RIP, Paul Boutin: Remembering the Ninth of November

In memory of someone who fought the good fight

Nov 09, 2025

This one is a bit different.

2 Nov 2025, Sun Journal (Maine): Obituary: Paul Boutin

BAKERSFIELD, Calif. – Paul Boutin died on Oct. 18, 2025, of cancer in Bakersfield, Calif., in the company of his wife, Christina Noren, and close friends.
A polymorphic polymath, Boutin was a programmer, editor, writer and recording artist whose words appeared in Wired, Slate and the New York Times.
As “Paul Lovecraft”, he was a prolific musician. He performed in Los Angeles with Tombstones in Their Eyes, a label-signed indie band.
Paul Edouard Boutin was born on Dec. 11, 1961, alongside his twin brother, Danny Robert Boutin in Lewiston. He graduated from Lewiston High School in 1980 and won admission to MIT. He studied there for two years before dropping out to help build the university’s Project Athena, a crucial testbed for technologies that later powered much of the internet.
At MIT, a manager sent him on a Silicon Valley boondoggle from which Boutin did not return. In California, Boutin found his life’s work, love, and a treasured community.
He settled in San Francisco, Calif. with Noren, whom he married for the first time in 2000 at the Burning Man festival in Nevada. The couple also lived briefly in New York.
After working in Silicon Valley, Boutin found the most meaningful work at HotWired, the online arm of Wired. He made his way to the magazine, where he served as a senior editor. After Wired, he worked at Splunk, a software company, alongside Noren.
Along the way, he struggled with addiction, divorced Noren, found sobriety, and moved to the Los Angeles, Calif. area where he focused on his music while continuing to write.
Boutin grew increasingly committed to political activism, finding a talent for training phone bankers. Most recently, he volunteered in service of immigrants’ rights.
He and Noren remained in touch and remarried in 2021, 21 years to the day after their first ceremony. They lived together in Camarillo Heights, where his brother Danny preceded him in death in March unexpectedly on a visit. Boutin experienced a first brush with cancer in 2024; the couple moved to Bakersfield, Calif. in 2025, shortly before the return of his illness became apparent.
He is survived by Noren and their dog Buzzy; his niece, Stephanie, and her husband Drew (Marin), his nephew Stephen; and his aunt, Connie Albert and uncle, Ray Bissonnette, of Lewiston.
A Catholic funeral Mass will be held at 10 a.m. on Nov. 11 at St. Francis Church in Bakersfield, Calif., with a rosary and viewing beforehand at 9:30 a.m. The church will stream the event on Facebook. A remembrance at Boutin and Noren’s Bakersfield home will follow.
Boutin will be laid to rest at the Mount Calvary Cemetery in Salt Lake City at 11 a.m. on Nov. 22.
Donations may be made in Paul’s name to the
Acacia Center for Justice:
https://bit.ly/acaciapaul
or to the
Coalition for Humane Immigrants Rights
(CHIRLA):
https://bit.ly/paulchirla

A Memory in History

I never met Paul in person — only via email and Google Meet. We worked on various projects related to the ex-Soviet Union, particularly in the Ninth of November Press, which was involved in publishing some key anti-Soviet books: (and the fall-out in the form of Putin)

(Note: links go to Amazon, and I get paid commissions for any sales through those links)

To Build a Castle: My Life as a Dissenter

Allegations: An insider’s fatal claims about Putin’s Russia

Judgment in Moscow: Soviet Crimes and Western Complicity

A story from Paul on the naming of the publishing house:

November 9, 1989:
A PR error and a Stasi officer bring down the Berlin Wall
Saturday 9 November is the 30th anniversary of the day when unprepared East German spokesman Günter Schabowski, responding to reporters’ questions at a daily press conference, jumped an embargo and fumbled his interpretation of a page that he had been handed to read. It described a pending softening of travel restrictions between East and West Germany.
Schabowski mistakenly said on TV that passage through Berlin’s heavily Antifaschistischer Schutzwall—the Anti-Fascist Protection Rampart built in 1961 to keep East German citizens safe from the rapacious capitalist sinkhole of West Berlin—was now unrestricted, effective immediately.
East Germans flocked to the Wall’s several gates, eager to cross into the other side of their city walled off for 28 years.
Harald Jäger—a 46-year-old night shift passport control officer who had cheered the wall’s rise in 1961 and joined the border patrol, a loyal Stasi member who later said he almost choked on his sandwich when he heard Schabowski’s announcement that morning—watched the gathering crowd grow from 20 people to an unruly 10,000 by nighttime.
As much as he despised the West’s fascists, Jäger ignored early orders to capture or kill trespassers, as well as later orders to allow some through but with trick one-way passport stamps that would lock them out of East Germany.
Eventually, with a restless mob of 10,000 at the gates and a riot brewing, Jäger did the safest thing for all: He disobeyed his commander on the phone and opened the gate at Bornholmer Street.
The other guards followed suit. You’ve seen the rest: Berliners on both sides united with hand tools to take the hated wall apart themselves.
I love the whole story. When I had to name the publishing imprint under which we restored out-of-print books by Russian dissidents Vladimir Bukovsky and Alexander Litvinenko, I chose Ninth of November Press. Surviving Soviet-era dissidents approved.

The last book was Judgment in Moscow, after those first two.

Description of the book:

“The movers and shakers of today have little interest in digging for the truth. Who knows what one may come up with? You may start out with the Communists and end up with yourself.” —Vladimir Bukovsky
Bukovsky’s Judgment in Moscow, called “stunning” by Richard Pipes and “a massive and major contribution” by Robert Conquest, has been published for the first time in English. Margaret Thatcher gave a grant to support the writing of the book, and the initial publication in Russia was paid for by Aleksander Solzhenitsyn. The book has an introduction by Edward Lucas and an afterword by David Satter.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, legendary Soviet dissident Vladimir Bukovsky had the opportunity to steal thousands of classified documents from the Soviet archives. Judgment in Moscow is about the secrets exposed by those documents. It reveals the inner workings of the Soviet regime and the complicity of many in the West with that regime.
Judgment in Moscow was an international bestseller published in nine languages, but has only now been published in English for the first time. It was previously at Random House, but Bukovsky refused to rewrite parts of the book which accused prominent Westerners of behind-the-scenes dealings with the Soviets. In this edition, the author quotes correspondence with his editor, who says, “I don’t disagree, but I simply can’t publish a book that accuses Americans like Cyrus Vance and Francis Ford Coppola of unpatriotic — or even treacherous — behavior.”
“Vladimir Bukovsky uses the Kremlin’s own documents to show how the Soviet Union provided a false face to the world and how Soviet leaders used Western leaders as dupes or willing actors. Judgment in Moscow provides the written Nuremberg trial the Soviets never got when the USSR fell.” —Anne Applebaum, author of Gulag: A History (Pulitzer Prize)
“An essential warning of the dangers of collaborating with authoritarian regimes.” — Garry Kasparov, former world chess champion and author of Winter is Coming
“The most important work to appear for decades on the Soviet empire and its aftermath.” — Edward Lucas, former senior editor of the Economist, from the introduction

I was more involved with this text, working primarily on checking footnotes and original English language sources, as well as compiling reference material as backmatter for the book.

This book was released in May 2019, not only in Kindle format, but also in hardcover and paperback versions. Bukovsky lived to see this publication but died in October 2019.

The original text had been published in languages other than English in 1995 (there’s a whole story about why it didn’t get published in English contemporaneously), and there had been some bootleg English translations floating around. We got it published in English, officially, for the first time in 2019.

So we could get it into libraries, there are also hardcover and paperback versions.

If you don’t want to buy the book via Amazon, there’s a non-DRM e-book version available through Baen Books.

In the after matter of the book, there is a list of Putin opponents assassinated. Not all of them were poisoned. Most of them were shot. These don’t include the many defenestrations that have occurred (sorry, not keeping a list of those.)

Of the three books I linked above, I’d recommend To Build a Castle the most, not because it’s the most important but because it makes the most compelling case and is the easiest to read. It can give some moral suasion in standing up against autocrats, even when it’s a “faceless” bureaucracy.

Judgment in Moscow is the most important in documenting the history, but it is more a thorough, academic tome. Allegations is more recent in events, but I think we all know what Putin is at this point. If you forget, Putin will do something shortly to remind you. Judgment in Moscow is needed to document how deliberate Soviet policy was in using its useful idiots and not-so-idiots in the West.

Pro-Democracy and Anti-Communism is a Nonpartisan Issue

Paul was a Democrat, and I’m a Republican. That was never an issue between us, because we were aligned on core values with respect to democracy and anti-communism.

Paul did a lot of get-out-the-vote activism during election season, and you can see that more recently he was involved in immigrant rights activism. I’ll link once again to the non-profits that Paul’s widow requested donations for in his memory.

Acacia Center for Justice:
https://bit.ly/acaciapaul
or to the
Coalition for Humane Immigrants Rights
(CHIRLA):
https://bit.ly/paulchirla

We were children of the 1970s/1980s, and more importantly, Paul had met and talked with the Soviet dissidents of the later generations, when Soviet policy had a “softer” face, but was still brutal.

More to the Man

I mainly knew Paul through online interactions, and some of his activities were known above. I talked with him a little about AI developments, as we were both techies (of sorts).

But as mentioned in his obit, he was in a band: