License to Kill

De: Edward Lucas

Narrado por: Kevin Stillwell

The Kremlin has never been afraid to assassinate its political opponents. In 1940, a Soviet agent murdered Leon Trotsky with an ice pick in Mexico City. In the 1950s, KGB agents poisoned the Ukrainian nationalist leaders Stepan Bandera and Lev Rebet in Munich. In 1978, Georgi Markov, a Bulgarian émigré broadcaster, was killed, supposedly by a poisoned pellet fired from an umbrella, on Waterloo Bridge in central London. New archival research suggests that the Soviet KGB ordered his murder.

Under President Vladimir Putin, the Russian state has continued in the same vein. Putin’s time in office began with a bloodbath. In 1999, a wave of apartment-block bombings killed more than 300 people in three Russian cities. The government blamed the attacks on Chechen terrorists, providing a pretext for a war in the breakaway republic and boosting Putin’s reputation as a tough leader. But from the start, critics poked holes in the official version of events.

©2016 Foreign Affairs (P)2016 Audible, Inc.