This book is largely the result of interviews conducted in Moscow and London during 2007, buttressed by reporting during the eleven years I was based in the former Soviet Union, from 1992 to 2003. I relied heavily on archival material—books, contemporarily written articles and films—for the historical passages and also to inform the account of present events. The deaths described in the book are among the most-chronicled events of our time, and I am grateful for the excellent work of colleagues. The sources for the quotations I have used are indicated in the notes, and work on which I relied informatively is listed below.
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Andrew, Christopher, and Oleg Gordievsky. KGB: The Inside Story. New York: HarperCollins, 1990.
Andrew, Christopher, and Vasili Mitrokhin. The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB. New York: Basic Books, 1999.
———. The Mitrokhin Archive II: The KGB and the World. London: Allen Lane, 2005.
Baker, Peter, and Susan Glasser. Kremlin Rising: Russia and the End of the Revolution. New York: Scribner, 2005.
Beazley, Raymond, Nevill Forbes, and G. A. Birkett. Russia from the Varangians to the Bolsheviks. London: Clarendon Press, 1918.
Belfield, Richard. The Assassination Business: A History of State-Sponsored Murder. New York: Carroll & Graf, 2005.
Bobrick, Benson. Fearful Majesty: The Life and Reign of Ivan the Terrible. New York: Putnam, 1987.
Bond, Edward Augustus. Russia at the Close of the Sixteenth Century. London: Hakluyt Society, 1861 repr. of 1591 manuscript.
Cherkashin, Victor, with Gregory Feifer. Spy Handler: Memoir of a KGB Officer: The True Story of the Man Who Recruited Robert Hanssen and Aldrich Ames. New York: Basic Books, 2005.
Conquest, Robert. The Great Terror: A Reassessment. London: Pimlico, 1994 repr.
Deriabin, Peter. Watchdogs of Terror: Russian Bodyguards from the Tsars to the Commissars. Frederick, Md.: Foreign Intelligence Book Series, 1984 repr.
Deriabin, Peter, and T. H. Bagley. The KGB: Masters of the Soviet Union. New York: Hippocrene, 1990.
Deriabin, Peter, and Frank Gibney. The Secret World: The Terrifying Report of a High Officer of Soviet Intelligence Whose Conscience Finally Rebelled. New York: Doubleday, 1959.
Felshtinsky, Yuri, and Alexander Litvinenko. Blowing Up Russia. London: Gibson Square, 2007.
Freeland, Chrystia. Sale of the Century. New York: Crown, 2000.
Goldfarb, Alex, and Marina Litvinenko. Death of a Dissident: The Poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko and the Return of the KGB. New York: Free Press, 2007.
Handelman, Stephen. Comrade Criminal. New Haven, Conn.: Yale, 1995.
Hochshild, Adam. The Unquiet Ghost. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1994.
Hoffman, David E. The Oligarchs: Wealth and Power in the New Russia. New York: Public Affairs, 2002.
Jack, Andrew. Inside Putin’s Russia. London: Granta Books, 2004.
Kalugin, Oleg. The First Directorate. New York: St. Martin’s, 1994.
Khokhlov, Nikolai. In the Name of Conscience: The Testament of a Soviet Secret Agent. New York: David McKay, 1959.
Klebnikov, Paul. Godfather of the Kremlin: The Decline of Russia in the Age of Gangster Capitalism. Orlando, Fla.: Harvest Books, 2000.
Knight, Amy. How the Cold War Began. New York: McClelland & Stewart, 2005.
———. Spies Without Cloaks. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1996.
Kouzminov, Alexander. Biological Espionage: Special Operations of the Soviet and Russian Foreign Intelligence Services in the West. London: Greenhill, 2005.
Krivitsky, W. G. In Stalin’s Secret Service. New York: Enigma, 2000.
Lauchlan, Iain. Russian Hide-and-Seek: The Tsarist Secret Police in St. Petersburg, 1906–1914. Helsinki: Finnish Literature Society, 2002.
Ledeneva, Alena V. How Russia Really Works: The Informal Practices That Shaped Post-Soviet Politics and Business. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell, 2006.
Lee III, Rensselaer W. Smuggling Armageddon: The Nuclear Black Market in the Former Soviet Union and Europe. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1998.
Linder, I. B., and C. A. Churkin. Istoria Spetsialnikh Sluzhb Rosii X–XX Vekov (The History of the Special Services of Russia from the Tenth Through Twentieth Centuries). Moscow, 2005.
Lloyd, John. Rebirth of a Nation: An Anatomy of Russia. London: Michael Joseph, 1998.
Lucas, Edward. The New Cold War: Putin’s Russia and the Threat to the West. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.
Massie, Robert K. Peter the Great. New York: Knopf, 1980.
Matlock Jr., Jack F. Autopsy on an Empire: The American Ambassador’s Account of the Collapse of the Soviet Union. New York: Random House, 1995.
Meier, Andrew. Black Earth. London: HarperCollins, 2004.
Montefiore, Simon Sebag. Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar. London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 2003.
Payne, Robert, and Nikita Romanoff. Ivan the Terrible. New York: Crowell, 1975.
Pipes, Richard. Russia Under the Old Regime. New York: Scribner’s, 1974.
Politkovskaya, Anna. Putin’s Russia: Life in a Failing Democracy. New York: Henry Holt, 2004.
———. A Russian Diary: A Journalist’s Final Account of Life, Corruption, and Death in Putin’s Russia. New York: Random House, 2007.
———. A Small Corner of Hell: Dispatches from Chechnya. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003.
Putin, Vladimir, Nataliya Gevorkyan, Natalya Timakova, and Andrei Kolesnikov. First Person: An Astonishingly Frank Self-Portrait by Russia’s President. New York: Public Affairs, 2000.
Ruud, Charles A., and Sergei A. Stepanov. Fontanka 16: The Tsars’ Secret Police. Montreal: McGill–Queens University Press, 1999.
Satter, David. Darkness at Dawn: The Rise of the Russian Criminal State. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2003.
Skrynnikov, Ruslan G. Ivan the Terrible. Gulf Breeze, Fla.: Academic International Press, 1981, trans. by Hugh E. Graham.
Smith, Hedrick. The New Russians. New York: Random House, 1990.
Sudoplatov, Pavel, and Anatoli Sudoplatov, with Jerrold L. and Leona P. Schecter. Special Tasks. Boston: Little, Brown, 1994.
Talbott, Strobe. The Russia Hand. New York: Random House, 2002.
Weiner, Tim. Legacy of Ashes. New York: Doubleday, 2007.
“In Memoriam Aleksander Litvinenko.” Directed by Jos de Putter. VPRO, 2007.
“The Last Days of a Secret Agent.” Dateline NBC, February 25, 2007.
“Poison Plot: The Killing of a Spy.” Anderson Cooper 360°, CNN, December 4, 2006.
“A Taste of Freedom.” Directed by Marina Goldovskaya. Turner Network Television, 1990.