Putin's guide

This book comes to endorse Vladimir Putin's original sin: his responsibility in the 1999 series of bombings of housing blocks in several Russian cities, in which almost 300 people died. With Putin as Boris Yeltsin's prime minister and a contender in the presidential election the following year, the bombs would have been planted by the secret services - although officially attributed to Caucasian terrorists - to provoke an electoral tilt in favor of the former KGB agent, as it happened. Marc Marginedas, who has been a correspondent of El Periódico de Catalunya in Russia and knows the country well, has interviewed those who risked investigating the events. Although the testimonies of the witnesses at the time provided sufficient elements for this denunciation, the governmental obstacles and the reprisals of the security forces from the very beginning have made it impossible to preserve incontrovertible evidence to corroborate that those attacks were perpetrated by elements of the FSB (successor of the KGB) following Putin's orders.

Marginedas argues that this has been the 'modus operandi' of the Russian president. When he has needed it politically - to have world support in his fight against Chechen nationalism, presenting it as another manifestation of jihadist terrorism, or to control progressive spheres of power - Putin would have resorted to major attacks against his own citizens, at least by allowing radicals from the Caucasus (highly penetrated by the Russian secret services, who would have been aware of his plans) to carry out large-scale massacres. This would have been the case of the action in 2002 against the Dubrovka theater in Moscow, where 170 attendees of a show died, or the one that took place in 2024 in a school in Breslan, North Ossetia, with the death of 330 people, half of them children.

These plots have been exposed by other authors; Marginedas adds some more testimonies in the same direction, while contributing to uncover a background that until now had barely emerged. Putin's official biographies have always said that his work in the USSR era as a spy stationed in Dresden, in the former GDR, had been merely bureaucratic. Marginedas points to a different version: some sources attribute him to be the KGB's link to suggest targets for attacks to Western terrorist groups, especially the German group Red Army Faction (RAF). If this is so, it would make much more sense that in 1999, with only one month as prime minister, he could imagine the use of a terrorist action for his political objectives.

Convinced that this is the logic that has driven Putin's trajectory, Marginedas sculpts it in clear letters on the book's cover: "More than two decades of state terrorism, kidnappings, mafia and propaganda," reads the subtitle. The pages of the book are a journey through the different aspects of that policy, some of them suffered in the author's own flesh. Although the tactic of kidnappings (and assassinations, particularly by poisoning, the authorship of which the Kremlin itself has tried to hint at, with a view to intimidation) is directed against Russian political opponents, Marginedas himself could be added to the list. He believes that the decision of his captors from the Islamic State in Syria, where he was sent as a war correspondent, to prolong his captivity, which ended with his release after six months but which could have ended with his execution, as happened to other journalists detained with him, was due to instructions from Moscow.

The book has the rhythm that corresponds to a journalistic account. As a journalist's work, it pays attention to the media (the Kremlin's disinformation) and some pages reflect well the circle of friendships that is created among colleagues (such as the episode of the dinner of Spanish correspondents with the then Spanish ambassador in Moscow, who comes off very badly). It is clear, in any case, that Marginedas does not act out of corporatism when he criticizes Putin's gagging of the press, nor out of revenge following his kidnapping when he lashes out harshly against Russia's foreign policy. Marginedas is a multi-award-winning, credible researcher , and this lends particular credibility to the book's allegations.