Litvinenko's account of the madness prevailing in the high spheres of Russian power. Vladimir Putin and his croonies are using the population of Russia and which ever unhappy former Soviet Republic provokes their wrath as tools to further sordid criminal goals. These people are the lowest of the low, giving free reign to their insanity in the golden rooms of the Kremlin fortress.Since this is written in the insufferable and very masculine style typical of conspiracy theories, I suggest conterbalancing with Anna Politkovskaya's reporting as her work both confirmss what is suggested here and possesses more human depth and literary qualities."One gets the impression that both the present party of power and the so-called opposition believe that Russia's democratic project is dead and buried. The authorities are not capable of imposing order founded in the law, it is beyond their ability to build a society governed by law. The alternative to a society governed by law is a bandit-and-police state, a situation in which the actions of terrorists and bandits on the one hand and the agencies of law enforcement on their objectives or the methods they employ. Among the public the mass conviction is gaining ground that democracy has failed to deliver as a form of government."
I have to agree with Matteo's review. The book exhaustively sets out evidence to prove that the Russian secret services deliberately killed their own compatriots in "Chechen" terrorist outrages in order to push Russia into the Second Checene War and get one of their own - Vladimir Putin - elected to the apogee of power. However, the book suffers from being a bit all over the place; and, although there was a Who's Who and a Glossary, there were so many characters (mainly Baddies and Even-More-Baddies) that it was difficult to keep a tab on them all.Still, an important and chilling work, which probably cost Litvinenko his life.
The authors seem to have done a lot of research for the book. There is a lot of information in the book that I did not previously know about. I am now sure the Russian secret services are behind some of the terrorist attacks in Russia. I find it difficult to believe that Chechen terrorists have had nothing to do with terrorism in Russia.In the USA we have been the victims of many terrorist attacks by Islamic crazies, including some from Chechnya. I suspect nearly every other country in the world has suffered the same fate.
—Seth
Makes plausible but chilling reading. Difficult to say just how truthful is this account, but it certainly accords with the Russia portrayed in Western media and in what I take to be the contemporary Western imagination. Recent events involving Russia seem to bear out the ruthlessness of modern Russian hegemony, and having listened, for instance, to Putin's accounts of those events and his 'whitewashing' of them from the Russian point of view, one might be forgiven for thinking that the so-called political system in Russia is effectively a dictatorship. Such a dictatorship exists because the KGB, one gathers, is a completely independent entity not answerable ultimately even to Putin himself.
—Ashvajit
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—Bettie☯
