Blowing up Russia: The Book that Got Litvinenko Murdered

Product Information

Because forensic examinations later determined that Alexander Litvinenko was almost certainly poisoned some time on 1 November 2006, the movements and actions of several people on that day became of considerable interest to the British police investigating his death. He was a former officer of the Russian secret police, and he had been poisoned with a radioactive substance. They had known one another since childhood days; they had grown up in the same neighbourhood, in the same apartment block, and trained together at the elite Soviet Military Command Academy in Moscow in the mid-1980s.

With the same muscular build and close-cropped grey hair as Kovtun, Lugovoy wore a look of professional wariness, his eyes sharp and mistrustful, darting constantly to and fro.Claiming Alexander Litvinenko was a former KGB spy, news reports said he blamed Vladimir Putin for poisoning him with polonium. For clues as to who wanted Alexander Litvinenko dead, you need look no farther than his book Blowing Up Russia".

It unveils the first-ever fake news campaign that the FSB created to have former FSB head Vladimir Putin elected as President of Russia. The names of Boris Berezovsky and a mysterious Italian wheeler-dealer, Mario Scaramella, will figure prominently, together with those Russians already named, and there is at times some conflict between the various versions of events. It was Sasha’s first encounter with the battle against organized crime and his record of success brought him a tangible reward: in 1988 he was invited to join the KGB’s counter-intelligence service on a permanent basis. Further atrocities, including the blowing-up of ordinary apartments, mainly in Moscow, occupied by innocent Russians served as a pretext for the Second Chechen War (1999 to 2000). Oligarchs come and go in the Putin court – the mighty can become mightier (and richer) and can fall quickly, lose everything, including their lives.

Over time, Sasha’s allegations had grown increasingly outrageous, including claims that Putin had regular sexual relations with young boys – all, in retrospect, potential motives for a murder. According to Lugovoy, shortly after breakfast at the Millennium Hotel he had a conversation on his Moscow-registered mobile phone with Litvinenko. This is a war that has blown hot and cold for over seven years; a war that has pitted some of Russia’s strongest, richest men against the most powerful president Russia has had since Josef Stalin. Now he was a martyr, condemned by foes unknown to an agonizing death in a hospital bed many miles from home; now he would lie in foreign soil, in an airtight casket to preserve his body for a thousand years.