It doesn't begin with Skripal. It doesn't end with Navalny. Anyone who believes the Kremlin’s political bloodlust is a whim of the present, a mere pathology of Vladimir Putin, is not wrong – but they fall short. Because the story of those who left Russia to escape the state – only to be struck down by its hand in the end – is not new. It is a system. A tradition. A message, deeply embedded in the blood archives of a secret service that never disappeared, only changed its acronym.
Emigration does not protect. It marks.
Since the days of the Bolsheviks, the traitor has been the true enemy. The dissenter, the emigrant, the defector – they carry not only guilt, but shame. And Moscow does not tolerate shame. As early as the 1920s, Soviet agents kidnapped exile generals like Alexander Kutepov and Yevgeny Miller. In 1940, an assassin commissioned by Stalin killed revolutionary Leon Trotsky in Mexico. The Soviet Union showed the world what it understood by sovereignty: its enemies remained enemies – no matter where they lived.
The KGB perfected the principle.
What was once improvised later became structure. The “13th Department” of the KGB – responsible for so-called executive actions – was more than just a hit squad. It was part of a complex apparatus that pursued, poisoned, kidnapped, and discredited political opponents beyond the Iron Curtain. In cooperation with the Bulgarian DS, the East German Stasi, or the Czechoslovak security service, the KGB made dissidents disappear – not only physically, but symbolically. The message was clear: Moscow sees you. Moscow does not forget. Moscow does not forgive.
The methods: gas, rumors, hostages.
The weapons were diverse – and mostly silent. Ricin, cyanide, thallium. Poisons that kill without speaking. Umbrellas with needle tips, pens with gas nozzles, poisoned drinks, manipulated radios. The arsenal of Soviet poisoners was a laboratory of modernity – and at the same time a museum of fear.
But not all attacks ended in death. Often, the mere knowledge of constant threat was enough. Dissidents knew they had been sentenced to death in absentia. In Berlin, Vienna, London – shadows waited for them everywhere. Those lucky were discredited, not killed. Those unlucky disappeared. Or died, officially of heart failure. But in truth, of state rationale.
The dead: Stepan Bandera, Georgi Markov, Nikolai Artamonov.
In 1957, Ukrainian nationalist Lev Rebet died on a staircase in Munich – later it emerged: he had been murdered with cyanide gas sprayed from a small pistol device. Two years later, Bandera met the same fate – same method, same perpetrator: Bohdan Stashynsky, a Soviet agent who later fled to the West and confessed the murder in full detail. The Federal Republic of Germany indicted the Soviet Union – a diplomatic scandal.
In 1978, Georgi Markov died in London. The writer had criticized Bulgaria’s regime. His killers shot a ricin capsule into his leg using a modified umbrella. An artistic murder in a pedestrian zone – and a case never officially solved, though all signs pointed to the KGB.
And then there is the case of Artamonov, aka Shadrin, a Soviet naval officer who worked for the United States – in 1975, he disappeared in Vienna, kidnapped by Soviet agents. The official version: heart failure during repatriation. The unofficial one: an act of revenge by design.
The network of fear.
The KGB did not operate alone. It used alliances. Bulgarian intelligence did the handiwork, Stasi agents provided logistics, infiltrated agents in churches, media, and migrant organizations ensured subversion and disinformation. The Soviet secret service even infiltrated editorial offices of Radio Free Europe. It forged letters, constructed biographies, planted “Nazi pasts” in résumés. Those who were not killed were to be rendered impossible.
The archives remain silent. The traces do not.
In 1992, Boris Yeltsin announced the opening of the archives. But the files on political murders remained sealed. Only thanks to defectors like Nikolai Khokhlov and Oleg Kalugin did parts of the network become visible. Khokhlov, once part of a hit squad himself, warned his target – and was subsequently poisoned with thallium. Kalugin later publicly confessed to the operation against Markov. And then there is the Mitrokhin Archive – a treasure trove of evidence, smuggled out by a former KGB archivist. Inside: plans, names, targets. Only a fraction has ever been published.
And today?
The names have changed – the FSB is not the KGB, but its DNA is identical. The methods are the same. The list lives on. Marsalek, Grozev, Dobrokhotov – the cases of recent years eerily resemble the past. They too are surveilled, robbed, intimidated. And the danger comes through detours – through Bulgarian networks, digital trails, assassination plans that read like pages from a Soviet screenplay.
Consider Alexander Litvinenko, poisoned in 2006 in London with polonium-210 – an act a British court later attributed directly to Putin. Or Sergei Skripal, poisoned in 2018 in Salisbury with the military nerve agent Novichok – survived, but barely, together with his daughter. Or Alexei Navalny, whose 2020 attack once again exposed the deadly potential of Soviet-era chemical weapons: again Novichok, this time likely applied via clothing or a water bottle, by a special FSB unit – the so-called Center 34435.
Oleg Kalugin, once part of the system himself, later said: “The KGB was never an intelligence service – it was a political weapon with a license to kill.” And Christo Grozev of Bellingcat, one of the most threatened investigators of these structures, puts it succinctly: “The methods are the same. Only the technology has changed.”
Putin’s Russia has never left the KGB school. It has perfected it – with new tools, but old logic. Every enemy of the system is a traitor. And every traitor is a target – whether in London, Berlin, or Los Angeles.
The list is not complete.
It still breathes. It does not remain silent. It threatens – in every word, every accident, every “natural death” that wasn’t.
Because Moscow sees. Moscow does not forget. Moscow does not forgive.
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