Alleged Victims
- Russian writer Maksim Gorky and his son. During the Trial of the Twenty One in 1938, NKVD chief Genrikh Yagoda admitted that he poisoned to death Maksim Gorky and his son and unsuccessfully tried to poison future NKVD boss Nikolay Yezhov. The attempted poisoning of Yezhov was later officially dismissed as falsification, but Vyacheslav Molotov believed that the poisoning accusations were true. Yagoda was never officially rehabilitated (recognized as an innocent victim of political repressions) by Soviet authorities.
- Soviet leader Joseph Stalin. Russian historians Anton Antonov-Ovseenko and Edvard Radzinsky believe that Stalin was poisoned by associates of NKVD chief Lavrentiy Beria, based on the interviews of a former Stalin bodyguard and numerous circumstantial evidence. Stalin planned to dismiss and execute Molotov and other senior members of the Soviet regime in 1953. According to Radzinsky, Stalin was poisoned by Khrustalev, a senior bodyguard briefly mentioned in the memoirs of Svetlana Alliluyeva, Stalin's daughter.
- Journalist Anna Politkovskaya. During the Beslan school hostage crisis in September 2004 and while on her way to Beslan to help in negotiations with the hostage-takers, Politkovskaya fell violently ill and lost consciousness after drinking tea given to her by Aeroflot flight attendant. She survived. The drug was allegedly prepared in the FSB poison facility.
- Another victim was former KGB agent Alexander Litvinenko. He was poisoned in a sushibar in London. Traces of polonium-210 were found in his body. Litvinenko himself accused, in a farwell letter, president Vladimir Putin of being behind the attack on his life. Litvinenko was critic of the Putin regime and accused the FSB of being behind the 1999 attacks in Russia. He died on the 23rd October 2006.
Read more about this topic: Poison Laboratory Of The Soviet Secret Services
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