There are many ways to incapacitate an enemy. But, historically, few have proved so attractive to the Soviet and Russian security services as poisoning. Ever since Vladimir Lenin set up his poison factory, known as the “Special Room”, over a century ago, poisonings have become one of the Kremlin’s preferred ways to eliminate, cripple or terrorise enemies and critics. Over the decades, it has built up unrivalled expertise in the field.
During the Soviet period, the Kremlin was said to have one of the biggest biological and chemical weapons programmes in the world. At one point, according to Boris Volodarsky, a former Russian military intelligence officer and author of a book on the KGB’s poison factory, it involved an estimated 25,000 to 32,000 people across more than 20 military and civilian laboratories, plus an additional 10,000 staff at bioweapons laboratories run out of the defence ministry. Early experiments began with sulphur mustards — a blistering agent that was quickly discarded for use in assassinations because of its tendency to be detected on modern autopsies and its lack of effectiveness. Later experiments focused on other toxins such as ricin, digitoxin and curare, which had the benefit of being both fatally effective and mirroring the symptoms of ordinary ailments, while also being effective at very low doses.
Most targeted poisonings are, by design, hard to detect. “It’s very difficult,” said Yuri Felshtinksy, a KGB historian and author of From Red Terror to Terrorist State, a book about Russia’s intelligence services. “I mean, if [someone is] killed with a gun or with a knife, it’s very easy to prove. But if the idea is to eliminate somebody without letting people obviously know that person was eliminated, poisoning is a very useful tool.”
TRUMP AND THE FBI
The FBI took Kara-Murza’s samples but initially declined to release his results to him. It was only after he requested documents under the Freedom of Information Act in 2019, and sued the US justice department the following year, that highly redacted documents were released. In them, the FBI stated that its investigation had been “unable to pinpoint the exact cause of Kara-Murza’s illness” but that “the team of doctors that treated Kara-Murza in the United States feel unequivocally that he was the victim of poisoning, either accidental or criminal”. It added: “The sum total of the symptoms and health effects Kara-Murza experienced could not have been brought about without a toxin being introduced to his system.” The Kremlin, meanwhile, blamed Kara-Murza’s medical problems on alcohol.
NAVALNY
Book
Yuri Felshtinksy, a KGB historian and author of From Red Terror to Terrorist State, a book about Russia’s intelligence services
Law, Power, and Justice 
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