the book with a link to journalists murdered in Russia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_journalists_killed_in_Russia. The page covers 2000 onwards, and lists journalists killed both in Russia and while covering the conflicts in Chechnya. Anyone interested in reversing this slaughter should join a local branch of Amnesty International or read the web site Reporters Without Borders. The English version is at http://www.rsf.org/rubrique.php3?id_rubrique=20
but the site is also in Spanish and French. While you visit, please sign this petition to create an international commision to investigate the murder of Anna Politkovskaya, who was murdered in Moscow on 7th October. The link to this petition is below.
http://www.rsf.org/article.php3?id_article=19163#sp19163