Back in the second half of the 30s, a special toxicological laboratory was created in the NKVD, which, since 1940, was headed by a brigade doctor, and later by a colonel of state security, Professor Grigory Mayranovsky (until 1937 he headed a group on poisons as part of the Institute of Biochemistry of the USSR Academy of Sciences, which also worked under patronage of the state security bodies; in the NKVD for the same purposes there was also a bacteriological laboratory, headed by the colonel of the medical service, Professor Sergei Muromtsev). In 1951, Mairanovsky was arrested as part of a campaign to combat cosmopolitans, sentenced to 10 years in prison, and in 1960, shortly after being released from prison early, died under unexplained circumstances. Most likely, he himself became a victim of poison - he knew too much, and even tried to bother about rehabilitation.
From prison, Mairanovsky wrote with pride to Beria: "More than a dozen sworn enemies of the Soviet regime, including nationalists of all kinds, were destroyed by my hand." During the investigation and trial of Beria, he and his subordinate General Pavel Sudoplatov were accused of poisoning four people. These cases are described in Sudoplatov's memoirs "Special Operations. Lubyanka and the Kremlin". By the way, in the verdict in the Sudoplatov case, passed by the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court in 1958 (Pavel Anatolyevich was given 15 years), it says:
“Beria and his accomplices, committing grave crimes against humanity, experienced deadly, painful poisons on living people. Similar criminal experiments took place against a large number of people sentenced to capital punishment, and against persons disliked by Beria and his accomplices. the laboratory, created for the production of experiments to test the action of the poison on a living person, worked under the supervision of Sudoplatov and his deputy Eitingon from 1942 to 1946, who demanded from the laboratory workers poisons only tested on humans."
In 1946, one of the leaders of the Ukrainian nationalists, Shumsky, who was in exile in Saratov, was destroyed in this way; in 1947, the Greek Catholic Archbishop of Transcarpathia Romzha was destroyed in the same way. They both died of congestive heart failure, which was actually the result of curare poisoning. Mairanovsky personally injected Shumsky on the train in the presence of Sudoplatov, and Romzhu was poisoned in this way after a car accident set up by the Chekists.
The Jewish engineer from Poland Samet, who was engaged in secret work on submarines in Ulyanovsk in 1946, also became a victim of Mairanovsky's poisons. When the "authorities" learned that Samet was going to leave for Palestine, the Chekists seized him, took him out of the city, gave him a lethal injection of curare, and then feigned death from acute heart failure. Another unfortunate person is the American Oggins, who worked closely with the Comintern and was arrested in 1938. During the war years, his wife turned to the American authorities with a request to release her husband from the USSR. The American representative met with Oggins in 1943 at the Butyrka prison. The MGB did not want to release him, so that he could not tell the truth about the Gulag in the West. In 1947, Oggins was given a lethal injection at the prison hospital.
According to Sudoplatov's quite solid assumption, in the same 1947, with the help of poison in the Lubyanka prison, the Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg was killed, according to the official Soviet-Russian version he died of acute heart failure. The motive for the murder could be the same as in the case of Oggins: the Swedish Foreign Ministry was interested in the fate of Wallenberg.
Let us name a number of other cases in which, as can be assumed, poisons from the KGB special laboratory were used. So, in 1956, the nephew of the former Japanese Prime Minister Prince Konoe, an officer of the Japanese army, involved in rather delicate negotiations, was repatriated to Japan from the USSR. On the way, he died of transient typhus. The last commandant of Berlin, Helmut Weidling, died in November 1955 in Vladimir prison from acute heart failure, after the decision was made to repatriate him. Perhaps Khrushchev did not want him to tell the public about Hitler's last days and the circumstances of his suicide. It is not excluded that the German Field Marshal Ewald von Kleist, who died in October 1954 from acute heart failure, was killed in the same Vladimir prison in the same way. The Soviet leadership probably did not want such an experienced military leader to end up in the FRG sooner or later, and could also take revenge on him, since it was Kleist who was one of the initiators of the formation of the Cossack units of the Wehrmacht from former Soviet citizens. By the way, in those years when Kleist and Weidling died, Mairanovsky was also kept in Vladimirka. Was it an irony of fate, or did they decide to use Grigory Moiseevich in his main specialty?
All sanctions for poisoning were given by the top political leadership - Stalin or Khrushchev. It is possible that earlier, back in 1934, the famous Ukrainian historian Mikhail Hrushevsky, the former head of the Central Rada, was poisoned. He died shortly after an injection in a Moscow clinic.
Finally, in 1957 and 1959. with the help of ampoules of potassium cyanide, the KGB killer Bogdan Stashinsky killed the leaders of Ukrainian nationalists Lev Rebet and Stepan Bandera (for some reason Ukrainians are especially lucky for "KGB" poisoning, at least for those that became known), about which he repented and defected in 1961 year in Germany, Stashinsky honestly told the West German court. In 1958, with the help of radioactive talc, they tried to kill the Soviet defector Nikolai Khokhlov, who was instructed by the KGB to kill the head of the NTS Grigory Okulovich and the chairman of the Provisional Government Alexander Kerensky. Khokhlov was saved with great difficulty by American doctors; he spent a whole year in the hospital.
The last known poisoning, in which the KGB was involved, dates back to 1980, when a Bulgarian dissident Georgi Markov, who worked for the BBC, was mortally wounded in London with the help of a poisoned umbrella. This operation was carried out by the state security organs of Bulgaria, but the poison was passed on to them by the KGB General Oleg Kalugin, who honestly admitted this during the years of perestroika.
However, just in the case of Viktor Yushchenko, the secret service with a powerful toxicological laboratory was unlikely to act: it would most likely choose a more suitable poison for poisoning, which guarantees a lethal outcome and does not leave, unlike dioxins, persistent traces in the body. Most likely, the people who poisoned Yushchenko used the first poisons at hand, suitable for mixing it into food in advance. Poisons based on hydrocyanic acid, which decompose in the open air or react with sugar and some other food substances, are not suitable for this purpose. (Therefore, for example, it was not possible to poison Grigory Rasputin with potassium cyanide: the poison was placed in cakes and in sweet Madeira, and it decomposed from interaction with sugar.) But persistent dioxins can be easily dissolved in advance in any fatty food.
"Active measures" of the Soviet special services
The legal basis for conducting "active operations" abroad was the decree dictated by Stalin and adopted by the Central Executive Committee of the USSR on November 21, 1927, which read: "Persons who refuse to return to the USSR are outlawed. Outlawing entails: a) confiscation of all property the convicted person, b) the execution of the convicted person 24 hours after his identity has been verified. This law is retroactive. " This decree was also applied against those immigrants from the territories annexed to the USSR later, who themselves were never citizens of the Russian Empire or citizens of the Soviet Union. Soviet agents killed such prominent deserters as Ignatius Reiss, Walter Krivitsky and Georgy Agabekov. At the same time, at the end of the 1920s, under the chairman of the OGPU Vyacheslav Menzhinsky, a special group of employees of the Comintern and intelligence was created, whose main task was to destroy the political opponents of the USSR, primarily from among the Russian emigrants and defectors. The most famous "active actions" of the Soviet special services were the abductions of generals Alexander Kutepov and Yevgeny Miller, the murder of Ukrainian nationalist leaders Yevgeny Konovalets, Lev Rebet and Stepan Bandera, Stalin's main political opponent, Leon Trotsky, and Afghan President Hafizullah Amin.
Abduction of General Kutepov
The head of the Russian All-Military Union, General Alexander Kutepov, was kidnapped by Soviet agents in Paris on January 26, 1930 with the assistance of one of the leaders of the Regional Military Alliance General Nikolai Skoblin. OGPU officers, one of whom was in the uniform of a French policeman, pushed Kutepov into a car, put him to sleep with an injection and took the general to the port of Marseille. There Kutepov was loaded onto a Soviet motor ship under the guise of a head mechanic on a spree. In protest against the kidnapping of 6,000 Paris taxi drivers - mostly Russian émigrés - went on strike. Prominent representatives of the Russian emigration demanded that the French authorities intervene and release the general, but by that time the ship with Kutepov had already left the territorial waters of France. According to the version coming from the KGB, General Kutepov died of a heart attack shortly after the ship passed the Black Sea straits, 100 miles from Novorossiysk.
The reason for the kidnapping and, possibly, the murder of Kutepov was his active struggle against the Soviet regime, which he continued in exile, in particular, by sending terrorist groups to Russia to destroy the party leaders and employees of the OGPU.
General Miller's kidnapping
Kutepov's successor as chairman of the ROVS, General Yevgeny Miller, was abducted in Paris on September 22, 1937 by the NKVD with the assistance of their longtime agents, General Nikolai Skoblin and the former Minister of the Provisional Government Sergei Tretyakov (in the house on Kolize Street, which belonged to Tretyakov, was the headquarters of the ROVS). Skoblin lured Miller into a trap, allegedly inviting him to a meeting with representatives of German intelligence. Evgeny Karlovich suspected that something was wrong and left a note where he warned that he was leaving for a meeting with Skoblin and if he did not return, then Skoblin was a traitor. Miller was brought aboard the Soviet ship "Maria Ulyanova" in a closed wooden box under the guise of a particularly valuable cargo. Miller's deputy, General Pyotr Kusonsky, delayed opening the note, which made it possible for Skoblin to escape from Paris to Republican Spain. There he was soon killed by NKVD officers. According to the version published by the late General of State Security Pavel Sudoplatov, Skoblin died in a Franco air raid on Barcelona. His last letter from Spain to an unknown NKVD officer nicknamed "Stakh" was dated November 11, 1937. Tretyakov, who helped Skoblin escape after being exposed, was executed in 1943 by the Germans as a Soviet spy. Skoblin's wife, singer Nadezhda Plevitskaya, was convicted by a French court as an accomplice in Miller's abduction and died in a French prison in 1941.
After the publication of Miller's note, the French authorities protested to the Soviet embassy against the abduction of the general and threatened to send a destroyer to intercept the Soviet motor ship Maria Ulyanova, which had just left Le Havre. Ambassador Yakov Surits said that the French side will bear full responsibility for the detention of a foreign ship in international waters, and warned that Miller would not be found on the ship anyway. The French backed down, probably realizing that the Chekists would not give up their booty alive. Miller was taken to Leningrad and on September 29 he was at the Lubyanka. There he was kept as a "secret prisoner" under the name of Pyotr Vasilyevich Ivanov. On May 11, 1939, on the personal order of the People's Commissar of Internal Affairs Lavrentia Beria, undoubtedly sanctioned by Stalin, he was shot by the commandant of the NKVD Vasily Blokhin.
The murder of Yevgeny Konovalets
The leader of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) Yevhen Konovalets, a former warrant officer of the Austrian army and a former commander of the Siege Corps of the army of the Ukrainian People's Republic in 1918-1919, was killed in Rotterdam on May 23, 1938 by a bomb explosion. The bomb was handed over to him under the guise of a box of Lviv chocolates by a staff member of the NKVD and the future lieutenant general of state security Pavel Sudoplatov, who infiltrated the OUN and became a confidant of Konovalets. The NKVD spread rumors that Konovalets fell victim to a showdown among the Ukrainian emigration. In his memoirs, Sudoplatov justified the murder of Konovalets by the fact that "the fascist terrorist OUN Konovalets-Bandera officially proclaimed a state of war with Soviet Russia and the USSR, which lasted from 1919 to 1991." In fact, the OUN as an organization at that time was not engaged in terror, but only tried to introduce its agents into the USSR, which was supposed to lead the future popular uprising. The main rival of Konovalets, Stepan Bandera, was a supporter of terror. In 1934, without the knowledge of Konovalets, he organized the assassination of the Polish Minister of Internal Affairs, General Kazimir Peratsky, for which he was sentenced to death, commuted to life imprisonment due to demonstrations by Ukrainians in Poland. The Germans released him from prison in 1939. The death of Konovalets only accelerated the transition of the OUN to terrorist methods of struggle, which were widely used by nationalists in 1941-1953 in Ukraine and in the eastern provinces of Poland. It is possible that in the case of Chechnya, the elimination of Maskhadov will only strengthen the positions of the "irreconcilable".
The assassination of Leon Trotsky
Leon Trotsky was fatally wounded by an alpenstock (ice ax) blow to the head at his residence in Coyoacan on the outskirts of Mexico City on August 20, 1940. Lev Davydovich managed to shout and grab his killer, biting his hand. This did not allow the attempted escape. The guards tried to finish him off on the spot, but Trotsky stopped the massacre, stating that it was necessary to force this man to say who he was and by whom he was sent. The beaten begged: "I had to do it! They are holding my mother! I was forced to! Kill immediately or stop hitting!"
Trotsky died in the hospital on August 21. The blow was struck by an agent of the NKVD, the Spanish Republican Ramon Mercader. He entered Trotsky's residence under the name of the Canadian journalist Frank Jackson, an admirer of the ideas of the "exiled prophet." During his arrest, he also had a passport in the name of the Belgian Jacques Mornard. At the trial, Mercader claimed to have acted alone. The driving motive, he said, was disappointment with Trotsky, who allegedly offered him to go to the USSR and kill Stalin. The court dismissed this motive as fantastic. For the murder, Mercader was sentenced to 20 years in prison - capital punishment under Mexican law.
From the very first day in the whole world, no one doubted that the NKVD and Stalin were behind the killer. This was written directly in the newspapers. The identity of Mercader was not established until after World War II, when Ramon Mercader's police dossier was found in Spain with fingerprints that matched the fingerprints of Trotsky's assassin. In 1960, after serving his sentence, Mercader was awarded the title of Hero of the Soviet Union. Mercader's actions in Mexico were led by a personnel officer of the NKVD, later Major General of State Security, Naum Eitingon. His accomplice and mistress was Ramona's mother, Caridad Mercader. In Moscow, the operation was prepared and supervised by Pavel Sudoplatov, deputy head of the department of the Main Directorate of State Security.
The order to assassinate Trotsky was given by Stalin and the head of the NKVD, Lavrenty Beria. In 1931, on Trotsky's letter, proposing to create a united front in Spain, where a revolution was brewing, Stalin imposed a resolution: “I think that Mr. Trotsky, this godfather and Menshevik charlatan, should have been hit on the head through the ECCI (Executive Committee of the Comintern. - B. S..). Let him know his place. In fact, this was the signal to start the hunt for Trotsky. According to some estimates, it cost the NKVD about $ 5 million.
The murder of Lev Rebet and Stepan Bandera
Leaders of Ukrainian nationalists Lev Rebet and Stepan Bandera were killed by KGB agent Bogdan Stashinsky in Munich on October 12, 1957 and October 15, 1959, respectively. The murder weapon was a specially designed device that fired ampoules with potassium cyanide. The victim died of poisoning, the poison quickly decomposed, and doctors pronounced death from sudden cardiac arrest. Initially, in the cases of Rebet and Bandera, the police, along with versions of murder, considered the possibility of suicide or death from natural causes.
For successful assassination attempts, Stashinsky was awarded the Orders of the Red Banner and Lenin, but under the influence of his wife he repented of his deed and on August 12, 1961, on the very eve of the erection of the Berlin Wall, he confessed to the authorities of West Germany. On October 19, 1962, Stashinsky was sentenced by the court to several years in prison, but was soon released and received asylum in the West under an assumed name. As the then chief of the Federal Intelligence Service, General Reinhard Gehlen, wrote in his memoirs, "the terrorist, by the grace of Shelepin, has already served his term and is now living as a free man in a free world."
The court issued a private ruling, in which the chief blame for the preparation of the assassination attempts was laid on the heads of the Soviet state security bodies - Ivan Serov (in 1957) and Alexander Shelepin (in 1959).
It is generally accepted that due to the noise raised during the Stashinsky trial, the KGB subsequently refused to carry out "active measures", at least in the Western states. Since then, there has not been a single high-profile murder in which the KGB has been convicted (if, however, not counting the assistance to the Bulgarian special services in the elimination of the dissident writer Georgy Markov, as reported by the former KGB general Oleg Kalugin). Either the Soviet special services began to work thinner, or they switched to the elimination of relatively little known people, whose death could not make much noise, or they really refrained from carrying out terrorist acts abroad. The only known exception so far is the assassination of Afghan President Hafizullah Amin on the first day of the Soviet invasion of that country.
Assassination of Afghan President Hafizullah Amin
The President of Afghanistan and the leader of the pro-Communist People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan, Hafizullah Amin, was killed on the night of December 27, 1979 at the very beginning of the Soviet military intervention in this country. His palace on the outskirts of Kabul was taken by storm by a special group of the KGB "Alpha", together with the special forces of the Main Intelligence Directorate. The Alpha fighters arrived in the Afghan capital without hindrance, ostensibly to guard Amin. The decision to destroy the Afghan president was made by the Soviet Politburo on December 12. KGB agents put poison in Amin's food. The unsuspecting Soviet doctor pulled the dictator literally from the other world. After that, it was necessary to involve the Alpha group and the GRU special forces. Amin was shot along with his family and several dozen guards. The official report attributed the murder's dubious honor to the "healthy forces of the Afghan revolution," although in reality Amin was killed by Alpha officers. The participants in the storming of the palace and the assassination of the Afghan president began to remember this event only in the late 1980s, with the advent of the era of glasnost.
The reasons for the murder of Amin were that Moscow had previously decided to rely on his predecessor as president of the creator of the PDPA Nur-Mohammed Taraki and advised him to eliminate such a serious rival as Amin, who enjoyed influence in the Afghan army. On September 8, 1978, in the presidential palace, Taraki's guards tried to kill Amin, but only his bodyguard was killed. Amin survived, raised loyal units of the Kabul garrison and removed Taraki. Soon Taraki was strangled. Amin intensified the terror against the Muslim rebels, but did not achieve the goal. The Soviet leadership did not like the fact that Amin came to power without his approval. They decided to remove him, although Amin, like Taraki, repeatedly asked for Soviet troops to enter the country in order to cope with the ever-growing insurgency.
The "active operation" to eliminate Amin most of all resembles those that Nikolai Patrushev promises to carry out against Maskhadov, Basayev, Khattab and other leaders of the Chechen resistance. After all, Afghanistan was a traditional sphere of Soviet influence, and with the introduction of troops, Moscow was going to make this country its obedient satellite. For this, it was necessary to eliminate the Afghan ruler, suspected of willfulness, in order to replace him with a puppet - Babrak Karmal, who did not enjoy any influence.
Amin was killed on the territory of an independent country. It is not entirely clear from Patrushev's speech whether he is going to destroy Maskhadov and others in Chechnya itself, which formally remains part of Russian territory, or also on the territory of other states. In the latter case, an international scandal cannot be avoided, as was the case with Bandera, Rebet and after other "active actions" of the Soviet special services.
