More of Kremlin’s Opponents Are Ending Up Dead
By ANDREW E. KRAMERAUG. 20, 2016
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The funeral of Alexander V. Litvinenko, a Putin opponent who died of radioactive polonium-210 poisoning in London in 2006. CreditPool photo by Cathal McNaughton
MOSCOW — From a certain perspective, certainly the Kremlin’s, Vladimir Kara-Murza’s behavior in Washington could be seen as treasonous, a brazen betrayal of his homeland.
In a series of public meetings on Capitol Hill, Mr. Kara-Murza, a leader in the Russian opposition, urged American lawmakers to expand economic sanctions against the Russian government under a law known as the Magnitsky Act. That would hasten political change in Russia, he argued.
Back in Moscow a month later, in May 2015, the changes Mr. Kara-Murza detected were going on in his own body. Midway through a meeting with fellow dissidents, beads of sweat inexplicably dotted his forehead. His stomach churned.
“It all went so fast,” he recalled. “In the space of about 20 minutes, I went from feeling completely normal to having a rapid heart rate, really high blood pressure, to sweating and vomiting all over the place, and then I lost consciousness.” He had ingested a poison, doctors told him after he emerged from a weeklong coma, though they could find no identifiable trace of it.
While Mr. Kara-Murza survived, few others in his position have proved as lucky. He said he was certain he had been the target of a security service poisoning. Used extensively in the Soviet era, political murders are again playing a prominent role in the Kremlin’s foreign policy, the most brutal instrument in an expanding repertoire of intimidation tactics intended to silence or otherwise intimidate critics at home and abroad.
Russia’s president, Vladimir V. Putin, has made no secret of his ambition to restore his country to what he sees as its rightful place among the world’s leading nations. He has invested considerable money and energy into building an image of a strong and morally superior Russia, in sharp contrast with what he portrays as weak, decadent and disorderly Western democracies.
Muckraking journalists, rights advocates, opposition politicians, government whistle-blowers and other Russians who threaten that image are treated harshly — imprisoned on trumped-up charges, smeared in the news media and, with increasing frequency, killed.
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Vladimir Kara-Murza, a Russian opposition leader, said he had been poisoned. CreditAl Drago/The New York Times
Political murders, particularly those accomplished with poisons, are nothing new in Russia, going back five centuries. Nor are they particularly subtle. While typically not traceable to any individuals and plausibly denied by government officials, poisonings leave little doubt of the state’s involvement — which may be precisely the point.
“Outside of popular culture, there are no highly skilled hit men for hire,” Mark Galeotti, a professor at New York University and an authority on the Russian security services, said in an interview. “If it’s a skilled job, that means it’s a state asset.”
Other countries, notably Israel and the United States, pursue targeted killings, but in a strict counterterrorism context. No other major power employs murder as systematically and ruthlessly as Russia does against those seen as betraying its interests abroad. Killings outside Russia were even given legal sanction by the nation’s Parliament in 2006.
Applied most notoriously in the case of Alexander V. Litvinenko, a Putin opponent who died of polonium-210 poisoning in London in 2006, murders and deaths under mysterious circumstances are now seen as such a menace that Kremlin critics now often flee the country and keep their whereabouts secret.
Russia has never acknowledged using the authority under the 2006 law and has specifically denied any government ties to high-profile cases, including the Litvinenko murder.
Among those fleeing Russia recently is Grigory Rodchenkov, a whistle-blower in Russia’s sports doping scandal.
This is not without reason. In the case over state-sponsored doping, two other officials with knowledge of the scheme died unexpectedly as the outlines of the scandal began to emerge. Just this month, another whistle-blower, Yulia Stepanova, a runner in hiding with her husband in the United States, was forced to move amid fears that hackers had found her location. “If something happens to us,” she said, “then you should know that it is not an accident.”
“The government is using the special services to liquidate its enemies,” Gennadi V. Gudkov, a former member of Parliament and onetime lieutenant colonel in the K.G.B., said in an interview. “It was not just Litvinenko, but many others we don’t know about, classified as accidents or maybe semi-accidents.”
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Sergei L. Magnitsky, a lawyer and auditor, was jailed on tax evasion charges while investigating Russian corruption. He died in 2009 after he was denied essential medical care in prison. CreditMikhail Voskresensky/Reuters
Most recently, a coroner ruled that blunt-force trauma caused the death of a Kremlin insider, Mikhail Y. Lesin, 57, in a Washington hotel room last year, not the heart attack his colleagues first said. In July, the Russian Interfax news agency reported that Aleksandr Poteyev, 64, an intelligence officer accused of defecting and betraying a ring of Russian spies living undercover in American suburbs, had died in the United States.
Still, the Magnitsky Act, the law that Mr. Kara-Murza was in Washington urging lawmakers to expand, has proved to be perhaps the most lethal topic of all over the years.
Sergei L. Magnitsky, a lawyer and auditor, was jailed on tax evasion charges while investigating a $230 million government tax “refund” that corrupt Russian officials had granted to themselves. He died in 2009 after having been denied essential medical care in prison, earning the Kremlin widespread condemnation.
