Poison, Russia's politics tool?

MOSCOW - In the bloodstained post-Soviet period, feuds over money and power have often been solved by bullets or bombs. But confirmation that Ukrainian opposition leader Viktor Yushchenko was disfigured by dioxin draws attention to suspicious cases in Russia in which poison may have been used to silence political foes and settle business scores.

As Yushchenko's supporters suggest Russian involvement in the attempt to hurt or kill him, critics of the Kremlin say poisoning is a Soviet-era practice that seems to have reappeared since ex-KGB officer Vladimir Putin became president and put colleagues from the spy agency into positions of power.

"The list is rather long, and since Putin assumed power in Russia, poisoning has been one of the preferred political tools used by the Kremlin," said Pavel Felgenhauer, an independent Russian military affairs analyst.

Yuri Shchekochikhin, a liberal Russian lawmaker and journalist who crusaded against corruption, died in July 2003 after apparently suffering a severe allergic reaction. Colleagues suspect he was poisoned, probably in connection with his reports on a case involving customs officials and allegations that a furniture store evaded millions of dollars in import duties.

Russia's chief prosecutor's office told Shchekochikhin's colleagues at the Novaya Gazeta newspaper and at the Yabloko political party that there was no evidence he was poisoned, Yabloko spokeswoman Yevgenia Dilendorf said. But she said a British laboratory that conducted tests for the paper and the party found that there were signs of poison.

"We unequivocally believe that Shchekochikhin was poisoned," said Vyacheslav Izmailov, a reporter and columnist at the paper.

Izmailov said the same was true for Anna Politkovskaya, a Novaya Gazeta journalist and Kremlin critic who fell seriously ill with symptoms of food poisoning after drinking tea on a flight from Moscow during the hostage crisis in Beslan. At least two other journalists accused authorities of trying to stop them from covering the standoff.

Izmailov points a finger at Russian intelligence agencies such as the Federal Security Service, or FSB, the main successor of the KGB.

The most notorious Soviet-era case of political poisoning allegedly involving the KGB was that of Bulgarian defector Georgi Markov, who died in London in 1978 after a pellet containing ricin was injected into his thigh - purportedly by a jab with a rigged umbrella.

The alleged cases of poisoning in the former Soviet Union are not limited to Russia and Ukraine. In Belarus, where critics of authoritarian President Alexander Lukashenko have disappeared and are feared dead, the wife of opposition leader Gennady Karpenko has claimed he was poisoned shortly before his death in 1999.

The small but growing list of suspected cases shows that poisoning is "not random - that it's a way of dealing with political leaders," Dilendorf said.

It's frightening, she said, "because it means that it's possible to dispose of anyone and go unpunished - absolutely unpunished. And it's very hard to prove."

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