The Man With the Poison Gun by Serhii Plokhy - Basic Books (2016)
There are two things I will never tire of watching: movies from the James Bond franchise, and episodes of Law & Order (I am perhaps the only person alive who prefers the original series over SVU). Like millions of viewers before me, I am drawn to the dark, illusory world of covert ops and international espionage like Gollum to his ‘precious.’ There is just something so thrilling and romantic about the notion of having a secret identity, slipping in and out of different personas, and infiltrating the inner nexus of a foreign governmental body. 007 is a master of reinvention, and if I were really honest with myself, I would have to admit that I envy his freedom from domestic obligations. My enduring love of Law & Order comes from a different corner of my psyche. I love the games of strategy, the risks and maneuvers, and above all the rhetoric of a courtroom drama. Some of the most ‘boring’ episodes of Law & Order are also my favorites. I don’t care much for high-speed chases or hostage situations. I love when criminals are apprehended early and the lawyers spend the rest of the episode delicately testing moral and legal boundaries, calling upon all the subtle permutations of the law. Because the law is undeniably malleable, and each new case widens the gap for new lines of inquiry and new questions which demand that we reflect upon what it means to be an individual within a society. The ruling in a single case can set the precedent for dozens of others and can impact the social milieu in which we exist. This does not always end well, but it is nevertheless fascinating to witness legal experts page through the same catalogue of rules and examples in order to argue opposing conclusions. The fact that someone can win an argument even when the court of public opinion is against them is one of the key differences between criminal justice in a democracy, and criminal justice in a totalitarian regime in which subjective opinions matter more than facts and logic.
I could rant forever but TL;DR I am a sucker for well-dressed undercover agents and clever lawyers.
The Man With the Poison Gun by Serhii Plokhy satisfied both of my narrative appetites. It is also well-supported enough to exist somewhat above the level of an actual Ian Fleming adventure. It is nonfiction that reads like fiction. The first half of the book, which documents the conversion of Bogdan Stashinsky from a Ukrainian revolutionary to a KGB assassin, is just as suspenseful and ludicrous as any Cold War mass-market paperback. The assassination by Stashinsky of a top Ukrainian leader, for example, involves multiple identities, a weapon concealed in a tin of sausages, and a gun that fires vaporized poison. In fact, most of the orders sent to Stashinsky from the Kremlin would be hilarious if they weren’t so deadly. Plokhy cleverly recycles all the effective literary devices from fiction in his biography. Thus, two characters might be introduced with full back stories in the early chapters, only to be merged into a single double-agent later on. Whereas many biographers would choose to clear up any identity confusion in the beginning, Plokhy lets his characters grow and expand significantly before ripping off their masks. Character information is distributed strategically rather than all at once, infusing what might otherwise have been a straightforward biography with a sense of mystery. More than once, the reader is left in the same state of disbelief and betrayal that one feels when Vesper Lynd stabs Bond, James Bond, in the back. In fact, Plokhy himself encourages the reader to participate in a bit of vicarious sleuthing with his journalistic manner of narration. Concluding his preface with what can only be termed ‘linguistic bait,’ Plokhy writes:
Most of what we know today about Bogdan Stashinsky, his crime, and his punishment comes from the testimony that he gave at his trial in Karlsruhe, Germany, in October 1962. We can now supplement that data with information from recently declassified files of the Central Intelligence Agency; KGB and Polish security archives; and memoirs and interviews of former KGB officers. The study of graveyard records in a Berlin suburb made it possible to corroborate parts of the story originally told by Stashinsky, and my interview with a former head of the South African police allowed me to trace the former Soviet assassin to that country. He is probably still living there, always looking over his shoulder, aware that the old habits of the KGB die hard, if at all.
This whodunit tone is all the more impressive considering Plokhy’s standing as a reputable historian. His published books (more than ten of them) have been translated into numerous languages, won countless awards reserved for Eastern European scholarship, and earned him a position as the Director of the Ukrainian Research Institute at Harvard University. Plokhy is, furthermore, prolific in his country of birth and has done much to support Ukrainian writers of fiction and nonfiction alike.
The second half of The Man With the Poison Gun is concerned with Stashinsky’s defection, trial, and subsequent disappearance. Having murdered two high-profile Ukrainian nationalists, Stashinsky fell in love with an East German woman and became gradually disenchanted with the ideals of a Soviet Empire. The two main sections of Plokhy’s book (conversion and trial) are neatly joined by Stashinsky’s stressful flight from Moscow to West Berlin. His defection and cooperation with the CIA became a turning point in the Cold War and a powerful blow to the reputation of the Russian elite. The trial section of The Man With the Poison Gun is written in a different tone—and progresses at a different pace—than the first chapters. In this section, Plokhy is chronological to the extreme, as if he were the court stenographer present at Stashinsky’s trial. There is very little ornamentation. Plokhy’s tone is dry and factual, reflecting the new legal setting of his narrative. The second half of his book takes place almost entirely in a courtroom that Plokhy brings to life in exacting detail. I do not know which half of the narrative I prefer, but I am thoroughly impressed by Plokhy’s ability to sew them together into a seamless whole. This transition is at least partly facilitated by a series of questions raised at the end of the first half of the book, which later become the key points in the 1962 court case. Plokhy first aligns his readers with the wary CIA agents who handle Stashinsky’s defection, and then with the witnesses in the courtroom attempting to locate the truth amidst all the illusions. Writes Plokhy:
Bogdan Stashinsky was flown to Frankfurt on August 13, 1961, while Inge [his wife] was interrogated separately by the West German authorities…The first of the many problems that the CIA interrogators faced in dealing with Stashinsky’s testimony, both in Berlin and then at the CIA interrogation center in Frankfurt, was that they could not establish his identity. The many documents he produced had three different names on them: Bogdan Stashinsky, Joseph Lehmann, and Aleksandr Krylov. The CIA Officers did not know which of them, if any, was authentic. The CIA also had no way to verify Stashinsky’s career with the KGB, or his surprisingly candid claims that he had killed Stepan Bandera and Lev Rebet. Besides, no one thought that Rebet had been assassinated, and what Stashinsky was telling the interrogators about Bandera ran counter to all the evidence they had collected so far and all the theories developed on the basis of it. The documents assembled in the CIA’s Bandera file suggested that he had been poisoned by someone close to him, not by a lone killer wandering the streets of Munich with a strange tube in his pocket.
Oh, to be a fly on the wall of that courtroom (and Plokhy almost makes it so). Not only was the identity of the accused uncertain, so was his admission of guilt. After weeks of examining the evidence, both the defense and the prosecution were confident in their determination that Bogdan Stashinsky had in fact carried out the assassinations. But who should be held responsible? Should the burden of guilt be placed upon the shoulders of the man with the gun, or did it belong within the inner sanctum of the Kremlin? Was it even possible to prosecute a nebulous political organism that routinely flouted the rules of international diplomacy to eliminate traitors and enemies abroad? After weeks of debate, Bogdan Stashinsky was given eight years penal service for two murders. He was convicted as an ‘accessory’ to a crime committed by Soviet Russia—a mere tool in the hands of a powerful ideological monster. The repercussions were inevitable. Writes Plokhy:
Since the Nuremberg trial of Nazi war criminals, the West German courts had universally rejected the argument that Nazi perpetrators had simply followed orders. Now the Federal Criminal court and then the High Court, which approved its ruling, were dramatically reversing that policy. Both courts rejected the “acting under duress of orders” defense in the Stashinsky case, but the ruling opened new avenues for the defense of Nazi criminals, as they could now claim that they had only been accessories to murder, while the main perpetrators, including Adolf Hitler, Heinrich Himmler, Hermann Göring, and other top officials of the Third Reich, were long gone.
Cases like Bogdan Stashinsky’s are, of course, never simple. Stashinsky’s repeated assertions that he was forced to join the KGB to protect his family (his sister was a Ukrainian revolutionary), that he carried out his assignments under duress, and that he was brainwashed by the zealots of communism are not exactly excuses for murder, but they do warrant a degree of empathy. At the very least, the reader must pause to consider what he or she might do in a similar situation. And if we decide that the legal cost of an acquittal—in new opportunities for incarcerated felons—is too great, then aren’t we in danger of buying into the same ‘greater good’ mentality used to justify the original crimes? In other words, is there a difference between a Nazi who thinks ‘if I spare one Jew, the rest will demand mercy, so I should kill them all,’ and the judge who thinks ‘if I pardon one assassin, the rest will claim victimhood, so I should convict them all’? Perhaps the more important question is how do we find the words to explain the difference (and I think there is one) in a manner that is legally unassailable? How do we translate what we know to be true in our souls into real sentences that clarify rather than confuse? In The Man With the Poison Gun Serhii Plokhy touches upon these questions while all the while reminding readers that biographies can be thrilling, suspenseful, and fun.
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