38 The New York Review
A History of Assassinations
Christian Caryl
The Compatriots:
The Brutal and Chaotic History
of Russia’s Exiles, Émigrés,
and Agents Abroad
by Andrei Soldatov and
Irina Borogan.
PublicAffairs, 361 pp., $30.00
From Russia with Blood:
The Kremlin’s Ruthless
Assassination Program and
Vladimir Putin’s Secret War
on the West
by Heidi Blake.
Mulholland, 323 pp., $30.00
On a balmy day in late August 2019 in
the center of Berlin, a man on a bicycle
rode up to forty-year-old Zelimkhan
Khangoshvili and fired three bullets
at close range, killing him instantly.
He then botched his getaway. Wit-
nesses saw him throw his pistol into a
nearby canal; police caught him hiding
in bushes not far from the scene. The
alleged assassin, who has been named
as Vadim Sokolov, was discovered to be
holding a Russian passport. Khangosh-
vili was an ethnic Chechen from Geor-
gia who had served as the commander
of a rebel unit during the anti-Moscow
insurgency in Chechnya at the turn of
the century.
In December the German authori-
ties announced that they suspected
Moscow of orchestrating the killing
and expelled two Russian diplomats in
retaliation. (The Russians responded
in kind a few days later.) I would be
surprised if the legal proceedings do
not end up generating negative public-
ity for the Kremlin, as did the attempt
in Salisbury to kill the defector and for-
mer spy Sergei Skripal and his daugh-
ter with a nerve agent in 2018, and the
murder in London of another ex-spy,
Alexander Litvinenko, using a radio-
active poison in 2006.
Both of those incidents took place in
the UK, a favored destination for polit-
ical exiles from Vladimir Putin’s Rus-
sia. That the attackers in those cases
used weapons obtainable only from a
government suggested that Moscow
was sending a message to Russians in
general and regime opponents in par-
ticular: Yes, it was us—and we haven’t
forgotten you.
Putin’s brazen revival of the Soviet
practice of killing political opponents
outside Russia has shocked many in the
West—though one could argue that he
has merely updated a long-standing po-
litical tradition. For hundreds of years,
Russian leaders have sought to assert
control over those who have sought
new lives abroad. Ivan the Terrible was
driven to distraction by Prince An-
drei Kurbsky, a nobleman who went
over to Muscovy’s Polish-Lithuanian
arch enemies and used his safe haven
to bombard his former sovereign with
scathing critiques. Peter the Great’s
wayward son Aleksei wandered Eu-
rope, seeking political support from
governments hostile to his father, until
he was finally lured home to a fate of
torture and death. In the nineteenth
century Alexander Herzen railedagainst tsarist tyranny from his com-
fortable London exile.Herzen managed to get away with
it. For all their brutality at home, the
tsars did not make a habit of killing
their critics abroad, apparently fearing
the likely effects on their international
reputation and diplomatic prestige.
The Bolsheviks had few such compunc-
tions. From the very beginning of their
rule they unleashed a campaign of ter-
ror against real and imagined class ene-
mies, and they soon demonstrated that
they were willing to extend it to politi-
cal opponents who had left the country.
As Andrei Soldatov and Irina Boro-
gan show in The Compatriots: The
Brutal and Chaotic History of Russia’s
Exiles, Émigrés, and Agents Abroad,
many Bolshevik leaders had spent long
periods in foreign exile themselves,
so they were all too aware of the pos-
sibility that a marginalized political
movement could return from abroad
to seize power. Soldatov and Borogan,
Russian journalists who have special-
ized in reporting on the Russian se-curity services, recount the obsessive
efforts of Soviet intelligence to monitor
the movements of Russians in exile. In
1930, the Kremlin’s agents zeroed in on
Alexander Kutepov, a veteran of the
civil war who had become the leader of
the military wing of the exiled White
Guard. A group of men in two cars
grabbed him off the street in Paris; he
was never seen again.
Yet Stalin’s biggest enemy abroad
wasn’t the Whites but one of his former
comrades-in-arms: the former Bolshe-
vik leader Leon Trotsky. In 1940, after
the spectacular failure of an earlier at-
tempt by Soviet agents, a Spanish civil
war veteran and Comintern operative
named Ramón Mercader finally suc-
ceeded in hacking Trotsky to death with
an ice ax at his home in Mexico City.
The KGB continued the practice
throughout the cold war. (Its agents
referred to assassinations as mokrye
dela, “wet work.”) Soviet intelligence
created laboratories for the develop-
ment of poisons and easily concealable
weapons. (Soldatov and Borogan note
that a Soviet mole infiltrated the US
military in the 1940s in order to track
down similar laboratories run by the
Department of War. There apparently
were none.)
The ex-KGB man Putin also proved
himself willing to resort to any means
to achieve his goals. He first showed his
determination to pursue his foes across
international borders in early 2004,
when a car bomb killed another former
Chechen rebel leader, Zelimkhan Yan-
darbiyev, in Qatar’s capital city, Doha.
The bomb was quickly traced to two
Russian citizens, apparently officers of
the GRU (military intelligence), who
were captured shortly after the killing,
tried, and sentenced to life in prison.
(The Qataris released them to Moscow
after a bit of time served.)
The killing of Litvinenko two years
later dramatically raised the stakes,
because of both its location (in the
heart of a major Western capital) and
its means (polonium-210, a highly
toxic radioactive substance whose trailintrinsic to life in its everyday realities.
Death not only terminates life, it ages
life out of existence and ruins all that
comes into being, from individuals to
civilizations to planetary bodies. Blan-
chot understood life in its essence as
a silent, ongoing, unending disaster. If
death’s “impossibility” did not turn us
i n side out, i f it d id not sepa rate me f rom
myself as well as others, we could not
form friendships. In the final chapter of
Friendship, Blanchot writes about the
death of his friend Bataille:
There was already, from the time
in which we were in the presence
of one another, this imminent
presence, though tacit, of the final
discretion, and it is on the basis of
this discretion that the precaution
of friendly words calmly affirmed
itself. Words from one shore to
the other shore, speech respond-
ing to someone who speaks fromthe other shore and where, even
in our life, the measurelessness of
the movement of dying would like
to complete itself.... With death
all that separates, disappears....
This is thought’s profound grief.
It must accompany friendship into
oblivion.In the end Blanchot believed that
only by acknowledging the disaster
that always already lurks in everyday
human existence—disaster understood
as the “necessary death” that precedes
and awaits us in life, or as the endless
movement of time that dissolves iden-
tity into difference—will we be able to
found what he called an “unavowable
community” whose members would
relate to one another not as empow-
ered citizens or egoic subjects but as
fellow witnesses of a human condition
predicated on disaster and impossibil-
ity. To bring some clarity to Blanchoton this crucial matter—I appreciate his
reasons for wanting to resist such elu-
cidations—I would say that only if and
when human beings “reappropriate”
their own mortality will they resolutely
refuse to walk over the bodies of others
to reach their own graves.
In The Writing of the Disaster, Blan-
chot declared, “The holocaust: the abso-
lute event of history.” The “unavowable
community” of the future would come
into being only through an absolute
break with—and refusal of—the politi-
cal history of the past. Blanchot adopted
as his categorical imperative: “Think
and act in such a way that Auschwitz
may never be repeated.” Perhaps the
most important word in that formula-
tion is “think.” It is primarily in thought
that we acknowledge the disaster inher-
ent in our common, shared mortality.
If Freudian terms are applicable here,
the disasters of history “play out” rather
than “work through” the death andloss of what we hold most dear, above
all our friends. Murder plays out our
inner mortality, while the unavowable
community works through it.
When Saint Benedict allegorized Ja-
cob’s Ladder (Genesis 28:10–19) as a
set of rules for how to approach God,
he identified two rungs with serious-
ness and the “mortification of laugh-
ter.” Blanchot was no Benedictine
monk, yet he could easily climb those
first steps. There is a serious intent in
every word he wrote, and without the
slightest trace of laughter. This distin-
guishes him from the likes of Beckett,
who had a genius for injecting humor
into tragedy. Blanchot had little to say
about the natural world, so I’m not sure
how much his philosophy of refusal can
help guide us today, when history is on
a collision course with nature, yet he
bore witness to the disasters of his own
era with a seriousness few of his con-
temporaries have matched. QVladimir Putin with Patriarch Kirill, the head of the Russian Orthodox Church,
Moscow, November 2019Shamil^Zhumatov/GettyImages