Just like the bad old Stalin days, Vladimir Putin’s death list grows
JACK THE INSIDER
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In the bad old days of Stalin’s Soviet Union, extra-judicial killings were routine. Soviet citizens who found themselves on lists compiled by Stalin’s secret police chief, Lavrentiy Beria, were arrested and simply disappeared.
Putin’s Russia cannot be so bold. Telecommunications in the 21st century demand explanations. Prominent Russians cannot merely vanish.
A week ago, Komsomolskaya Pravda editor-in-chief Vladimir Nikolayevich Sungorkin died suddenly after appearing to suffocate, according to a report in the newspaper he had led. There’s no official cause of death although reports indicated he had suffered a stroke. He was 68 years of age.
Three days ago, the former head of Moscow Aviation Institute, Anatoly Gerashchenko, died in a fall inside the aerospace institute in the Russian capital. Reports from Russian media claimed Gerashchenko had “fallen from a great height”, clattering down a number of flights of stairs within the MAI. He was pronounced dead at the scene.
I’ve been keeping a list of prominent Russians who have died under suspicious circumstances since Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. The list is by no means complete. There are tales of murder-suicides which at face value are improbable. All are suspect and reek of extra-judicial murder. And it is more than likely that many more, without the profiles of wealth and prominence have suffered similar fates.
On September 16, Aviation Director for Russia’s Far East and Arctic Development Corporation (KRDV), Ivan Pechorin, died in what was reported as a maritime accident, near Vladivostok with reports claiming he had fallen off a boat travelling at high speed. His body was discovered two days later. Pechorin was 39.
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On September 1, the chairman of the board of Russia’s largest private oil company Lukoil, Ravil Maganov, died after falling out of the sixth-storey window at the Moscow Central Clinical Hospital.
I’ve been keeping a list of prominent Russians who have died under suspicious circumstances since Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. The list is by no means complete. There are tales of murder-suicides which at face value are improbable. All are suspect and reek of extra-judicial murder. And it is more than likely that many more, without the profiles of wealth and prominence have suffered similar fates.
On September 16, Aviation Director for Russia’s Far East and Arctic Development Corporation (KRDV), Ivan Pechorin, died in what was reported as a maritime accident, near Vladivostok with reports claiming he had fallen off a boat travelling at high speed. His body was discovered two days later. Pechorin was 39.
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On September 1, the chairman of the board of Russia’s largest private oil company Lukoil, Ravil Maganov, died after falling out of the sixth-storey window at the Moscow Central Clinical Hospital.The Russian oligarch had called for an end to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Another executive at Lukoil, Alexander Subbotin was found dead in May in circumstances that strain credibility. According to the BBC, Subbotin was found “in the basement of a shaman’s house after consuming snake venom as a hangover cure.” As you do.
In April, a former executive at Novatek a large privately owned LNG producer in Russia, Sergey Protosenya, 55, was found hanged in a villa in Lloret De Mar, Catalonia, Spain, along with the bodies of his wife, Natalya, 53, and 18-year-old daughter, Maria.
The deaths were described as a murder-suicide but Protosenya’s 22-year-old son, Fedor, believes all three were murdered. Sergey Protosenya was known to be a good family man. His wife and daughter had been bludgeoned to death with an axe.
Sergei Protosenya, wife Natalya and teenage daughter Maria were found dead in their Spanish mansion in Lloret de Mar. Picture: social media/east2west news
Sergei Protosenya, wife Natalya and teenage daughter Maria were found dead in their Spanish mansion in Lloret de Mar. Picture: social media/east2west news
On the previous day, Vladislav Avayev, former vice-president of Gazprombank, was found dead in his Moscow apartment along with the bodies of his wife and 13-year-old daughter. The deaths also appeared to be a murder-suicide. All three died of gunshot wounds.
Vasily Melnikov, owner of a company that imports medical equipment into Russia, was found dead in his apartment in Nizhny Novgorod a city 420 kilometres east of Moscow. Melnikov, his wife, and his two sons, aged 10 and four had been stabbed to death. Another murder-suicide pact apparently.
On February 24, the day Russia’s invasion began, Alexander Tyulyakov, deputy general of the treasury department for Gazprom, was found hanged in the garage of his home in St Petersburg. A note was found with his body leading investigators to conclude that Tyulyakov died by suicide. Tyulyakov was Ukrainian.
Fire brigade members wear green biohazard suits in Salisbury, England, after the attempted murder of Russian former double-agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter. Picture: AFP
Fire brigade members wear green biohazard suits in Salisbury, England, after the attempted murder of Russian former double-agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter. Picture: AFP
There are others, many others that pre-date the invasion. Oligarchs, dissidents, critics. Trip and falls. Poisonings. Many with the visible imprimatur of Putin and the FSB.
The chemical weapon, Novichok, was used by the FSB in an attempt to murder former Russian military intelligence agent, Sergei Skripal and his daughter, Yulia, in Salisbury, England. Both were poisoned but recovered. But the nerve agent had spread, contaminating others. Two British citizens fell ill, one later died.
What does all this tell us? Foremost is that Putin’s Russia holds international law in contempt. The FSB will commit murders on foreign soil just as freely as they will in Russia.
The spate of deaths since the invasion also points to an attempt to silence Putin’s critics. Scrape the surface and the hard man can only survive with the intervention of his secret police.
Moreover, it tells us that Putin is becoming increasingly desperate. This may be good news or it might be terrible. What we can see from his leadership is that he governs without compunction, without honour and without regard for basic human dignity.
Like Stalin, he appears to be incapable of feeling remorse or regret, any form of emotional connection to the world around him.
That makes him a very dangerous man indeed, worse still as he inherited a nuclear weapons stockpile second only to that of the United States and openly threatens to use them.
But now Putin can no longer claim the nonsense of a limited military operation in Ukraine. The announcement of an expansion of troop numbers in Ukraine exposes Putin to a much broader wave of dissent. In the two days since Putin raised the stakes, Russians of fighting age have headed to the Georgian border, the one country Russians can escape to without a visa.
And with that looming dissent, Putin will learn, just as Stalin chief Beria discovered, that there are only so many people he can kill before it’s his turn.
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