Word: litvinenko
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...Apocalypse during the Cuban Missile Crisis, a couple of months before Alexander was born in a remote Russian village. After making a good impression with the intelligentsia at the Ministry of Internal Affairs, he moved up in Soviet bureaucracy. In 1988, as dissent became pronounced all throughout Eastern Europe, Litvinenko joined the infamous KGB, the counter-intelligence agency and symbol of Soviet realpolitick in the West...
Whether or not anyone in the Kremlin had targeted Litvinenko, his death, coming just weeks after the murder of investigative journalist Anna Politkovskaya in her Moscow apartment block, has sent a subzero chill over Russia's already frosty civil society. Human-rights campaigners and other Putin critics see the killing as the latest blow to democracy and free speech, part of a steady erosion of civil liberties. Russian democracy was chaotically vibrant just a decade ago, after the collapse of communism in 1991. But these days it is looking fragile. New legislation annuls independent candidates for the Duma (parliament...
...Litvinenko, for one, was unafraid to speak out. A former lieutenant colonel in the Russian federal security service (FSB), the successor agency to the KGB, Litvinenko gained notoriety in the 1990s for claiming to have refused a Kremlin order to assassinate the Russian oligarch Boris Berezovsky. He had long accused Putin of backtracking on democracy and, in a 2001 book he co-wrote, went so far as to allege that Russian security services organized apartment-block bombings in 1999 that stoked support for a resurgence of the war in Chechnya. He had most recently made public statements tying the Kremlin...
...Litvinenko case revived memories of perhaps the most notorious assassination carried out during the cold war, the 1978 murder in London of Georgi Markov, a Bulgarian dissident who was working for the BBC. He was killed with a ricin-tipped umbrella while waiting for a bus, in a case that has never been solved. Just like the Markov murder, the death of Litvinenko has already given rise to a flurry of conspiracy theories, including speculation among defenders of the government that the poisoning was arranged by Russian �migr�s or Western intelligence agencies to discredit Moscow. But for many...
DIED. Alexander Litvinenko, 43, former KGB spy and vocal critic of the Kremlin; of radiation poisoning; in London. He wrote a dramatic statement, released after his death, fingering Russian President Vladimir Putin as the engineer of his murder and describing him as "barbaric and ruthless." (See page...