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It's in the foreword to the Russian edition of Blowing Up Russia that co-author Yuri Felshtinsky drops his bombshell:
“Alexander Litvinenko and I wrote this part of the Foreword for the second edition in February of 2004. It was then slightly changed in February of 2005. Since that time, we had been looking for a publisher. We could not find one. Then came November 1, 2006, and everything changed...Litvinenko was poisoned.”
From his hospital bed in London, Litvinenko told Felshtinsky, that he was sure Russia's FSB (successor to the KGB) had attempted to assassinate him on the direct orders of Russia's president Vladimir Putin. But Litvinenko was upbeat.
“In a few days,” he said, “I will be home. We will have time to talk later.”
But Litvinenko never left the hospital. Less than three weeks later, he died from the effects of exposure to polonium-210, and his passing made headlines around the world.
Litvinenko had been a KGB and then an FSB agent and left FSB after refusing an order to murder Russian billionaire Boris Berezovsky. As Felshtinsky writes:
“Alexander made his choice. He came to Berezovsky and told him about the order. He went public with his story at a press conference, declaring that some top generals of the FSB were definitely breaking the law and giving their junior officers illegal orders.”
He writes of his late friend that the athletic Litvinenko was a rare sort of Russian in that he neither smoked nor drank, and because he was a courageous, outspoken opponent of the Putin regime. Together they began to compare notes and write the book that became Blowing Up Russia, the story of the way Putin and the FSB are brutalizing not just terrorist rebels in Chechnya but decent citizens in Russia as well.
Putin, you'll recall, was the man about whom George W. Bush said: “I looked the man in the eye. I found him to be very straightforward and trustworthy.... I was able to get a sense of his soul.”
So much for President Bush's soul sense.—Brad Miner
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