Although, on the surface of it, Serhii Plokhy's The Man with the Poison Gun is a biography of a perpetrator of high-profile murders, in effect, it is a history of Ukrainian emigres’ fight for the independence of their home country in the post-WWII period.

The book consists of seven parts broken down into several short chapters. The first two parts describe the planning and execution of the murders of two prominent figures in the Ukrainian émigré movement for independence in the late 1950s. On Nikita Khrushchev's orders following the Ukrainian nationalist guerrillas’ assassination of Iaroslav Halan, a communist propagandist of the Soviet regime, the KGB began plotting the liquidation of Stepan Bandera, the leader of the most militant branch of the organization of Ukrainian nationalists.

The book opens with chapters describing the circumstances of the KGB recruitment of one Bohdan Stashinsky. After being caught by railroad police for an offense as minor as fare evasion, he was coerced into becoming an informer for the KGB. He later underwent training in Moscow, where he became a member of the Soviet secret police. This fateful turn in his life was brought about by an avalanche of historical events that deeply affected the young man. His emotional instability and misplaced sense of duty to his family were important factors for his betrayal of his country, while his cowardice also played a role in his unfortunate decision-making.

Stashinsky's first target was Lev Rebet, the editor of Ukrainian Independentist, an émigré newspaper. Equipped with a superior Soviet iteration of the German WWII-era poison gun, Stashinsky pursued his victim and eventually brought him down in cold blood. Then, after a long period of surveillance, Stashinsky began to prey on Stepan Bandera, the KGB's main target in its fight with the Ukrainian independence movement. Shortly after Bandera was taken down by way of “perfect murder” (no witnesses, no traces of the perpetrator), Stashinsky's KGB career abruptly ended. An interesting psychological detail explains the turning point in the murderer's consciousness. Only after watching a documentary about Bandera's funeral, which was attended by thousands of mourners, including his wife and his three children, did Stashinsky wake up from his robot-like existence. For the first time, he realized that he had taken another human being's life.

Thus, as irony has it, the murder of Bandera restored Stashinsky's humanity. Shortly after, he fell in love and married an East German woman. Under her influence, with his vow to no longer take part in any of the KGB's “wet” jobs, he planned his escape and successfully fled to the west with his wife. After defecting to the west, he publicly confessed his crimes.

From this point on, the book reads like a court drama. Was Stashinsky a murderer or merely an instrument in the hands of the true perpetrators, the Soviet secret police? Should he be put behind bars for the rest of his life or would the court go soft on him, seeing him as a mere tool of Red Terror against the Ukrainian struggle of independence? The most important outcome of the trial, however, was the fact that while the employment of murder as a staple of the Soviet regime's foreign policy was not new, it was established in the court of law for the first time.

The last part of the book is devoted to the subsequent fate of Stashinsky, after he served a reduced prison term, and the impact of his defection and trial on world public opinion of the Soviet Union. Since Plokhy provides the reader with a thorough historical background of the circumstances that led to Stashinsky's crimes, in its entirety the volume also acts as a more general history of KGB “wet operations,” that is, of the Soviet practice of political killing, post-WWII.

The book is a crash course for anyone who is unfamiliar with KGB disinformation or influence campaigns. Therefore, it serves as a revelation for those in the west who accept at face value the current Russian government's denial of meddling in recent American elections. The study of Stashinsky's case is as important as ever, considering the fact that the rulers of the current Russian Federation have roots in the same organization that carried out the Soviet methods of influencing international politics.

Although the book addresses historical events that occurred over six decades ago, it has a contemporary ring to it, complete with heart attacks of KGB turncoats and the continued Ukrainian struggle for sustaining independence. Today, since it has become clear that Vladimir Putin's regime resurrected his the KGB's terrorist tactics by annexing part of Ukrainian territory, that struggle is hardly over.