In Russia, I Learned, Threats Were Always Real

Credit...Valery Sharifulin\\TASS, via Getty ImagesIt started with a weekday interview in an office near the Moscow River. The man was a murderer, it was said, but when I asked about the crime, he smirked and said he was framed. I remember his shoes, pointy and shined like glass.

I published a lot of articles as Moscow bureau chief for The Los Angeles Times, but this is one story I never wrote: About the problem that began with that 2008 interview and unfolded gradually over years — slowly enough to create the illusion that nothing was happening.

Russian power has a tendency to work that way. You detect a suggestion of a threat, but then it just lingers, unrealized, until finally you shrug it…