THE KREMLIN’S NOOSE: Putin’s Bitter Feud With The Oligarch

“Knight provides a fascinating narrative of Putin’s rise to power and his authoritarian rule, told through the prism of his relationship with Russia’s once most powerful oligarch, Boris Berezovsky.”

In The Kremlin’s Noose Amy Knight tells the riveting story of Vladimir Putin and the oligarch Boris Berezovsky, who forged a relationship in the early years of the Yeltsin era. Berezovsky later played a crucial role in Putin’s rise to the Russian presidency in March 2000. When Putin began dismantling Boris Yeltsin’s democratic reforms, Berezovsky came into conflict with the new Russian leader by reproaching him publicly. Their relationship quickly disintegrated into a bitter feud played out against the backdrop of billion-dollar financial deals, Kremlin in-fighting, and international politics.

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PUTIN’S KILLERS: The Kremlin and the Art of Political Assassination

“Ever since Vladimir Putin came to power, his critics have been turning up dead. According to Amy Knight, one of the West’s foremost scholars of the KGB, this is no coincidence.”

A  British edition of Orders To Kill, with a postscript.

Ever since Vladimir Putin came to power, his critics have been turning up dead. According to Amy Knight, one of the West’s foremost scholars of the KGB, this is no coincidence. Here, she links together dozens of deaths, exposing a far-reaching campaign of killing that is even tied to the Boston Marathon bombing.

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ORDERS TO KILL: The Putin Regime and Political Murder

“Orders to Kill is a story long hidden in plain sight with huge ramifications.”

Called “the West’s foremost scholar” of the KGB by The New York Times, Knight traces Putin’s journey from the Federal Security Service (FSB) in the late 1990s to his subsequent rise to absolute power as the Kremlin’s leader today, detailing the many bodies that paved the way. She offers new information about the most famous victims, such as Alexander Litvinenko, the former FSB officer who was poisoned while living in London, and the statesman Boris Nemtsov, who was murdered outside the Kremlin in 2015, and she puts faces on many others who are less well-known in the West or forgotten. She shows that terrorist attacks in Russia, as well as the Boston Marathon bombing in the U.S., are part of the same campaign. And she explores what these murders mean for Putin’s future, for Russia and for the West, where in America Donald Trump has claimed, “Nobody has proven that he’s killed anyone….He’s always denied it.…It has not been proven that he’s killed reporters.”

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How the Cold War Began

“Amy Knight is one of the most meticulous and ground-breaking scholars of Soviet history, and this latest work is her best yet…a gripping spy thriller, a fascinating human story, and a magisterial history of how the victors of WWII moved from four years of Grand Alliance to forty years of Cold War.”
Simon Sebag Montefiore

On September 5, 1945, Soviet cipher clerk Igor Gouzenko severed ties with his embassy in Ottawa, Canada, reporting allegations to authorities of a Soviet espionage network in North America. His defection sent shockwaves through Washington, London, and Ottawa. In her riveting narrative, Amy Knight documents how Gouzenko’s defection, and the events that followed it, triggered Cold War fears and altered the course of modern history. Knight sheds new light on the Gouzenko Affair, showing how J. Edgar Hoover hoped to discredit the Truman administration by incriminating U.S. government insiders Alger Hiss and Harry Dexter White. She also probes Gouzenko’s motives for defecting and brilliantly connects these events to the strained relations between the Soviet Union and the West that marked the beginning of the Cold War.

Who Killed Kirov?

“A gripping portrait of one of the grimmest periods in modern Russian history.”
The Los Angeles Times

The 1934 assassination of Sergei Kirov, the Leningrad Communist Party chief and a rising star in Stalin’s inner circle, marked the beginning of one of the darkest periods of Russian historyAStalin’s Great Terror, in which millions of Soviet citizens were imprisoned, exiled or killed. Knight goes beyond the usual questions about the Kremlin’s greatest mystery to take a closer look at the people and events that enabled Stalin to not only authorize the murder of a respected colleague but also to repeat the tactic without any kind of personal repercussion. Knight expertly unravels the layers of the Kirov coverup in which newly empowered party and police officials found themselves compelled to discard fact for fiction in a vain attempt to escape the ubiquitous brand of “traitor” or “collaborator.”

Spies without Cloaks

“This is easily the best book on the former KGB to appear since the end of the Cold War. Knight is a formidable researcher with an excellent reputation, which this work does everything to confirm.”
The Sunday Times (London)

This book offers a compelling and comprehensive account of what happened to the KGB when the Soviet Union collapsed and the world’s most powerful and dangerous secret police organization was uncloaked. As Amy Knight shows, the KGB was renamed and reorganized several times after it was officially disbanded in December 1991–but it was not reformed. Knight’s rich and lively narrative begins with the aborted August 1991 coup, led by KGB hard-liners, and takes us through the summer of 1995, when the Russian parliamentary elections were looming on the horizon. The failed coup attempt was a setback for the KGB because it led to demands from Russian democrats for a complete overhaul of the security services. As a result, the KGB’s leaders were fired, its staff reduced, and its functions dispersed among several agencies. But President Yeltsin was reluctant to press on with reforms of the security services, because he needed their support in his struggle against mounting political opposition.

Beria: Stalin’s First Lieutenant

“This first full-scale scholarly biography of the clever, cruel, domineering security chief whom Stalin once called ‘my Himmler’ casts valuable new light on various events of the Stalin period and its early aftermath.”
Robert Tucker, Professor Emeritus, Princeton University

This is the first comprehensive biography of Lavrentii Beria, Stalin’s notorious police chief and for many years his most powerful lieutenant. Beria has long symbolized all the evils of Stalinism, haunting the public imagination both in the West and in the former Soviet Union. Yet because his political opponents expunged his name from public memory after his dramatic arrest and execution in 1953, little has been previously published about his long and tumultuous career.

The KGB: Police and Politics in the Soviet Union

“A well informed and sober history of the security police as a political institution.”
The New York Times Book Review

From The Library Journal:
Recent interest in the Soviet Union has spawned a plethora of works on the KGB and its nefarious activities, but a shortage of unbiased scholarship remains. Knight, a Soviet affairs specialist, examines the KGB’s origins and evolution, structure, and functions to describe and analyze “the KGB as a political institution.” Serious students will value the extensive references to Russian and Western sources, detailed information on the background of KGB cadres, and absence of polemic.