Heidi Blake

From my reading of Selwyn Raab’s magnificent biography of New York City’s Mafia families, I’ve never forgotten celebrity gangster John Gotti. Earning the nickname “The Teflon Don” for his ability to evade conviction at trial, Gotti avidly courted the media and turned himself into America’s bad boy even as he killed and extorted his way to power and wealth. If you imagine a government under the control of Teflon Don, with his talents for both murder and media manipulation, you show more have a pretty close analogue for the presidency of Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin.

Heidi Blake, writing as BuzzFeed’s head of investigative journalism in the United Kingdom, follows the trail of blood that Putin’s government killers, hired assassins, and contract mobsters left on English soil over a span of 10 years. One after another, Russian exiles and their associates dropped dead under the nose of successive British governments all too willing to grumble but fold in exchange for continued access to looted rubles and Siberian energy.

I closed Blake’s book with the uneasy feeling that I had missed everything important in the first two decades of the 21st century. I lived through the terrorist attacks of September 11th, the invasion of Afghanistan, the War on Terror, and the global recession of 2008. I was vaguely aware of Russian actions in Chechnya and Georgia, but these places held little meaning for me. The surface of things sucked up my attention, and I didn’t know that each new crisis was a fresh inflection point as British and American leaders looked steadfastly away from Russian atrocities, encouraging Putin to ever more aggressive calculations of Western weakness.

No Western leader comes out looking like anything but a useful fool, but they’re bit players in what is essentially an organized crime drama. Blake could’ve just as easily subtitled her work, “The War of the Oligarchs”; and she sets the stage with a brief history of the collapse of the Soviet Union and the ruthless pillaging of state-owned assets by the men who would become Russia’s oligarchs. The central figure in her story is multi-billionaire Boris Abramovich Berezovsky, who spends most of the book flying teenage hookers into London and lobbing grenades at the Kremlin from behind the wall of British law.

In my distaste for the oligarchs, I found Putin’s interpretation of the West more comprehensible. These men perpetrated a rape of the Motherland that left tens of millions of everyday Russians mired in poverty. When Putin began consolidating power and bringing men like Berezovsky to heel, some escaped with their fortunes to the West and did all they could, from a certain point of view, to cripple and destroy the regime that stabilized and lifted a shattered nation. With Berezovsky bankrolling Ukraine’s Orange Revolution while British judges refuse to extradite him, it’s easy to understand a Russian narrative of Western perfidy and hostility. If I were a Russian citizen, I might well believe it.

However, as Russian dissidents are fond of saying, you should never believe anything until the Kremlin denies it. The one man who comes across as admirable is Alexander Valterovich Litvinenko, the senior Federal Security Service (FSB) officer who defected to Great Britain and met his end with a fatal dose of radioactive polonium-210. It doesn’t matter whether you believe his contention that Putin staged the apartment bombings that provided a pretext for the Second Chechen War; Litvinenko believed it so intensely that he converted to Islam on his deathbed in public solidarity with the Chechen people. In a posthumous open letter to Putin, he wrote, “May God forgive you for what you have done, not only to me but to beloved Russia and its people.”

The killing of that rarest of things — an honorable man — brings focus back to the fact that Putin is not a well-intentioned savior of an embattled Russia. Litvinenko did nothing worse than accuse the president of criminal behavior, and paid with his life. The oligarchs are awful, but so is Putin and his pet oligarchs who agree to serve the Kremlin in exchange for continued access to the money pit. This is not a tale of heroes and villains, but of a gangland war to control a modern nuclear state and its many levers of extortion and corruption, all under the patriotic banner of restoring Russia’s greatness.

If Blake’s account tells us anything, it is this: you cannot compromise with a criminal autocracy. Every attempt to negotiate in good faith, every pretense that common ground exists, is one step closer to the brink. The United Kingdom wanted investments for its banks, and the United States wanted bases for its War on Terror. What they got was corpses, active measures in their own backyards, and a string of wars capped off by the assault on Ukraine in 2022. You cannot stop an authoritarian by meeting him halfway, because men who consider themselves bound by neither laws nor norms will never stop coming: first for your country, then your money, then your soul, then your life. show less

Heidi Blake is a global investigator from BuzzFeed, not someone I trust with heavy news reporting. I just want to be clear: there are no (or very few that mean much) notations/footnotes of sources, the bibliography is only 1/2 page long. So, can I say with all honesty that I believe every bit of this story? Nope. But was it an interesting read? You betcha!

We Americans have sorta figured out that Vladimir Putin is not such a nice guy. This is the story of the double digit "alleged" show more assassinations of the, also not so nice robber-barons (oh, I mean oligarchs), who escaped to the United Kingdom when Putin tried to put their riches in his own pockets. The allegations are, that the FSB (which of course really means Putin) was behind all of these deaths. Can I believe that? Yep. Did Great Britain really try to cover them up, to some extent? I don't know that for sure. It seems possible. Politics is dirty business, we all learned that the last 4 years.

The book kept me captive-if you love espionage and spy craft and dirty little secrets, go for it. show less

Really? Putin a murderer? I don’t believe it.
Sure he is a KGB man from the beginning.
Believes anything is ok if it benefits mother Russia
Had major ties to Russian mafia while serving the mayor in St Petersburg.
But sanction the murder of his enemies in Europe, America or constantly in Britain? Yes you bet your ass he would!
And these governments allowed it to happen.
Putin laughed and continues to laugh at the west and their ignorance and naïveté!
Set over the media, and Putin dictates what show more Russians are told worldwide.
This is why China and Russia see eye to eye on some things because neither country has any problems with mass killing their own citizens. Of course since they are both psychotic murdering leaders, they also know that ultimately neither one can trust the other.
Excellent book. show less

Well written and very unnerving. Fightening how easy it was to have so many people eliminated. It was an interesting read but one I could only read in short bursts as I had some very bad dreams! I saw the author interviewed on Amanpour and was intrigued.