Legacy of former Soviet Union infects new states

The Irish Times
December 22, 2004

Journalism and politics are the most dangerous jobs in the former
Soviet Union, writes Seamus Martin.

The ravaged face of Viktor Yushchenko has been the iconic image of
Ukraine’s electoral process. Poisoned with dioxin, Yushchenko lived to
tell the tale and have his case proven by medical tests in a Vienna
hospital. Others, a large number of them journalists in eastern and
central Europe, have not been so lucky.

Yuri Petrovich Shchekochikhin, like Yushchenko, fell ill at a
crucial stage in his career. A deputy in the Russian parliament
for the pro-western Yabloko party, he was also deputy editor of
the investigative journal Novaya Gazeta and was intent on exposing
corruption in post-communist Russia just as he had done in the
communist era.

After a visit to the city of Ryazan in the summer of 2003, he developed
a slight fever. Suddenly his symptoms began to resemble those we
recognise from Yushchenko’s recent photographs. His face broke out
in blisters, and his skin began to peel. He died nine days later.

The official cause of death was given as Lyell’s Syndrome, or
Toxic Epidermal Necrolysis, an extremely rare allergic reaction to
medication, infections or other illnesses.

His friends and colleagues believe he was poisoned. Andrei Mironov,
a Soviet-era dissident journalist and Gulag survivor, doubted from the
beginning that Shchekochikhin died from natural causes. The publication
of Yushchenko’s photographs from Kiev has confirmed his suspicions.

Journalists on Novaya Gazeta opened their own investigation, but could
not come to a definite conclusion, even though some doctors involved
in the case were convinced that poison was administered.

Their task encountered some serious obstacles. A request for samples
of Shchekochikhin’s hair for forensic analysis, while he still lived,
was refused. Thus they were unable to discover what type of toxin
may have ended his life. In an even more suspicious development,
the official file on his death was classified as secret.

I knew Yuri Shchekochikhin quite well, spoke to him frequently and
sipped his favourite Armenian brandy in his office in the Duma during
my time as Moscow correspondent of this newspaper. He spoke often of
the difficulties his colleagues on Novaya Gazeta faced as journalists
in today’s Russia.

He spoke of reporter Igor Domnikov, who was beaten to death at the
entrance to his apartment block. He believed that the intended target
was another Novaya Gazeta journalist, Oleg Sultanov, who lived in the
same building and was investigating the affairs of the giant Russian
oil company, Lukoil.

He told of Oleg Lurye, who was hospitalised after a similar attack.
He mourned the death of Larisa Yudina, the murdered Kalmyk journalist
and Yabloko member. He talked, too, of an attack made on his paper’s
office in Ryazan, and it was events in that city which may have led
to his own death.

Shchekochikhin was working on two stories in the final weeks of his
life. One concerned possible tax fraud by a furniture company called
Tri Kita, linked to members of the Federal Security Service (FSB).
The other involved the apartment bombings attributed to Chechen
terrorists which killed almost 300 people in 1999 and which swung
public opinion in favour of a second Chechen war.

A strange incident occurred at that time in Ryazan, when members of
the FSB were reported to have been seen unloading white powder in
the basement of a block of flats. The FSB admitted responsibility,
but said its agents were merely engaged in a security drill, and the
powder was innocuous.

The fate of many of those who investigated this incident has been
unusual. Mikhail Trepashkin, a former lieutenant colonel in the KGB,
was due to issue a report on the incident in October on behalf of a
parliamentary commission. He was arrested, however, and sentenced to
four years in prison for “revealing state secrets”.

Trepashkin had identified Vladimir Romanovich, a former FSB man,
from a photo-fit picture as a suspect in the apartment bombings.
Romanovich was later killed in a car crash in Cyprus.

Two of the four Duma deputies looking into the bombings have since
died: Shchekochikhin from the disputed allergy, and another who was
shot dead outside his apartment building in spring of this year.

Physical attacks have been the most common method of murdering
politicians and journalists in Russia, Ukraine and other former
Soviet republics. In the case of Georgy Gongadze, the attack was
particularly brutal. His headless body was found near Kiev, and an
examination indicated that he had been decapitated while alive.

Tape recordings were released in which a voice sounding like that of
President Leonid Kuchma called for Gongadze to be removed.

But poison has also been regarded as a legitimate weapon by the KGB,
from which both the Russian and Ukrainian intelligence services
emerged. A former FSB agent, Alexander Litvinenko, told the New York
Times earlier this month that a secret laboratory for the study of
poisons was still operated by the FSB in Moscow.

The New York Times report pointed to the death of a Russian banker,
Ivan Kiviledi, who died after his phone was dosed with poison in
1995. The Saudi combatant known as Khattab, who fought alongside
insurgents in Chechnya, is believed to have died after opening a
poisoned letter.

More recently, Anna Politkovskaya of Shchekochikhin’s Novaya Gazeta,
a persistent critic of the war in Chechnya, became unconscious on
a flight to the northern Caucasus to cover the terrorist attack on
the school in Beslan. She was told by a nurse that there had been an
attempt to poison her.

There is little doubt that close links continue between the Russian
FSB and the Ukrainian SBU, both of which were part of the KGB,
and sharing of technology between eastern European intelligence
organisations has also been well documented in the past.

While there has been evidence of political compliance in the murder of
Gongadze in Ukraine, freelance activity by current and former security
agents is seen as the most likely cause for the murders in Russia.

Journalism and politics remain the most dangerous jobs in the former
Soviet Union. To ply both trades, as Shchekochikhin did, was to make
life perilous in the extreme.

* Seamus Martin is a member of the national executive of the National
Union of Journalists and a former international editor of The Irish
Times.