Sudden death syndrome of Russians

Late last year, Pavlo Antov, the chief executive of a sausage company and the man who reportedly showed a dangerous lack of enthusiasm for Vladimir Putin's war against Ukraine, was found dead in a hotel in India, just two days after one of his Russian companions died in the same hotel. It is stated that Antov fell from the hotel window and that he died on the spot. A millionaire who made a fortune on sausages and his dead friend are the latest in a terrifying list of people who have succumbed to "sudden Russian death syndrome", a phenomenon that has claimed the lives of many businessmen, officials, oligarchs and journalists. The catalog of these deaths, which includes alleged defenestrations (from the Latin de - from and from fenestra - window; thrown from a window - ed. author), suspected poisoning, suspected heart attacks and suspected suicide, is impressive for the variety of unnatural deaths.

 

About twenty famous Russians died in 2022 in mysterious and sometimes terrifying ways. At the beginning of the year, messages about suicide were found on the bodies of gas industry leaders Leonid Shulman and Oleksandr Tyulakov. Then, within just a month, three more Russian leaders - Vasily Melnikov, Vladislav Avayev and Sergei Protosenya - were found dead (apparently by suicide), along with their wives and children. In May, Russian authorities found the body of Sochi resort owner Andrii Krukovsky at the foot of a cliff. Seven days later, Alexander Subotin, manager of a Russian gas company, died in a house owned by a Moscow shaman, after allegedly being poisoned by snake venom.

The list can go on. Yuri Voronov, the head of the company that was the main contractor for Gazprom, was found in July in his swimming pool in the suburbs of

To repeat: all these deaths occurred this year.

 

It could be argued that, given Russia's extremely low life expectancy and widespread alcoholism, at least some of these deaths were "natural" or "accidental". Just because you're Russian doesn't mean you can't accidentally fall out of a window on a higher floor. Sometimes people kill themselves, and the suicide rate among Russian men is one of the highest in the world. For Edvard Lutvak, a historian and expert on military strategy, this is at least part of what is happening – an outbreak of mass despair among Russia's connected and privileged elite.

"Imagine what will happen to a globalized country when they introduce sanctions," said Lutvak. "Some of them will commit suicide. But the prevalence of these premature deaths warrants closer examination."

After all, that's what the Kremlin does. This phenomenon has a precedent. In 2020, Russian agents poisoned with a nerve agent, but failed to kill Putin's critic Alexei Navalny. 10 years ago, they managed to carry out a similar attempt on a defector from the Russian special services, Alexander Litvinenko. 2004. Year. In the same year, Viktor Yushchenko ran for the presidency of Ukraine against a candidate supported by the Kremlin. Yushchenko was poisoned with dioxin, which disfigured him. 30 years earlier, the Bulgarian secret service, allegedly with the help of the Soviet KGB, killed the dissident Georgi Markov, wounding him on Waterloo Bridge in London with the tip of a castor oil umbrella. Lutvak told me that Russian agents often "turn to the most exotic methods."

"Commercial killing people look on and laugh."

Suicides are harder to decipher. For oligarchs who have not shown sufficient loyalty to Putin, suicidal tendencies are not an unlikely scenario.

"They often say: "We can come to you or you can act like a man and end your life by suicide, getting off the "chess board". At least you'll have an agency for your own destruction,” says Michael Weiss, a journalist and author of a forthcoming book about the GRU, Russia's military intelligence service.

"Did Antov really fall through the window in India? Was he pushed by a Kremlin agent? Or did he receive a call that threatened his family and made him feel he had no choice but to jump? "Everything is possible".

 

In the Gothic universe of Kremling Killer, imagination is key.

Throwing opponents out of windows has been a favorite method of eliminating political opponents since the early days of high-rise buildings. However, in the modern era, Russia has monopolized this practice. Similar to Tosca's climactic escape from the walls of Castel Sant'Angelo, death by falling from a great height has a performative, even moral, aspect.

In Russian, such work is known as "mokroe delo". Sometimes the main purpose is to send a message to others: we will kill you and your family if you are disloyal. Sometimes the ultimate goal is simply to destroy the problematic person.

A few years after the death of the Russian whistleblower Alexander Perepilichny during a run around London in 2012, during one of the autopsies, the remains of a substance related to the rare and highly poisonous flower gelsemium were found in his stomach.

"These are things the Russians like to use," says Weiss. "You could say it's a business card. They want us to know: it was murder. But they don't want us to be able to conclude with certainty that it was a murder."

Poisoning has such an ambiguity. The poison is hidden and sometimes quite difficult to detect. Throwing it out the window is a little less ambiguous. Yes, it can be an accident. But it is much easier to conclude that it was a murder, a very obvious murder.

"Things that simulate natural causes of death, like a heart attack or a stroke, the Russians do pretty well," Weiss said.

The deaths vary in their effectiveness, but all are part of one master plan: to perpetuate the idea that the Russian state is a deadly, all-powerful octopus whose slimy tentacles can seek out and capture any dissident anywhere. As it was in one of the Bond film sequels: the whole world is not enough.

The war in Ukraine is not universally popular among Russia's ruling elite. Since the beginning of the conflict, sanctions against oligarchs and businessmen have curbed their extravagant lifestyles. This is understandable: some say they are unhappy about it.

Russia's high-level elite feel as if Putin has "essentially turned back the clock," Weiss said, to the bad old days of Cold War isolation.

This year's wave of deaths is so striking in number and method that there is no concern for plausible or even implausible denials. So it's likely that this is Putin's way of warning the Russian elite that he is the deadly octopus. After all, the point of eliminating critics is not necessarily to eliminate criticism. This should remind critics, with as much sensitivity as possible, what the cost of expressing such criticism can be.