Russia, Politics and Death: A Tightknit Trio

PUTIN'S LABYRINTH

Spies, Murder, and the Dark Heart of the New Russia

By Steve LeVine

Random House. 194 pp. $26

Ever since Russian tanks rolled into South Ossetia on Aug. 8, I find myself wondering several times a day: What would Anna say? By Anna, I mean Anna Politkovskaya, the Russian war correspondent who unflinchingly reported the Russian authorities' abuses in Chechnya and was shot to death on Oct. 7, 2006, in the hallway of her apartment building in Moscow. She would have turned 50 last week. Undoubtedly, were she alive, she would have spent her birthday reporting from South Ossetia.

Politkovskaya's murder is one of several killings that Steve LeVine, who spent more than a decade covering the former Soviet Union for the Wall Street Journal and other publications, presents as examples of nasty, brutish and artificially shortened life in Vladimir Putin's Russia. Readers inclined to view Russia in those Hobbesian terms will find "Putin's Labyrinth" persuasive. Those who are sympathetic toward Putin may consider this book Exhibit A of Western media bias. To my surprise, given that my own research often has focused on human rights abuses in Russia, I found myself reeling back and forth between these polarized positions as I read LeVine's case studies of killing, from the attempted poisoning of a KGB defector with radioactive thallium in 1957 to the mass gassing of Chechen terrorists and their hostages in a Moscow theater in 2002.

I was a passing acquaintance of two victims in the book. I had met Politkovskaya in Washington six years ago. Paul Klebnikov, an American of Russian dissent, was the editor of the Russian edition of Forbes. We took classes together in the mid-1980s in London and then in New York. Nearly 20 years later, he was gunned down on a Moscow street and bled to death. As LeVine notes, an ambulance was delayed in reaching him, the gates of the hospital were locked when the ambulance finally arrived, and the elevator carrying him to the operating room failed. Were these more than coincidences? Had Klebnikov angered Russian mobsters, their political protectors or both? As in Politkovskaya's slaying, official investigations have led to charges against the alleged triggermen, but we still don't know who ordered the murder or why.

Alexander Litvinenko, the former KGB officer who came under the wing of exiled oligarch Boris Berezovsky, is the victim in "Putin's Labyrinth" who captured the most international attention, not because of his work but because of his gruesome demise: He was poisoned by ingesting polonium-210 in a posh London hotel. Scotland Yard claims the rare isotope came from a Russian who now sits in the State Duma, the lower house of Russia's parliament, as a member of the Kremlin's party.

"Putin's Labyrinth" is not the first book on the centrality of death in Russia's political culture. Catherine Merridale's "Night of Stone: Death and Memory in Twentieth-Century Russia," published in 2000, is a more cerebral, nuanced study of the impact of a century of staggering losses from war, revolution, famine and the gulag. LeVine covers some of the same ground, briefly recounting Russia's history with particular attention to repression and cruelty, such as Ivan the Terrible's penchant for poisoning suspected rivals, Peter the Great's execution of his own son and Stalin's dispatching of an assassin to kill Leon Trotsky in Mexico.

The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, he writes, should have been an opportunity for the nation to break the cycle and "demonstrate that murder and mayhem were not embedded in the Russian DNA." But with chapter headings like "Once Again, Mother Russia Fails Her People," he suggests that just the opposite has happened: "There does seem to be a straight line to the present from Ivan the Terrible and the Russian tradition of fear-based rule."

Do unsolved killings tell us an important story about Russia today? Yes and no. Journalists, human rights activists and scholars struggle every day with how to present injustices, crimes and human rights abuses in ways that are compelling but accurate. When events are framed in purely emotional terms -- "Ossetia genocide!" screamed Russian television; "Ethnic cleansing!" countered the Georgian president -- the competing claims may cancel each other out and be dismissed by faraway observers. But if the same events are presented in an overly dry and empirical manner, all sense of moral outrage may be lost. Using murder as a lens on Russia is both revealing and distorting, much as it would be if a Russian author used Hurricane Katrina as the sole window on the United States.

Though some of the stories in "Putin's Labyrinth" are riveting, the book is marred by derogatory, meaningless and self-contradictory generalizations about obedience ("that quality so rare in Russia"), passivity ("Russians had reverted to what they had always been, which was generally passive") and backwardness ("Russians in a sense have chosen to live in the tradition of their medieval ancestors.") LeVine succeeds in demonstrating that mob hits and political assassinations take place at a troubling rate in Russia today, but he fails to make a compelling case that this reflects Russia's national character. I can only imagine some Russian nationalist claiming that "there does seem to be a straight line" between the U.S. invasion of Iraq and how the first settlers treated the native population after they landed at Jamestown.