Alexey Navalny is but the Latest in a Long Line of Putin’s Victims

“The old Soviet KGB refined this strategy to perfection,” said Soldatov. “Poison is unique in that its victim does not suffer alone. Their relatives and friends share the horrific experience of the loved one’s suffering.” As does the public, if they follow the story in the media.

Lacing a meal or a cup of tea with poison is simple and requires no special training, Gennadi V. Gudkov, a former opposition member of Parliament and onetime colonel in the K.G.B., told the New York Times in a telephone interview on Thursday.

“It is easy, and easy to cover your tracks,” he said. “Any person can use poison.” Poisons can be intended either to kill or to incapacitate a person with a long and unpleasant illness, he said.

Vladimir Putin, a former senior KGB officer, is thus following in the footsteps of his predecessors who ran the Soviet secret police organs since the inception of the Soviet Union: Cheka (1917-1922); NKVD (1922-1943); OGPU (a sub-unit of NKVD: 1923-1934); GUGB (a sub-unit of NKVD: 1934-1941); NKGB (1943-1946); MGB (1946-1953); MVD (1953-1954); and KGB (1954-1991).

In 1991, following to dissolution of the Soviet Union, the functions of the KGB were split between the Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) and the Federal Counterintelligence Service which later became the Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation (FSB). In 1995, another secret service agency was created — the Federal Protective Service (FSO).

— For more on the Russian secret services’ use of poison since the inception of the Soviet Union, see Boris Volodarsky, The KGB’s Poison Factory: From Lenin to Litvinenko (2010), and Boris Volodarsky, Assassins: The KGB’s Poison Factory Ten Years On (2020).

2. Putin’s Victims
Navalny is but the latest of Putin’s critics who suffered a violent attack by the Kremlin’s agents (Navalny’s own fate still hangs in the balance). Tomorrow, Tuesday, we will publish the names and circumstances of death of all of the known victims of the Putin regime. Well, not all of them, because the list would be way too long. So we pared it down to about 65 names. You will notice that many of those violently killed by Putin’s agents belong to his favorite target group – free-thinking journalists (he repeatedly charges that the free quality media is the “Enemy of the People,” and he describes reports of his strong-man tactics and corruption as “fake news”). Since Putin came to power in 2000, more than fifty journalists who wrote critical stories about him were killed violently.

3. Propaganda and Useful Idiots
Navalny became ill on Thursday, but the Kremlin prevented the hospital in the Siberian city of Omsk, where he was taken, from allowing German specialists – and Navalny’s wife – from seeing him until late Saturday. The Kremlin did not allow a German plane to take him to treatment in Germany before Sunday. The reason: Experts say that within three days, the types of poisons used by Russian agents to kill their victims either wash out of the body (if the victim survives), or decay to a point of being unrecognizable (if the victim dies). But the Kremlin’s gamble failed, and the German scientists were able to identify the group of active substances to which the specific poison used by the Russian agents belongs (the specific substance will be known in about 48 hours, after more lab tests).

The people who run Russia’s practiced, well-oiled propaganda and disinformation machine were right not take any chances on Russian doctors being able to hide every last trace of the poison Navalny ingested. Fearing that German scientists would find traces of poison in Navalny’s system, Russia’s propaganda and disinformation organs were already circulating, on Sunday, stories they cooked up following two previous attempts on Navalny’s life (2017, 2019) – that he has poisoned himself in order to be able to blame Putin and thus tarnish the reputation of the Putin regime and galvanize the opposition to it at home and abroad.

With depressing predictability, this line of Russian propaganda is already being repeated and amplified by useful idiots in the West who parrot the Kremlin’s every lie.

— For Russia’s willing helpers in the West, and the reasons why so many support Russia and Putin, see Vincent Charles Keating and Katarzyna Kaczmarska, “Russia’s Influence Is Much More than Propaganda and Fake News (HSNW, 5 April 2018).

— On the methods of Russia’s campaign of propaganda and disinformation, see Christopher Paul and Miriam Matthews, The Russian “Firehose of Falsehood” Propaganda Model: Why It Might Work and Options to Counter It (RAND, 2018).

Ben Frankel is the editor of the Homeland Security News Wire