Who’s behind Russian oligarch deaths?
Lukoil, Russia's largest privately owned oil and gas company, announced on September 1st the death of its chairman Ravil Maganov, 67, at a Moscow hospital “following a severe illness.”
Illness or suicide or foul play?
BBC, on the other hand, ran a headline on his death declaring “Lukoil chief dies in fall from hospital window” - citing a report from Russian state-owned news agency TASS which later added that the fall was actually a suicide. CNN also discounts the illness claim, reporting that he is at least the eighth of “prominent Russian businessmen [to] have reportedly died by suicide or in as yet unexplained accidents since late January, with six of them associated with Russia's two largest energy companies.”
Two of the oligarchs Sergei Protosenya and Vladislav Avayev, were found dead in identical circumstances, seemingly having killed themselves at home after murdering their wives and daughters. In both cases, those close to the oligarchs claimed they were murder victims, not murderers.
Why?
With the official story of a combination of murder-suicides being questioned, CNN offers a theory to explain Russia’s interest in seeing Lukoil executives dead:
Earlier this year, the company took the unusual public stance of speaking out against Russia's war in Ukraine, calling for sympathy for the victims, and for the end of the conflict.
Déjà vu
Blaming the oligarch deaths on the victims’ criticism of the Ukraine war does not explain, though, why a similar string of deaths took place a decade ago. When Boris Berezovsky, once the wealthiest of Russian billionaires, was found dead with a “ligature around his neck” in his home in 2013, after surviving two assassination attempts, it was initially described as a suicide. But Professor Bernd Brinkmann, an asphyxiation expert testified, "In my view there is no way for death by hanging." This followed a string of incidents involving Russian oligarchs, as reported in The New American:
One by one, the oligarchs who didn’t fall into line behind Putin either went to prison, fled the country — or were murdered. Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Platon Lebedev are two of the most well known Russian former billionaires languishing in prison. Shabtai Kalmanovich was gunned down in Moscow …
Georgian billionaire Arkady “Badri” Patarkatsishvili—who, like Berezovsky . . . told the Sunday Times there was an assassination plot against him orchestrated by the Kremlin. He died a little more than a month later at his Surrey mansion of what pathologists concluded was a heart attack… Alexander Perepilichnyy … dropped dead while jogging outside his Surrey home, also of an apparent heart attack.
Of course, the KGB has great expertise and long experience in the art of assassination by “natural means,” including poisons that can cause a heart attack, while being very difficult to detect.
Motive
Extreme forms of socialism, where government nationalizes farms and factories, have led to outright economic failures and even famine. This is far worse than less extreme versions of socialism which the Heritage Foundation credits with merely resulting in “a pronounced slowdown in growth and usually a decline in the standard of living.”
In either case, socialist nations require outside money to prop up their economies. The US has provided some of that “propping up” in the form of subsidies from capitalist nations through mechanisms like the Export-Import Bank. Another model for attracting foreign dollars and thus infusing wealth into a socialist economy is to declare an opening of the economy and authorize certain communist, or “former" communist officials to act as businessmen, with monopolistic control of a certain industry.
Lenin
Vladimir Lenin's New Economic Policy (NEP) created state-supported “businessmen” to attract foreign wealth, as described by The New American.
The NEP was a massive deception run by Lenin’s Cheka (also known as the NKVD — forerunner of the KGB) to lure Western aid and investment. Communist Party officials posing as Russian “businessmen” went into partnership with Western companies, and for a number of years gave the appearance that capitalism was replacing communism in Russia.
Stalin
Private wealth was indeed created under the NEP, but it didn’t stay that way for long:
In order to make the ruse convincing, the communist “capitalists” had to be given some latitude. Many of the newly minted business elite quickly became seduced by the wealth and lifestyles that came with their assignments; they began building impressive dachas and stashing gold, foreign currencies, and other valuables. Stalin put an end to that. He instructed Genrikh Grigoryevich Yagoda, NKVD chief and People’s Commissar for Internal Affairs, to ferret out all the secreted wealth of the “corrupt” comrades, including their secret Swiss bank accounts. This Yagoda did, and Stalin then had the offenders purged (usually tortured and killed).
However, Yagoda had made one particularly startling omission in his otherwise thorough investigation: his own Swiss bank account. Stalin, not trusting anyone, had had his own personal secret inner intelligence service investigate Yagoda. He confronted Yagoda with his own theft of “the People’s” property. Yagoda himself was executed in the same manner as those he had executed.
Putin
The New American surmises that history is repeating itself:
There is good reason to believe that many of the murders of (and murder attempts on) Russian oligarchs and crime bosses may be part of the larger Putin effort to take back state control of assets that were privatized in the 1990s. It can be likened to Stalin’s re-nationalization of wealth that had found its way into private hands …
Support for the contention that Putin is following in Stalin’s footsteps, by going after Russian oligarchs, is found in the writings of KGB defector Anatoly Golitsyn. In How one defector got it right, we presented Golitsyn’s report that long before Perestroika there was a planned, fake collapse of the Soviet Union, after which “former” communists took control.
As with Lenin’s NEP, the “former” communists would eventually take the wealth of oligarchs who attempted to move their money out of Russia, all the while waiting for an opportunity to claim some fabricated conflict as justification for reuniting some parts of the Soviet Union and eventually declaring a return to socialism.
War
Please see our previous articles on how Russian deception may be behind the Ukraine war:
