«Business Week», USA
Excerpted from PUTIN'S LABYRINTH by Steve LeVine. Copyright © 2008 by Steve LeVine. Reprinted by arrangement with Random House Publishing Group.
 Meanwhile, a series of ugly events caused even greater consternation among Putin-watchers. Most prominent was the slaying of Alexander Litvinenko, a former Russian intelligence agent living in political exile in London, who in November 2006 was poisoned by persons unknown with Polonium-210, a radioactive isotope.
Putin's fingerprints were not on every untoward event. They didn't have to be. Rather, it was the complicity of his inaction. A high-profile murder can go unsolved anywhere. A hostage situation—as with the 2002 Chechen terrorist seizure of the packed Moscow theater where the musical Nord-Ost was playing—can go awry even when police are highly skilled.
But after the third, fourth, or fifth such outrage, it becomes clear that something fundamental is amiss. At the very least, in Putin's Russia the state cannot be counted on to protect the lives of its citizens. At worst, hired killers and those who employ them have reason to believe that they can carry out executions without fear of the law. I came to view Litvinenko's assassination in particular—and the spectacular use of polonium to kill him—as emblematic of the dark turn that Russia had taken under Putin's rule. I don't mean to suggest that other countries occupy a higher moral plane than Russia. The post-9/11 world has upset many people's presumptions—including my own—that the West can lay claim to generally noble status. In fact, a comparison of contemporary events in Russia, the West, and elsewhere in the world suggests that distinctions between countries and cultures have become barely discernible. Except that they haven't. Notwithstanding America's image problems abroad during the George W. Bush years, the U.S., Europe, and large swaths of Asia are not places where journalists such as the crusading Russian writer Anna Politkovskaya are freely assassinated, defecting spies poisoned, or theatergoers gassed to death by their own police, as was the audience of Nord-Ost. If you are a citizen of Russia, you are more likely than a person in any other G-8 nation to die a premature death, and to do so in a bizarre or cruel way. When I say premature death, I'm not thinking disease, infant mortality, or an automobile accident—though Russians die at a far higher rate in all these categories than citizens of the other seven countries. I mean the kind of death experienced by Litvinenko, Politkovskaya, and the 129 victims of Nord-Ost—all deaths that were countenanced or at least tolerated by the Russian state.
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