The story of Ukrainian Bogdan Stashinsky’s rise from an agricultural student to a KGB assassin who defected to the West in 1961.
Stashinsky’s career as a member of the Soviet secret police did not have an auspicious beginning. As an aspiring university student during the postwar Soviet occupation of Ukraine, he had family ties to the nationalist underground and was sympathetic to anti-Soviet groups. Local Soviet officials knew this well and blackmailed Stashinsky by giving him an ultimatum: betray his loyalties or watch the Soviets persistently harass and potentially assassinate his family members. He chose to collaborate with his occupiers. However, Stashinsky was quickly outed and shunned by his family; with nowhere else to turn, he accepted an offer to join the MGB, a precursor to the KGB. So began his rise as a professional assassin. With gusto and verve, Plokhy (Ukrainian History/Harvard Univ.; The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine, 2015, etc.) details Stashinsky’s intelligence work in East Germany, where he eventually received assignments to assassinate dissident journalist Lev Rebet and Stepan Bandera, leader of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists. To complete the deed, he was given a novel device that shot untraceable poison directly into the face of his victims. However, Stashinsky was a reluctant assassin and was eager for reassignment to the West. Upon being recalled to Moscow with his wife—and much KGB meddling with their personal affairs—he decided to make a daring escape and defect to West Germany. Ironically, Stashinsky had to prove that he had killed Rebet and Bandera in order to save himself, though that was easier said than done. More than just the story of Stashinsky’s involvement with the KGB, the book wonderfully details the entire intelligence milieu of postwar Germany, Russia, and much of Eastern Europe, including the paranoid atmosphere created by the legions of secret police that had taken hold throughout the region.
A thrilling, well-researched tale of espionage that has all the spycraft hallmarks of a blockbuster movie.Pub Date: Dec. 6, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-465-03590-8
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Basic
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2016
Categories: GENERAL HISTORY | TRUE CRIME | MODERN | WORLD | HISTORY
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"There's got to be something wrong with somebody who'd do a thing like that." This is Perry Edward Smith, talking about himself. "Deal me out, baby...I'm a normal." This is Richard Eugene Hickock, talking about himself. They're as sick a pair as Leopold and Loeb and together they killed a mother, a father, a pretty 17-year-old and her brother, none of whom they'd seen before, in cold blood. A couple of days before they had bought a 100 foot rope to garrote them—enough for ten people if necessary. This small pogrom took place in Holcomb, Kansas, a lonesome town on a flat, limitless landscape: a depot, a store, a cafe, two filling stations, 270 inhabitants. The natives refer to it as "out there." It occurred in 1959 and Capote has spent five years, almost all of the time which has since elapsed, in following up this crime which made no sense, had no motive, left few clues—just a footprint and a remembered conversation. Capote's alternating dossier Shifts from the victims, the Clutter family, to the boy who had loved Nancy Clutter, and her best friend, to the neighbors, and to the recently paroled perpetrators: Perry, with a stunted child's legs and a changeling's face, and Dick, who had one squinting eye but a "smile that works." They had been cellmates at the Kansas State Penitentiary where another prisoner had told them about the Clutters—he'd hired out once on Mr. Clutter's farm and thought that Mr. Clutter was perhaps rich. And this is the lead which finally broke the case after Perry and Dick had drifted down to Mexico, back to the midwest, been seen in Kansas City, and were finally picked up in Las Vegas. The last, even more terrible chapters, deal with their confessions, the law man who wanted to see them hanged, back to back, the trial begun in 1960, the post-ponements of the execution, and finally the walk to "The Corner" and Perry's soft-spoken words—"It would be meaningless to apologize for what I did. Even inappropriate. But I do. I apologize." It's a magnificent job—this American tragedy—with the incomparable Capote touches throughout. There may never have been a perfect crime, but if there ever has been a perfect reconstruction of one, surely this must be it.
Pub Date: Jan. 7, 1965
ISBN: 0375507906
Page Count: 343
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Oct. 10, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1965
Categories: TRUE CRIME
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For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
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