Orders To Kill: The Putin Regime And Political Murder

Orders to Kill is a powerful but chilling book. In describing today’s Russian politics, Dr. Amy Knight explains the organizations, elements, methods, and personalities that control a criminal state through intimidation and murder. She details the intricate relationships, often based on corruption, other criminal activity, and kompromat (compromising information of each others’ crimes) that binds together the surviving oligarchs and siloviki (those that emerged as national leaders from the security services after Vladimir Putin came to power). She explains the long history of assassinations in Russia and the St. Petersburg connections of those cronies close to Vladimir Putin, many drawn from his days in the KGB (Committee for State Security).
The list of domestic and extraterritorial killings has grown significantly under Putin, especially after the Russian Duma passed a law in 2006 legalizing (at least in Russia) such killings of “terrorists.” “’Terrorism’ would become the Kremlin’s label for many forms of political opposition,” Knight points out.
She explores the evidence that Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the older of the April 2013 Boston Marathon bombing brothers, may have been a Russian agent, recruited by the FSB.