In September 1999, four apartment buildings in three Russian cities exploded, killing 300 people and injuring another thousand. The attacks were blamed on Islamist terrorists and used to justify the Second Chechen War. The war smoothed the transition of power from Boris Yeltsin to former KGB officer Vladimir Putin, whose rise reassured the oligarchs who had looted the wealth of the Soviet Union that their riches would remain untouched.
In 2002, dozens of armed Chechens held 850 theater-goers hostage in Moscow. Russian special forces killed all the militants and 130 hostages during a raid by using a secret formulation of knockout gas. The siege renewed domestic support for the war in Chechnya at a time when Putin was under intense pressure to negotiate peace. In 2004, a similar siege at a school in Beslan ended with the deaths of 330 hostages, including 186 children, after Russian forces stormed the school with heavy weapons. In the aftermath of that tragedy, Putin abolished the popular election of governors in order to "strengthen national unity."
In The Less You Know, the Better You Sleep, journalist David Satter (Darkness at Dawn), who has written about Russia for nearly 40 years, makes a compelling case that these terror attacks, along with a string of assassinations, are the responsibility of the FSB (once known as the KGB) and a wider criminal enterprise now in control of the Russian state, all of whom are answerable to one man: Vladimir Putin. As the first American journalist expelled from Russia since the Cold War, Satter's evidence is chilling, often damning. --Tobias Mutter, freelance reviewer