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Suspicious deaths of Putin’s political opponents

Posted March. 03, 2015 07:35,   

한국어

Former Russian security agent Alexander Litvinenko who exiled to the U.K. suddenly died in November 2006. Polonium-210 poisoning was the cause of the death of the man who criticized Russian President Vladimir Putin after his exile. He died after drinking a cup of black tea poisoned with radioactive polonium-210. Western intelligence agencies suspected that the Russian spy agency killed him.

Alexander I. Solzhenitsyn, a writer who criticized Soviet totalitarianism, was also a target of poisoning. According to a former KGB agent’s autobiography, the agent coated poison on the writer’s wrist pretending that he accidently bumped into the writer who was standing in line for candies at a department store in 1971. Solzhenitsyn suffered an unknown disease with blisters all over his body, but doctors were not able to identify it. Fortunately, he survived but KGB also achieved its goal. It was to make everybody distrust each other and live in fear. Suspecting everybody and tightening one’s guard are as dreadful as death.

Russians gathered on Sunday to mourn the opposition politician Boris Nemtsov who was murdered in Moscow. He was a reformist politician who served as a deputy prime minister in Boris Yeltsin’s cabinet and turned into an opposition politician after Putin took the helm. He said in an interview, “I’m scared because Putin would kill me.” His sudden death sent shockwaves throughout the world as well as Russia. The widow of Alexander Litvinenko said at a gathering in London, “It was like deja vu for me.”

“Death solves all problems,” Joseph Stalin, the merciless dictator of the former Soviet Union, said. Stalin disappeared into history but does the reign of terror that kills or purges political opponents for political purposes remain alive? Tensions are mounting in Russia. Opposition parties claim that it is a political assassination and terrorist attack backed by Kremlin, while the ruling party suggest a conspiracy theory. The international community does not trust Russian President Vladimir Putin who said he would do everything possible to bring to justice those who committed the "vile and cynical" murder, however.