March 12, 2020 39
British investigators were later able to
follow all the way across London). The
Russian operatives who attacked Skri-
pal and his daughter in 2018 carried
this ostentatious sloppiness to a lethal
new level. Though failing in their mur-
derous mission, they managed to kill
an innocent woman, Dawn Sturgess,
who found a bottle of nerve agent dis-
carded by the assailants and picked it
up, thinking it was perfume.
In From Russia with Blood, Heidi
Blake, an investigative journalist with
BuzzFeed News, argues that the result-
ing scandal may have been just what
Putin wanted. Russia was scheduled to
hold a presidential election two weeks
after the attack on the Skripals, and
the Kremlin was happy to twist the
story to its own ends. Though Moscow
dismissed Western accusations of its
involvement in the nerve agent attack
as slander, Putin gave an interview just
days before the election in which he
pointedly declared that Russia never
forgives “betrayal.” His spokesman at-
tributed the relatively high turnout in
the election—which, to the surprise
of no one, Putin won by his usual re-
sounding margin—to Britain’s harsh
reaction to the Skripal incident.
Blake’s book makes the sensational
claim that at least fourteen recent mys-
terious deaths in the UK (and one in
the US) should be attributed to Rus-
sian assassins. The cases in question
range from a British lawyer’s fatal heli-
copter crash to the apparent suicide of
Boris Berezovsky, the exiled oligarch
who had helped Putin rise to power at
the end of the 1990s before a falling-
out that turned the two men into bitter
enemies. British counterintelligence
has reopened investigations into some
of the deaths on Blake’s list, including
Berezovsky’s. I remain skeptical about
a number of her conclusions; to name
but one, she asserts that Russian intel-
ligence has developed a program that
uses “drugs and psychological tactics to
drive their targets into taking their own
lives.” This seems like a lot of work for
an outcome that you could achieve
just as easily with a fast-acting poison
that doesn’t leave obvious traces in
autopsies.
Blake is, however, right to urge West-
ern governments—and Britain’s in
particular—that they must show far
more resolve in confronting Moscow’s
attacks on their societies, whether
through poison, corruption, or dis-
information. Yet we cannot afford to
succumb to hysteria along the way. If
we’ve learned anything by now, it’s that
Putin is always happy to turn our weak-
nesses against us.
The policy of targeted killings is just
one of many Soviet practices that the
Russian president has revived during
his two decades in power. Yet even as
he has restricted or rolled back some
of the freedoms achieved in the 1990s,
there is one that he has conspicuously
left intact: the freedom of movement.
In this he has notably departed from
the Stalinist model.
Almost immediately after seizing
power in 1917, the Bolsheviks set to
work transforming the borders of Rus-
sia (and then the Soviet Union) into the
walls of a gigantic prison. No other re-
gime had gone to comparable lengths
to seal its citizens off from the outside
world. Stalin’s concentration camps
soon included inmates guilty solely
of trying to cross the border—an un-
forgivable offense not only because it
demonstrated a lack of loyalty, but also
because emigrants could potentially
tell the outside world what life inside
the Communist utopia was really like.
Those borders became porous under
Mikhail Gorbachev in the 1980s, and
since then millions of people have cho-
sen to leave Russia and the other coun-
tries of the former USSR. The collapse
of the Soviet Union involuntarily exiled
many more—including a large number
of ethnic Russians who suddenly found
themselves citizens of new countries
such as Kazakhstan or Ukraine. Cit-
ing statistics from the United Nations,Soldatov and Borogan estimate that
the current global Russian diaspora
numbers around eleven million people.
Putin himself cites a figure of more
than 30 million.^1
Over the decades, many of those
Russians made the decision to leave for
economic or personal reasons rather
than political ones, and often retained
a deep emotional bond to the land of
their birth. Boris Yeltsin, keen to es-
tablish policies that contrasted with
those of his Communist predecessors,
understood that many of these Rus-
sians abroad could be useful allies in
his project of democratization. Soviet
officials had habitually referred to
emigrants as “traitors.” Yeltsin and his
government consciously chose a differ-
ent term: “compatriots” (sootechestvin-
niki). Yeltsin invited the first delegation
of émigré Russians, which included
many descendants of those who left the
country following the Bolshevik take-
over, to a conference in the summer
of 1991 in Moscow, where their visit
overlapped with the unsuccessful coup
attempt against Mikhail Gorbachev
staged by Soviet hard-liners.
Putin has continued and expanded
that embrace of the exile community.In 2008 he created an entire agency,
subordinate to the Ministry of Foreign
Affairs, that was tasked with the man-
agement of Moscow’s relations to over-
seas Russians. In Russian it is known
simply as Rossotrudnichestvo (“Rus-
sian Cooperation”); in English, it gran-
diloquently refers to itself as the Federal
Agency for the Commonwealth of In-
dependent States, Compatriots Living
Abroad, and International Humanitar-
ian Cooperation. Shortly before, Putin
founded a parallel organization, called
Russian World, that aimed to promote
Russian language and culture abroad
in close conjunction with the Russian
Orthodox Church.That last element is important. One
of the most striking features of Putin’s
time in office has been his transforma-
tion of the Orthodox Church into a
pillar of the regime. To be sure, present-
day Russia is still a long way from be-
coming a theocracy; that is scarcely a
practical option for a country that re-
mains a bewildering quilt of ethnicities
and faiths, among them an indigenous
Muslim community numbering in the
many millions. Yet these days the Mos-
cow Patriarchy looks increasingly like
a state institution in all but name. “In-
sulting the feelings of believers” has
become an offense enshrined in the
criminal code, and religious officials
routinely take part in military ceremo-
nies, administering blessings to new
weaponry as well as to soldiers.
As Soldatov and Borogan show, of-
ficially sanctioned Orthodoxy—as a
marker of putative authentic Russian
identity—has become a major com-
ponent of Putin’s efforts to meld the
diverse Russian presence abroad into
an army of sympathizers capable of
mobilizing support for the Kremlin’s
agenda. To show how this translates
into practice, they visited the Russian
Orthodox Spiritual and Cultural Cen-
ter in Paris. The church at the heart of
the complex is open to the public; when
they tried to enter one of the other
buildings, “a man appeared from no-
where and gestured at us to stop and
go back.” They note that the French
authorities regard the complex as an in-
telligence outpost and have refused to
accede to Moscow’s request to give its
employees diplomatic status. Soldatov
and Borogan conclude:Orthodox believers in France,
mostly Russian emigrants and
their descendants, were invited to
come to a church that was clearly
under Moscow’s control. There,
they would be embraced by the
new Russia, one no longer di-
vided into two groups—the Rus-
sian diaspora and Russians still
living in Russia—but constitut-
ing a single Russky Mir (Russian
world), whose members were all
“ compatriots.”Soldatov and Borogan give an inter-
esting account of Putin’s campaign to
reunify Moscow’s branch of the Ortho-
dox Church with its exile counterpart,
the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad
(also known as the White Church),
which broke away from the Moscow
church in 1919 after it came under the
control of the Soviet government. The
effort to woo the émigré church offi-
cials took six years, but in the end they
succumbed to the Kremlin’s peculiarbrand of suasion. In November 2018
the authors conducted an interview in
Moscow with a man named Peter Ho-
lodny, whom they describe as a “priest
and financier” of the White Church:He brought his grown son with
him to the meeting, probably as a
witness.
“Forgive me for not being as
naive as I used to be. You have an
ambiguous reputation, and you
have powerful enemies,” he said.
He was referring to the FSB, the
Russian security service. “Now
you want to write about the re-
union. I’m telling you—there was
no money, no one bribed anyone,
there was no coercion.”
Nobody had asked him about
money or coercion.The story of the Kremlin’s use of over-
seas Russians as a medium of power
projection isn’t just about culture and
religion. Putin’s reign has coincided
with an extraordinary worldwide ex-
pansion of Russian economic and busi-
ness interests—often in ways that are
hard to distinguish from the overtly
criminal. Émigrés—and Russian ty-
coons who seem to spend as much time
in the West as they do at home—figure
prominently in the story.
Blake, Soldatov, and Borogan all
show, in impressive detail, how West-
ern institutions have proven more than
happy to corrupt themselves—from the
banks and lawyers eager to help laun-
der funds of suspicious provenance to
the universities, hospitals, and cultural
institutions keen to bestow their cachet
on deep-pocketed donors. American
journalists such as David Corn, Mi-
chael Isikoff, and Craig Unger have
amply documented Donald Trump’s
myriad relations with dubious Rus-
sian investors, showing how Soviet and
Russian émigrés flooded his real estate
business with hard-to-trace cash at a
time when most US banks had ceased
to lend to him.^2 One need only recall
the notorious tale of the FBI’s hunt for
Alimzhan Tokhtakhounov, a Russian
mobster who was running an interna-
tional gambling ring headquartered in
New York City. When agents finally
tracked him down in 2013, he turned
out to be living in a luxury apartment
in Trump Tower.
Soldatov and Borogan have little to
say about Trump, but they do offer an
intriguing biography of the American
businessman Boris Jordan, an invest-
ment banker whose grandfather fled
Russia after the revolution. Jordan was
one of the first Western investors to un-
derstand that the dawning of capitalism
in post-Soviet Russia offered unlimited
opportunities to those willing to bear
the risks; he ended up making millions.
Along the way, he became the CEO of
NTV, one of the country’s most out-
spoken private TV broadcasters, at a
moment when Putin, still a newcomer
in power, wanted to neutralize it. Jor-
dan was happy to help, willingly fir-(^1) The difference probably involves the ing critical journalists and eliminating
rather thorny issue of how one de-
fines “Russian.” Unlike, say, “Han
Chinese,” the term “Russian” is noto-
riously elastic. Some define it linguisti-
cally (“Russian-speakers”), others as
an ethnicity—the latter a highly slip-
pery approach in a country in which
diversity has been the only constant.
Soldatov and Borogan never attempt a
definition in their book.
(^2) See Michael Isikoff and David Corn,
Russian Roulette: The Inside Story of
Putin’s War on America and the Elec-
tion of Donald Trump (Twelve, 2018);
and Craig Unger, House of Trump,
House of Putin: The Untold Story of
Donald Trump and the Russian Mafia
(Dutton, 2018).
The grave of the murdered Russian ex-spy
Alexander Litvinenko, Highgate
Cemetery, London, 2016
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