You've gotta hand it to Russia these days--they're certainly returning to their roots. After spending a couple of decades as a nice, fluffy, USA-wannabe democracy, the land of Lenin is returning to the old gulag-filling, enemy-dispatching, vodka-drinking cold war bad boy that we all loved. In the last five months alone there've been at least four James Bond-quality murders of vocal critics of the Kremlin in so-ridiculous-it's-almost-comical fashion.

While here in the US if you say something critical of the government you might get a tongue lashing from neo-con harpy Ann Coulter or, at worst, get an all expense paid vacation to Guantanamo, our Ruskie counterparts are bringin' sexy back with their treatment of dissidents. Putin and Company certainly seem to think that if America, once the good guy in the Cold War and a global opponent of torture and illegal detention, is now advocating torture and building their own modern-day Gulags, then Mother Russia needs to show the world they're still the tough-guy among former superpowers.

Exhibit A

In the US it seems like a new book critical of GW Bush and his cabal hits the shelves every week. What happens? Bill O'Reilly and Sean Hannity get material to bitch about on their worthless "news" shows. In Russia though, after award-winning journalist Anna Politkovskaya (a US citizen) released her book "Putin's Russia" criticizing Russian President Vladimir Putin, she wasn't given a verbal beatdown on Fox News, she was shot dead outside her home in October.

Pravda (Pravda is to The Kremlin as Fox News is the The Bush White House) recently reported that two Chechen soldiers have been detained in regard to the murder, based on military satellite photos of Politkovskaya's home around the time of her assasination. It's a nice, mundane cover story, but the Russians definately get spy-vs-spy points for admitting that they had a military satellite providing regular surveillance of a JOURNALIST!

Exhibit B

Surveilling and murdering a dissident journalist is one thing. But how do you stop whistleblowers within the government from outing your involvement in something like the Politkovskaya assasination? In the US, Karl Rove would probably initiate a smear campaign that accused them of being gay or having an Islamic friend or belonging to a Unitarian church: boooooring.

This is how the Russians do it: They POISON you with RADIOACTIVE material such as polonium-210! Are you kidding me? Nobody actually does this stuff, do they? Is Putin taking hints from Tom Clancy and Jerry Bruckheimer?

Seriously, former KGB spy Alexander Litvenko died in November from radiation poisoning caused by "someone" slipping a little polonium-210 into his cocktail while he was investigating the assasination of Anna Politkovskaya. Litvenko took asylum in Britain in 2000 after he was imprisoned for publicly criticizing the KGB for ordering him to kill certain civilian businessmen.

Exhibit C

So we've got an assasinated journalist and a poisoned ex-KGB agent who was investigating the murder of said journalist. So what do you think happened a few days ago to former police officer, Paul Joyal, after he implicated Moscow in the poisoning murder of Litvenko? He was shot several times outside his home...just like Politkovskaya.

Joyal wasn't killed, but was reportedly left in critical condition at a Washington, DC hospital. This assasination attempt was not only carried out against another US citizen (remember, Politkovskaya was a natural-born US citizen living in Russia), but it was carried out on US soil.

Exhibit D

Shootings, poisoning (albeit radiocative poisonings), military surveillance; these are all fairly clean and somewhat high-tech. So just to shake things up a bit and let the world know that they're not just slick, run-and-gun assasins, the Putin gang decided to use the world's oldest murder weapon: gravity.

Last Friday, Russian journalist Ivan Saronov "fell" from a fifth-story window after telling the editors of his newspaper, Kommersant, that he'd gathered materials for an article exposing the Russian government's plans to sell weapons, including missiles and fighter jets, to Iran and Syria. Before his death Saronov reportedly told friends and colleagues he'd received warnings and death threats from various individuals telling him to cease his investigation.


These, um, "accidents" surrounding anyone critical of Russian policy or action in recent months have certainly accomplished their goal: they've sent a very strong (and none too subtle) message that if you say something bad about Putin you can expect a parting gift of a bullet, a radioactive cocktail, or a very short skydiving adventure. I wish I could say I'm making these up because they are so ridiculous that they belong in the pages of a spy novel. Unfortunately I'm not, and it's a pretty safe bet we will hear of more suspicious deaths of Moscow's critics in coming weeks and months.

What's the solution? Well, since the American government and (for the most part) media seem content to all but ignore these events, despite their incredible political relevance to the situation in the Middle East and the global economy, I say we throw ridiculous fictional answers at ridiculous FACTUAL tyrrants: Let's team MI6's James Bond with CTU's Jack Bauer. We'll call them something cool like JB Alpha and drop them into Moscow via stealth rocket drone and let the carnage ensue. It'll be a huge summer blockbuster and we can all continue to pretend it's just fiction.