Blowing up Russia: The Book that Got Litvinenko Murdered

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These two men left a radioactive trail around London, as they made various bungled attempts to kill the man who considered them as, if not friends, acquaintances. She unconsciously raised her hand to feel the short spiky hair she favoured now, dyed blond to complement her striking blue eyes, making her look younger than her forty-four years. This account will examine the movements and actions of a key group of players, both friends and suspects. But the last third of the book skims over huge territory, whilst lacking some objectivity of what came before it. More resplendent in death than ever he was in life, here was Sasha Litvinenko, the boy from the deep Russian provinces who rose through the ranks of the world’s most feared security service; the man who alleged murder and corruption in the Russian government, fled from the wrath of the Kremlin, came to London and took the shilling of Moscow’s avowed enemy.

The two men’s greeting in the hotel foyer that morning was a brief, manly hug in the Russian manner. Sasha Litvinenko was Berezovsky’s lieutenant in a bitter propaganda campaign against Putin and his regime. It doesn’t matter that the planners were careless, with the power of the “country” they control and their wealth, consequences are unlikely.One is awe for the very brave men and women in Russia who pursue reform through the media, politics and the courts. While serving in the army, he was temporarily attached to a counter-intelligence unit tasked with tracing the hundreds of thousands of illegal weapons that were causing havoc across the Soviet Union. In places like Armenia, Azerbaijan, Nagorno Karabakh, Abkhazia and Ossetia, purloined Red Army bullets and bombs were fuelling increasingly bloody fighting and undermining the authority of the Kremlin. Alongside, this we benefit from Mr Harding's experience as The Guardian's Russia correspondent (he was expulsed in 2011 - the first since the Cold War's ending), his interviews with a number of the key players and Litvinenko himself. In response to FSB's banning their books, the authors granted the right to print and distribute the books in Russia to "anybody who wishes to do so" free of charge.

For most of that time they had been living comfortably – and mainly happily – in a spacious modern house in the respectable London suburb of Muswell Hill, the house that their patron, Boris Berezovsky, had bought for them. In fact, as his previous book Mafia State makes clear, part of the reason he was banished from Russia was due to his persistent questioning of the Kremlin’s narrative.Blincoe further asserts that the fact that Berezovsky was the mastermind behind Putin's rise to power is evidence that no KGB-sponsored coup d'état took place - contrary to what was claimed in the book. At first, I thought I was looking at a cancer patient; the fascinating and horrific truth was soon evident though.