From the Ludwig Bridge in Munich, the young man caught the tram to the Massmannplatz. Then, he walked past St. Benno’s Catholic Church, looking for the newly constructed Kreittmayrstrasse No. 7 apartment block. The dark blue car he was waiting for soon pulled in. The short, stocky man who entered the apartment struggled to remove his key from his coat, while holding a large bag of tomatoes in his other arm. Likely, he didn’t even notice the young man tying his shoelaces on the steps.
The kneeling assassin, Bohdan Stashinsky, his biographer Serhii Plokhy says, seized the opportunity to point the rolled-up newspaper upward towards his victim’s face. Then, he pressed a trigger concealed inside the newspaper that sprayed a gentle mist of cyanide over the Ukrainian anti-communist leader Stepan Bandera. The rebel died within seconds.
‘Liquid Affairs’: The women and men of the Thirteen Directorate of the Soviet Union’s Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti secret service, or KGB, used the almost poetic euphemism for their dark work. Through the Second World War, Bandera had collaborated with the Nazis, and now, with the support of the Central Intelligence Agency-backed Gelen Organisation, hoped to set Soviet-ruled Ukraine on fire. The Thirteenth Directorate had extinguished the threat.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3F_RCqUpxqg
Too loud, too crude, some purists of the Thirteenth might have thought of the air crash staged last week to eliminate mutinous mercenary commander Yevgeny Prigozhin, chief of the Wagner Group. The truth is, though, that President Valdimir Putin has proved himself a committed student of the lessons he learned at the KGB’s Felix Dzerzhinsky Academy, which he joined around 1975.
Throughout Putin’s political career, dozens of his powerful rivals have died—almost all in circumstances far too opaque for Russian authorities to even trouble themselves with the pretence of an investigation.
Also read: How Yevgeny Prigozhin, Wagner chief now presumed dead, went from ‘Putin’s chef’ to ‘biggest threat’
The house of poisons
Like all revolutionary movements, the Soviets understood the value of terror: Local newspapers were full of reports of atrocities, the scholar Alan Ball’s work shows. The Bolshevik not-so-secret service, The Cheka, scalped and skinned its opponents alive, pushed them into tanks of boiling water, and rolled them about in barrels studded with nails. A particularly creative device was invented to encourage rats to gnaw their way into the guts of imprisoned dissenters.
This early apparatus of terror soon evolved into an organisation of international reach. Led by the legendary spymaster Pavel Sudaplatov, the Department for Special Tasks was created in 1936. Famously, it organised the killing of the radical Leon Trotsky in August 1940. The department also hunted down one-time agent Ignace Reiss near Lausanne, after he returned his medals to Stalin.
Elizabeth Poretsky, Reiss’ wife, is also believed to have been targeted for assassination—but her would-be killer Gertrude Schildbach, at the last minute, snatched back a box of strychnine-laced chocolates.
Trotsky’s supporters often met horrible ends: The leader’s son, Leon Sedov, died of an overdose in a clinic run by anti-communist Russians; aide Rudolf Klement’s headless body was discovered in the Seine; friend Jacob Blumkin was lured back into the Soviet Union by a former lover, Lisa Zarubina, and then executed.
Like other foreign intelligence services—including MI6 and the CIA—the KGB regularly used assassination to kill opponents overseas.
From declassified Western documents, it has long been known there were two specialist technology centres set up to support these operations. An explosive and weapons laboratory at Kunchino, outside Moscow, and a web of poisons labs established from 1921, provided the tools for Directorate 13. The work of the former Soviet scientist Vadim Birstein records that the poisons were regularly tested on prisoners.
The victims of poisoning included the Bulgarian dissident writer Georgi Markov, killed in London by a ricin-laced pellet fired from an umbrella. The famous author Alexander Solzhenitsyn was poisoned, but survived. The former president of Afghanistan, Hafizullah Amin, was given poisoned food—but, suspicious, declined the plate. His son-in-law, though, ate what he was offered, and ended up critically ill in a Moscow hospital.
Also read: Wagner Group is a shadow instrument of Russian policy, product of a ‘deny-endorse’ paradox
An earnest student
Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, Putin returned from running the KGB station in Dresden. From early on, he demonstrated an interest in politics. The former spy approached the human rights activist Galina Starovoitova, offering to join her anti-corruption campaign. Failing this, he began working as a political fixer for the high-profile Leningrad law professor Anatoly Sobchak, who had just returned from exile in Paris. Putin acted as Sobchak’s liaison with the government, biographer Catherine Belton has recorded.
Putin soon abandoned his mentor and joined the court of President Boris Yeltsin in Moscow. Within a year, he was promoted to the Kremlin’s first deputy chief of staff, responsible for administering the country’s regions. Three months later, he was appointed to head the new post-Soviet version of the KGB, the FSB. A lieutenant colonel at the time, Putin was the junior-most officer ever appointed to the position.
Likely, the meteoric rise had to do with Putin’s deep KGB links. Although other institutions of the state had collapsed after the fall of the Soviet Union, the intelligence services continued to maintain powerful networks of influence and coercion. They had long-standing links to both the oligarchs who had taken over the country’s economy and to Russia’s powerful organised crime groups.
In 2000, riding on the back of a nationalist wave sparked by murderous bombings in Moscow carried out by Chechen jihadists, Putin became president of Russia. Critics alleged that Putin and his old KGB friends had engineered the escalation of the jihadist campaign
The killings began soon after. Sergei Yushenkov, a leading liberal MP who headed an independent commission to investigate the bombings, was shot dead outside his house in April 2003. Yury Schekochikin, a well-known investigative journalist who was also on the commission, died three months later, of a mysterious illness linked to radioactive exposure.
Legions of anti-Putin figures joined this list. The famous journalist Anna Politkovskaya fell violently ill after drinking the tea given to her by an Aeroflot flight attendant in 2004, on her way to report on a terrorism crisis. Two years later, she was shot dead outside her Moscow apartment. The opposition politician Alex Navalny, who remains in prison, was poisoned with the chemical agent Novichok.
The man who first mentored Putin would himself be found dead in February, 2000, Belton records. The man accompanying Sobchak was Shabtai Kalmanovich, a former KGB agent who had once been sentenced to five years in prison for spying in Israel. Following his release, Kalmanovich developed close ties with organised crime. Kalmanovich found Sobchak unconscious in his hotel room, but no ambulance was called for 30 minutes.
Galina Starovoitova, the human rights activist Putin had first approached, was shot dead at the entrance to her apartment building late one evening in November 1998. A former FSB officer was convicted for her killing, along with former legislator Mikhail Glushchenko.
Also read: Once upon a spooky time, when Indian and CIA spies were partners in spying
Nowhere to hide
Earlier generations of Soviet dissidents had discovered there was nowhere to hide. Alexander Zelenovskiy, a Soviet diplomat posted in Kolkata, had been dragged into the mission premises, declared insane, and forcibly repatriated to the Soviet Union in January 1958, declassified CIA records state. A diplomat in Myanmar met the same fate the next year. Anti-Soviet German activist Walter Linse was kidnapped from West Berlin in 1952 and died in a Soviet Gulag.
Like his predecessors, Putin ensured retribution was discovered to traitors. Former Soviet double agent Sergei Skripal was almost killed in the United Kingdom, after being administered the nerve agent Novichok concealed in a perfume bottle. Alexander Litvinenko, an opposition leader, was killed in London in 2006 after his tea was spiked with the radioactive metal polonium.
Even foreign leaders were not immune. The pro-European Ukrainian politician standing in 2004, Viktor Yushchenko was poisoned with a highly toxic digoxin, which left him permanently disfigured.
The mathematician-turned-media baron Boris Berezovsky, once a Putin insider, found himself in exile in London after a falling out. Later, he was found hanged to death in his bathroom, and an inquest ruled the case might have been a murder.
Prigozhin is just one in a long list of oligarchs and Putin critics who have jumped out of windows, slashed their wrists, and hanged themselves since the war in Ukraine began.
“We stand for organized terror—this should be frankly admitted,” said Felix Dzerzhinsky, the founder of the Soviet secret police. “Terror is an absolute necessity.” He would be proud of Putin.
The author is National Security Editor, ThePrint. He tweets @praveenswami. Views are personal.
(Edited by Prashant)