The Defector

though I suspect the KGB and its successors probably have one.
    The Great Terror killing ground discovered at the climax of The Defector is fictitious, but, sadly, the historical circumstances that could have created such a place are not. Precisely how many people were shot to death during the brutal repressions lasting from 1936 to 1938 may never be known. Estimates range from approximately seven hundred thousand to well over a million. Suffice it to say the number of those executed is but one measure of the suffering Stalin inflicted on Russia during the time of the Great Terror. Historian Robert Conquest estimates that the purges and Stalin-induced famines probably claimed between eleven million and thirteen million lives. Other historians place the number even higher. And still opinion polls consistently find that Stalin remains highly popular among Russians to this day.
    One of the few sites where Russians can mourn Stalin’s victims is Butovo, just south of Moscow. There, from August 1937 to October 1938, an estimated twenty thousand people were shot in the back of the head and buried in long mass graves. I visited the recently opened memorial at Butovo with my family in the summer of 2007 while researching Moscow Rules , and in large measure it inspired The Defector . One question haunted me as I walked slowly past the burial trenches, accompanied by weeping Russian citizens. Why are there not more places like this? Places where ordinary Russians can see evidence of Stalin’s unimaginable crimes with their own eyes. The answer, of course, is that the rulers of the New Russia are not terribly interested in exposing the sins of the Soviet past. On the contrary, they are engaged in a carefully orchestrated endeavor to airbrush away its most repulsive aspects while celebrating its achievements. One can understand their motives. The NKVD, which carried out the Great Terror at Stalin’s behest, was the forerunner of the KGB. And former officers of the KGB, including Vladimir Putin himself, are now running Russia.
    There is a danger to such historical myopia, of course: the danger that it might happen again. In smaller, far more subtle ways, it already is. Since coming to power in 1999, Vladimir Putin, Russia’s former president and now prime minister, has overseen a wide-ranging curtailment of press and civic freedoms. And in December 2008 the government introduced new legislation that would greatly expand the definition of “state treason.” Human rights activists, already on shaky ground, fear the laws could be used to jail anyone who dares to criticize the regime. Andrei Lugovoi, the former KGB officer accused by British authorities of the November 2006 poisoning of the dissident defector Alexander Litvinenko, apparently feels the new law does not go far enough. Now a member of parliament, and a hero to many Russians, he told the Spanish newspaper El País that anyone who dares to criticize Russia “should be exterminated.”
    Lugovoi went on to say: “Do I think someone should have killed Litvinenko in the interests of the Russian state? If you’re talking about the interests of the Russian state, in the purest sense of the word, I myself would have given that order.” This from the man wanted by British authorities for the very same murder of which he speaks.
    For those who dare to question the Kremlin and Russia’s powerful elite, arrest and prosecution are sometimes the least of their worries. Too many have simply been killed in cold blood. Witness the case of Stanislav Markelov, the crusading human rights lawyer and social justice activist, gunned down on a central Moscow street in January 2009 as he was leaving a news conference. Also killed was Anastasia Baburova, a freelance journalist for Novaya Gazeta —tragically, the same publication that employed Anna Politkovskaya, who was shot to death in the elevator of her Moscow apartment house in October 2006.
    According to the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists, forty-nine media professionals have been killed in Russia since 1992. Only in Iraq and Algeria have more died in the line of duty during the same period. This, too, is a Russian tragedy.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
    As always, I am deeply indebted to my dear friend David Bull, who truly is among the finest art restorers in the world. Each year, David gives up many hours of his extremely valuable time to peer over my shoulder, and Gabriel’s, to make certain we are doing our jobs