Putin's Labyrinth

necessarily dictate the present. But it was hard to understand why in this instance they didn’t see what seemed obvious: that Russians in a sense have chosen to live in the tradition of their medieval ancestors.

It isn’t that Russians favor dictatorship. But they have gone along with autocratic rule even when offered an alternative, as in the parliamentary and presidential elections over eight years that cemented Putin’s grip on power. And there does seem to be a straight line to the present from Ivan the Terrible and the Russian tradition of fear-based rule.

Russia’s first crowned czar and grandson of the creator of the Russian state, Ivan, who took power in 1547, had thinning hair, deep wrinkles on his forehead, and was physically impressive, with a rippling beard and a barrel chest. His more sympathetic biographers thought that he was initially a conscientious and even empathetic leader. Emulating Spain, England, and Portugal in the pursuit of empire, he captured parts of Siberia, fought against Poland for control of the Baltic Sea, and against the Tatars in the east. Ivan opened Russia to the West, welcoming trade with Europe and forming a particularly warm relationship with Elizabeth of England; Elizabeth had a soft spot for Ivan and on at least two occasions offered him asylum should he require it.

Yet, though Westerners were accustomed to savagery against one’s own kind, they were startled at what they witnessed in Ivan’s Russia. An English merchant named Jerome Horsey wrote of a prince named Boris Telupa who, accused of treason, had a stake “thrust into his fundament through his body, which came out at his neck, upon which he languished in horrible pain for fifteen hours.” Telupa’s mother was gang-raped, Horsey wrote, and Ivan “commanded his huntsmen to bring their hungry hounds to eat and devour her flesh and bones, dragged everywhere.” Anthony Jenkinson, England’s envoy to Russia, described the punishment of an unfortunate aristocrat, as Ivan’s men “cut off his nose, his tongue, his ears and his lips.” Ivan had a particular fascination with potions. Convinced that one Prince Vladimir was out to destroy him, he handed a goblet of poisoned wine to the unfortunate man, who died in great agony. His wife and nine-year-old daughter similarly perished after being given the same concoction. When some of Vladimir’s retinue refused to beg for mercy, they were stripped naked, shot, and left for birds and wild animals to eat.

That was how Russians grew up in the sixteenth century. Ivan was out to destroy Russia’s power structure —shared by the Church, wealthy and politically powerful landowners called boyars, and individual princely rivals to the throne—and become its sole, almighty ruler. His enforcers were an ultra-loyalist six-thousand-man band of thugs whom he called the oprichniki. They roamed the countryside on horseback in black robes, a dog’s head and broom etched into their saddles, massacring thousands, including much of the population of the ancient city of Novgorod. To retain their loyalty, Ivan granted them control of the richest part of the country, along with Russia’s principal trade routes.

The consequence of Ivan’s violence was a terrorized, terrified, and cowed population. In a letter to England’s Queen Elizabeth, King Sigismund Augustus II of Poland asked in wonder why Russians, while no doubt fearful of their czar’s savagery, also seemed to defend him as a mark of patriotism.

The most-admired historical figure in Russia is Peter the Great, who two centuries later presided over the torture and execution of hundreds of actual and alleged traitors, including his own son, Alexei. He doled out such punishment “to make an example, to terrify, to force submission,” wrote biographer Robert Massie, but with the ultimate aim of gaining “the power to work his reforms and—for better or worse—to revolutionize Russian society.” He fretted that the pain and death he inflicted might cause his Western friends to think less of him, and ordered that a lengthy letter be delivered to Europe’s heads of state imploring them to ignore reports of his brutality against his son. At the end of the self-serving missive, composed the day after Alexei’s death, Peter advised his European counterparts, “In case also that anyone wished to publish this event in an odious manner, you will have in hand what is necessary to destroy and solidly refute any unjust and unfounded tales.”

The czars of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were also to be feared, as exemplified by the organized attacks on Jews that they carried out. But some were victims of assassination themselves. Among those suffering that fate were Czar Alexander II, who was killed by a bomb in 1881, and of course Nicholas II, who was shot dead along with the entire Romanov family in 1918.

Soviet rule brought a new wave of official violence. Josef Stalin executed nearly all of his senior-most comrades from revolutionary days, almost his entire upper echelon of military officers, and millions of others when one included deaths in labor camps and from forced collectivization. Stalin was Ivan’s natural heir, and said as much himself. During the darkest days of Hitler’s invasion, Stalin could be found scribbling the words “teacher, teacher” on the pages of a biography of Ivan. He “constantly compared his terror to Ivan’s massacre of the boyars”—the landed aristocracy—according to a biographer of the twentieth-century dictator. Stalin thought that Ivan’s only fault was that, in slaying the boyars, “he should have killed them all, to create a strong state.”

One of the most credible and revealing accounts of Stalin’s time is Special Tasks, the memoir of Pavel Sudoplatov, who directed overseas assassinations for the dictator. Contemplating his own and others’ acts during the Soviet era, Sudoplatov wrote that “victorious Russian rulers always combined the qualities of criminals and statesmen.” Indeed, his book is a dispassionate catalogue of official poisonings, stabbings, and other plots, including the killing of his first victim, Yevhen Konovalets, a Ukrainian nationalist whom he cultivated for five years before blowing him up in Germany with a booby-trapped box of chocolates. Sudoplatov played a leading role in one of the most infamous political assassinations of the twentieth century, that of Leon Trotsky. The revolutionary leader had fled to Mexico after earning the enmity of Stalin, who ordered Sudoplatov to make his slaying a priority. So in 1940, Ramon Mercader del Rio, a Spanish national working for a Sudoplatov deputy, dispatched him with a pickax to the head.

Musa Eitingon Malinovskaya is the daughter of Mercader’s supervising agent, the legendary Soviet master spy Leonid Eitingon. Dressed in a silk scarf and a denim blouse for coffee at an upscale Moscow cafe, the sixty-year-old Malinovskaya told me how, as a teenager in the 1960s, she shared ice cream with Mercader and her father. She had no idea who he was, nor of her father’s role in the Trotsky assassination, but the two men had an evidently warm relationship. “My father introduced him to me as ‘my friend from the Spanish resistance,’” Malinovskaya said. “…I heard about him killing Trotsky only in 1989 when I read about it in Literaturnaya Gazeta.” Malinovskaya was clearly proud of her mother, Musa, for whom she was named. She showed me a 2005 advertisement featuring a 1935 photo of her mother as a gorgeous twenty-two-year-old Army parachutist. But she was singularly devoted to her father and eager to talk about his association with Trotsky’s slayer. One got the impression that it was the most important thing she could say about herself. The murder perhaps helped to break the ice at cocktail parties.

In 1954, a Sudoplatov protege named Nikolai Khokhlov became the first Soviet defector to publicly divulge firsthand knowledge of the Kremlin’s assassination program. He became a valuable source of intelligence for the CIA and survived an attempt by Russian agents to assassinate him using radioactive poisoning. The West usually prosecutes its traitors but, as Khokhlov was witness, the Soviets regarded them as fair game for murder.

Another defector, Bulgarian novelist and playwright Georgy Markov, died in a most exotic way. He was working as a London-based journalist for the BBC when Moscow and its Bulgarian allies joined forces to kill him. In 1978, an assassin jabbed a tiny ricin-laced pellet into Markov’s thigh as he waited at a bus stop near Waterloo Bridge. Although the murder weapon wasn’t found, an excited British press reported that the pellet was fired from an umbrella, and that idea stuck with historians.

Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia became a fledgling democracy in 1991. It should have been an opportunity for the nation to demonstrate that murder and mayhem were not embedded in the Russian DNA, that the notion of a centuries-long continuum of violence was fatally flawed. The czars and the dictators were gone; tyranny no longer ruled the land. But its people quickly learned that democracy Russian style could be ruthlessly bloody. A historic tradition seemed to be reasserting itself. The chosen style of rule—tyranny or democracy or something in between—seemed to matter little.

There were, of course, differences between the old and the new. Ivan, Peter, and Stalin alike reserved the right to decide who would live and who would die. Ivan and Peter tortured their unlucky victims to death, and Stalin had them shot in the back of the head or sent to prison camps to be starved and worked to death. This was state murder. But none of these three strongmen permitted murder in the streets. On the contrary, they were very nearly pathological about order and concealing Russia’s dark side from the rest of the world.

Under the rule of Boris Yeltsin in the 1990s, the old order was turned upside down. There was little if any state-sponsored murder. But contract killers brazenly murdered prominent bankers, metal traders, oilmen, and hundreds of others for violating unspoken “rules of the game.” Kidnappers chopped off the fingers and heads of their