In 1453, the Grand Duke of Moscow died after consuming an arsenic-laced chicken dinner. In 1610, a Russian prince, considered a threat to the tsar, was poisoned by his own wife. But the medieval technique of eliminating threats to power with poison has hardly waned in more recent centuries. In 1916, a group of Russian nobles tried to kill royal advisor Grigori Rasputin by poisoning his food, but when that failed to immediately fell him, he was shot, beaten, and drowned. And in just the past 20 years, a disturbing number of Kremlin opponents have been turning up dead, often under dubious circumstances that point in one direction.
Russia’s expertise in modern techniques of assassination-by-poison is said to stem from one unfortunate event. On August 30, 1918, a young revolutionary named Fanny Kaplan fired three poisoned bullets at Vladimir Lenin, wounding but failing to kill the Bolshevik leader. After recovering from his wounds, Lenin’s secret police briefed him on the incident, revealing that Kaplan’s poison of choice was curare, a resin extracted from American plants and used by Native Americans to poison arrowheads. Lenin’s interest was piqued, and, as Boris Volodarsky writes in his exhaustive study of Soviet poisoning, The KGB’s Poison Factory, it didn’t take long for Lenin to start using poison against enemies of the state. In 1921, he opened a poison laboratory, dubbed the “Special Room” or the “lab of death.” Perhaps unsurprisingly, the leadership of the Special Room changed hands and monikers often — from 1946 to 1953 it was known as the “Chamber,” or Kamera, and new poisons were routinely tested on Soviet prisoners before being deployed against enemies.
In the 1950s, KGB agents killed two Ukrainian nationalist leaders with a poison air gun, and planned to kill Yugoslav dictator Josip Tito by way of lethal bacteria or a poisoned jewel box. Both Lenin and Stalin died of strokes, both under suspicious circumstances. Researchers have recently suggested that Lenin’s stroke was in fact poison-induced, and archival evidence suggests Tito may have sent an assassin to do the same for Stalin. Lenin’s obsession with poison may very well have accelerated his and his successor’s demise.
After Stalin’s death in 1953, Soviet agents further refined their assassination techniques, not without a few missteps. In 1957, KGB defector Nikolai Khoklov survived a thallium poisoning. In 1971, Nobel Prize Winner Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn survived an attempt to poison him, as did former Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko in 2004. Last year, Russian opposition leader Vladimir Kara-Murza went into a coma and was hospitalized after being poisoned, which he believes occurred on board an Aeroflot flight. Russian investigative journalist Anna Politkovskaya survived a poisoning onboard a Russian domestic flight in 2004, but was brutally murdered two years later. In 2003, another investigative journalist, Yuri Shchekochikhin died in a Russian hospital after a rapid illness, probably the result of a thallium poisoning, one of the Kamera’s early innovations. Similar circumstances precipitated the death of one of Putin’s former bodyguards in 2004.
In 2006, FSB officer turned Kremlin critic Alexander Litvinenko died of radioactive poisoning in London, not before collaborating with Scotland Yard officers to solve his own murder. Six years later, in another part of London, Alexander Perepilichny collapsed on a jog near his rented home and died, likely because he was poisoned by a little-known Chinese flower, gelsemium. As Jeffrey E. Stern writes in his investigation of Perepilichny’s death in The Atlantic, the mystery surrounding his case, and that of countless others before him, is the finishing flourish of a highly-planned state operation:
Once a plan is developed, it is passed down a formal chain of command, from the Kremlin to the chief of the secret service to the head of the FSB (the successor to the KGB) to the Kamera. Not even assassinations are exempt from the singular Russian bureaucracy. A target’s body type, weight, eating habits, and other details must be known by a specialist, who chooses a poison and calculates the dose. An assassin can’t count on a second chance if the dose is too low, and might be exposed as the killer if the dose is too high and symptoms come on before he can escape….Agents draw on careful planning and a long history of tradecraft, which is why when enemies of the Kremlin die, blame is almost never conclusively established.
Until now, Russians have mostly perpetrated this peculiar crime against internal enemies. But with Putin’s geopolitical influence seemingly growing, and the recent success meddling in the US election, it’s not a good time to be an enemy of a state so adept at political murder. In any case, Perepilichny’s death likely won’t be the last of its kind.
