Under Russian Terror, All Exiles Are Fearful and All Deaths Are Suspicious

By Masha Gessen, The New Yorker

14 April 18

he Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, an intergovernmental authority, has confirmed that the former Russian spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia, who were hospitalized in England last month, were poisoned with Novichok, a Russian-made nerve agent. What’s more, the form of the gas was pure enough to suggest that it was deployed by a state actor. “They practically wrote that it was Russia,” an anchor on a Russian state-television news show concluded. “Though, of course, it’s not so.”

The official Russian line on the poisonings is that they were set up—presumably by the British government—in order to frame Russia. The Russian Foreign Ministry has issued a series of denials and counter-accusations, and, on Monday, the foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, addressing Russian diplomats who have been expelled by different Western countries, called the entire affair an “unprecedented provocation.” The Russian media, for their part, have aired endless, daily reports on the Skripals, methodically casting doubt on every aspect of the story. Why are the Skripals recovering? journalists ask, implying that if the father and daughter had really been poisoned by Russian-made nerve gas, they would be good and dead. Why do their voices sound so strong? Why did they turn off location services on their cell phones on the day of the poisoning? Why hasn’t Yulia returned to Russia?

The practice of committing—or in this case, attempting—blatant murder and following it with a series of equally blatant denials is nearly as old as Soviet state terror. During the Great Terror of 1937–38, the secret police killed thousands of people every day, but hid this fact from the victims’ families. Soviet terror abroad worked similarly, if more selectively. The Soviets killed defectors, such as Georgy Agabekov, a rogue secret-police officer who was assassinated in Paris, in 1938, eight years after he defected to the West. This was legal under a 1927 Soviet law that made defection punishable by execution. But they also killed suspected traitors, such as the American Communist Juliet Stuart Poyntz, who disappeared in New York City, in 1937. And, most famously, they killed Leon Trotsky, the out-of-favor revolutionary who was banished from the Soviet Union, in 1929, and killed in Mexico City, in 1940.

Ramón Mercader, who killed Trotsky with an ice axe, denied any connection to the U.S.S.R.—he claimed that he killed Trotsky over a woman. But, once he completed his twenty-year sentence in Mexico, he moved to the Soviet Union, where he was promptly awarded Hero of the U.S.S.R., the highest military honor. Mercader lived out his days in Cuba but is buried in Moscow, with a pseudonym on his gravestone.

Soviet media denounced the dead Trotsky, just as it had denounced him when he was alive, as an enemy not only of the Soviet state but of all the world’s working classes. Three decades later, an entirely new generation of exiles—dissidents who were expelled from the U.S.S.R. or who escaped its satellites—were denounced in only slightly milder terms. Some of them were also killed. In 1978, the Bulgarian dissident writer Georgi Markov was murdered with a poisoned umbrella, in London. (Earlier, more conventional attempts to poison Markov had failed.) In 1981, a terrorist cell operating out of East Germany detonated a bomb at the Munich headquarters of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty; no one was killed. These high-profile attacks, combined with the continued vitriol of Soviet media, made murder a credible threat for Soviet exiles. Every accident, and every heart attack, began to look suspicious. When the exiled writer Andrei Amalrik died, in a car accident, in Spain, on his way to a human-rights conference, many observers in the U.S.S.R. and abroad were convinced that he had been murdered, although people who shared the ride with him said that he had been tired and lost control of the car. When the exiled singer-songwriter Alexander Galich died, from electrocution, while setting up a new stereo system in his Paris apartment, in 1977, the dissident community split among similar lines.

A generation later, when the exiled oligarch Boris Berezovsky was found dead in his house in London, in 2013, his large circle of friends and acquaintances split into two irreconcilable camps: those who believed that Berezovsky committed suicide, and those who were convinced that he was killed by Russians. In Berezovsky’s case, one might argue, it was a distinction without a difference: the former Kremlin kingmaker had been hounded by Russian agents for years, and Scotland Yard had foiled assassination attempts against him. One of his closest allies, the former Russian secret-police agent Alexander Litvinenko, had been killed by polonium poisoning, in London, in 2006. It took nearly ten years for an official inquest to place the blame on the Kremlin. Now probable culpability for the attempted murder of the Skripals has been assigned much faster.

To Russians living—and dying—abroad, especially in the United Kingdom, any number of other deaths appear suspicious. A BuzzFeed report last year identified fourteen deaths that might have been hits. After the Skripal poisoning, another high-profile Russian from Berezovsky’s circle was found dead, in London, and his death was quickly ruled a homicide.

In addition to the many recent deaths that remain mysterious, some of the deaths from the seventies and eighties continue to ignite debate. When, one day, late-Soviet and Russian secret-police records can be examined, it will likely emerge that some presumed murders were, in fact, accidents, and some apparent accidents might have been murders. But, in the uninterrupted logic of terror, the facts matter less than the fear. Hundreds of the Kremlin’s active opponents have left Russia in the last six years, moving the intellectual center of the opposition abroad, much as it happened in the seventies. In London, New York, and the Baltic republics, they continue to meet, organize, and plan a post-Putin future; in fact, the former chess champion Garry Kasparov, who moved to New York five years ago, chaired this week the Forum for a Free Russia, the fifth such gathering he has organized, in the Lithuanian capital of Vilnius. Every person at the gathering, and scores of other Russian activists who are not there, have watched the unfolding Skripal investigation and wondered, at least occasionally, if they might not be next.