Twas the night before Christmas when through a hotel in India,
something dreadful was stirring. As most people were snug in their beds,
a wealthy Russian businessman, politician, and one-time critic of Vladamir Putin,
flew through the air to land on the floor with a towering thud. And so it was; a winter’s
nap became an eternal trip to the afterlife. He was just one of many Russian oligarchs to
have mysteriously died lately in circumstances that would compel even the least curious of
you to mutter the word “conspiracy.” People are saying something wicked is afoot within
the ranks of Russia’s mega-wealthy. The words “Russian Death Syndrome” have been
used ironically, but the humor is lost on the Russian oligarchs who might be next.
What ties all these deaths together is the question on everyone’s mind,
and that’s what we’ll investigate today. The man we just talked about was Pavel Antov.
The 65-year-old had just celebrated his birthday on December 22 after booking into that hotel with
three of his friends. Given Antov’s wealth, we think his accommodation, the Hotel Sai
International in Rayagada in the eastern Indian state of Odisha, was pretty basic. Rooms in
January are going for about 40 bucks a night, and Antov was said to be worth at least $140 million.
But the lack of luxury on that night isn’t what we’re here to talk about. What we want
to know is how Antov died, given that he joined a long list of oligarchs who’ve bitten the dust
lately. One of the problems with getting to the truth is that Antov’s body wasn’t examined by a
pathologist. He was cremated the day after his death, a procedure earlier given the green light
by the Russian authorities in India. The cause of death was pretty obvious,
given he’d fallen from three floors, but how he got to the floor should pique your interest,
was he pushed or is there another explanation for this? As it stands, we don’t know, but the Indian
police rightly treat the death as suspicious. After all, this millionaire, who’d made a ton
of money doing business in sausages of all things, and who’d been a successful lawmaker
in Russia’s Vladimir Oblast, had been having a good trip up until two days before his death.
We’ll explain soon what affected his mood. The crime branch in that part of India got
on the case, but seeing as he’d been cremated already, their investigation
was somewhat cut short by the lack of a body. Before we go on, we’ll just mention a little
point we think you need to hear. During Russia’s invasion of Ukraine,
Antov had apparently spoken critically about a Russian missile attack on a residential apartment
block in the Shevchenkivskyi district of Kyiv. He took to WhatsApp and mentioned citizens being
pulled from the rubble, saying, “It's extremely difficult to call all this anything but terror.”
The strange thing is, and you’re going to hear a hell of a lot of strange things today,
is that he soon deleted the message and wrote that he was a “patriot of my country.” We wonder
what compelled him to change his mind. He later said he had nothing to do with the message and
it had been written by a critic of Russia’s so-called special operation, adding that he
absolutely did not agree with this man’s opinions. Back to India. The top cops in Odisha said they
interviewed everyone at the hotel and all the staff. They explained that they’d gone through
the rooms where the Russians were staying, 319 and 401, and collected mobile phones,
laptops, and other important things. They interviewed two other Russians,
Turov Mikhail, and Pane Senko Natalia. As you’ll have noted, we said four Russians booked into
that hotel. The police couldn’t interview the other person because he was also now
nothing but a pile of cremated ashes. He was 61-year-old Vladimir Bydenov,
a good friend to Antov and also a very rich man. They’d both been sharing the room when
sometime around the night of Antov’s birthday celebrations, Bydenov collapsed and died. We
don’t know exactly how he died, but initial reports said it was perhaps a stroke or a heart
attack. Al Jazeera wrote that it might even have been a “drug overdose.” It was reported that both
men had been drinking large amounts of wine, but that usually doesn’t constitute a drug overdose.
The Russian Consul General in India, Alexey Idamkin, told the press that there was nothing
suspicious about both deaths, adding that they are not being treated as criminal cases in
Russia. The first one, he said, was a matter of failing health, and the second was down
to the sadness at the loss of a life-long friend. However, something just doesn’t ring true,
given what’s been happening to Russian oligarchs of late. Indian investigators have at least
not given up on these cases being crimes. On New Year’s Eve, they got hold of the cremated remains
so pathologists could perform more forensic examinations. It’s not impossible that something
can still be found. Any forensic pathologist will tell you that traces of poison can be
found in cremated ashes in a forensic toxicology lab. It’s also reported that India’s National
Human Rights Commission is now on the case. Some of you might now think there’s nothing to
be suspicious about. After all, Russian oligarchs have been through quite a rough stretch of late,
walking on eggshells where Ukraine is concerned and getting their assets seized in various
countries. Maybe, you think, there’s a good reason they’d be sick and depressed. Some people are
bound to have died of various non-criminal causes in such a stressful environment.
Let’s see if you’re saying the same at the end of the show.
Vladimir Putin, who back in the day ensured most of the oligarchs got to
keep all that money many of them had looted from Russia, would just tell you the deaths
of two men in a hotel within two days was merely an unfortunate event. And sure, he’d likely say,
he forgives Antov for bad-mouthing Russia’s bombing of an apartment block.
But the deaths of those two men are merely the tip of a blood-stained iceberg. Such as the sudden
death last year of a man named Ravil Maganov, which was about as suspicious as you can get.
It was notable because Maganov had been very critical of the Ukraine invasion. Up
until his death, Maganov had been chairman of the giant national oil company Lukoil.
As head of the board of directors, Maganov and the other members of the board came
out and called the invasion a “tragedy.” A statement also said, “We strongly support a
lasting cease-fire and a settlement of problems through serious negotiations and diplomacy.”
They were certainly walking on shaky ground by saying that, and no doubt Putin was enraged by
such traitorousness. Still, Lukoil knew very well that to keep business booming and to go ahead with
its planned expansion in Europe and Africa; it had to toe the line in terms of how the world thought
about the invasion. Putin wasn’t impressed. In September, Maganov was a patient at the
Central Clinical Hospital in Moscow when, like Antov, he took a trip through the sky,
this time flying from the sixth floor. Lukoil wrote on its website that its chairman “had passed
away following a severe illness,” only adding, “Lukoil's many thousands of employees mourn
deeply for this grievous loss and express their sincere condolences to Ravil Maganov's family.”
Russian TV news media said Maganov had gone to the hospital suffering from heart issues
but noted that he had been taking antidepressant pills at the time of his fall. Nothing much more
was said than that, although Reuters spoke with associates of Maganov that suggested his mind was
in good shape before he went into the hospital. Another report stated that Maganov was in good
mental health and might have gone to the balcony for a smoke and just fallen off. It
seems the security cameras that might have caught the action were not working at the
time due to repairs. Hmm, doesn’t that always seem to be the case with high-profile deaths…
If this is starting to sound dark, it’s about to get pitch-black, although it has to be said
this next story has a touch of black humor to it, if, of course, you didn’t know the victim.
He was 43-year-old Alexander Subbotin, who, lo and behold,
had also worked as a top executive for Lukoil. His death takes the biscuit for outright strangeness.
A Russian news agency said this billionaire had been trying to get his hands on what some
reports say was a cure for a hangover. Still, it seems more likely he was after
something that could help him detoxify from either alcohol or drug dependence.
The report states that he ended up at a house in Moscow where it’s believed a shaman lived
who had a kind of antidote to help with withdrawal symptoms. The news agency said
Subbotin was subjected to “Jamaican voodoo rituals,” which involved having toad venom
injected into his body or at least having some rubbed on a small incision in his skin.
People do actually do this to induce a psychedelic experience, and there are some cases of people
doing it as a method of detoxification, but it’s strange that a billionaire would seek out
a very experimental treatment when he could afford the best detox that money could buy.
Russian law enforcement said that’s exactly what he did, and right after, he suffered from a heart
attack. The same report said he was given some valerian root and died the next day in his home.
The Russian police said they were investigating the matter, but we don't know what came of that.
Another top executive to bite the dust was Leonid Shulman, who was the Director of Transport at
Russia’s giant energy corporation, Gazprom – one of the biggest public companies in the world.
He was found at the start of 2022 in his cottage near Leningrad. At the time,
the Russian media didn’t give a cause of death, although it was later stated that he’d
been found covered in blood next to a note. Almost exactly a month later,
61-year-old Alexander Tyulyakov was found dead in the same village as Shulman had died in. He
was also a top executive at Gazprom. We don’t know the contents of the note,
but we do know that a few news reports said that before he died, he might have taken a beating.
The Leningrad Region Investigative Committee told the press, “Forensics were already working
when a group of heavies arrived in three SUVs. They said they were Gazprom's security service,
surrounded the territory, and put us and most of the police outside the fence of the house.”
Gazprom did not comment to the press about these deaths.
In July, a 61-year-old man who was the CEO of a subcontracting firm
working for Gazprom was also found dead in Leningrad. His name was Yuri Voronov.
Like the others, he’d made millions from his business but seemingly became very depressed
all of a sudden. His body was found in a swimming pool at his mansion. There was a hole in his head
and a semi-automatic Grand Power pistol lying nearby. Reports say several spent
cartridges were lying at the bottom of the pool. A Russian Investigative Committee said the death
might have been due to “a quarrel with partners,” while his wife said that he had indeed had a
falling out with people he was doing business with. Nonetheless, initial reports said the
security cameras around the mansion had not picked up any images of strangers visiting the house.
Another Gazprom-related death in 2022 was that of 37-year-old Andrei Krukovsky.
He fell off a cliff while hiking at a ski resort owned by Gazprom and managed by
him. He had a lot of experience hiking, too. Anyone can fall, of course, and it can happen
anywhere, just as it did to the former Russia-based businessman Dan Rapoport.
After moving from Ukraine to the US after the invasion, he was an outspoken critic of
Putin. In August, he was found in the street outside his nine-story luxury apartment in
Washington D.C. He was found still wearing a hat and flip-flops and had a load of cash in
his wallet. His wife said not long before they’d both been making plans together.
Was it a suspicious death? The US authorities didn’t seem to think so, but others did,
including his wife. Some fellow businessmen said his connections in Washington and his history in
Russia, along with his criticism of Putin, made it naïve to rule out foul play. His final Facebook
post, a photo of Marlon Brandon playing Colonel Kurtz in Apocalypse Now, could mean anything,
but it’s strange, to say the least. “The Horror, the horror,” he wrote, quoting Kurtz.
One of the commenters on that post, Jim Brooke, the former Moscow Bureau Chief for
Bloomberg and former overseas bureau chief at The New York Times, said, “Dan - we will miss
you. I am very skeptical…Try again DC police!” If this still doesn’t sound suspicious to you,
you might want to know about the death of 51-year-old Vladislav Avayev in April.
Another multi-millionaire on this list, Avayev was a former Kremlin official with
close ties to Putin. He was also the former Vice President of the financial institution,
Gazprombank, which had specifically been set up to serve the Gazprom energy company.
News reports say Vladislav’s body was found close to his wife and daughter’s bodies at their
multi-million dollar Moscow apartment. The bodies were found by another daughter who’d been worried
none of the family had been picking up the phone. Police said they found a gun in the father’s hand,
and the other two had also been shot. Various reports said it’s possible that Vladislav
could have been jealous about his wife having an affair and getting pregnant,
although this hasn’t been confirmed. It’s also possible that Western sanctions had hurt him
financially, but other people said none of this made any sense. A neighbor told the press that
he seemed fine and was not the kind of man who could kill. She said, “He was a nerd.
He had no reason to do that. He was rich, smart. There‘s no way a man like that could
kill…Maybe Avayev and his family were killed.” Just one day after the Avayev family was found,
a very similar scene was discovered in Spain. The family this time was the Protosenyas,
whose patriarch was Sergey, a 55-year-old oligarch worth around $250 million who
was once Deputy Chairman of Russia’s second-largest natural gas producer, Novatek.
Sergey also had close ties with Putin; if the initial news reports are correct, he also lost
his mind and went on a bloody rampage. This time it was at a luxury Spanish villa, and the
murder weapon was an axe. Yes, that doesn’t bear thinking about, but the surviving son,
a 22-year-old named Fedor, said there’s absolutely no way his father could turn into an axe murderer.
He told the press, “My father is not a killer. He loved my mother and especially Maria, my sister.”
Spanish investigators said they understood that people were speculating about some kind of hit
by Russian intelligence, but they said that’s all it is: speculation. They told the press,
“Everything points to it being a domestic violence crime, a double murder, and subsequent homicide.”
Anatoly Timoshenko, who was a close friend of Sergey, told the British press, “Sergey did
not do it. Sergey did not kill his family. It is impossible. I do not want to discuss what may have
happened at the house that night, but I know that Sergey is not a killer.”
Another friend said, “Sergey did not kill his family. I have known him for
ten years. He was a happy man. He loved his family. He did not kill
his wife and child. I am sure.” The investigation is ongoing.
It was a similar tale in March when the Russian billionaire, Vasily Melnikov,
was found dead in an apartment in Nizhny Novgorod along with three of his family members.
Melnikov was the owner of MedStom, a very successful medical supplies firm. A knife
was found at the scene, and the father’s body was close to his wife and two children. Russian
investigators said there “were no signs of unauthorized entry into the apartment.”
At first glance, you’d certainly not want to work in the oil and gas industries in
Russia at the moment because executives in those areas have been dropping like flies.
A 66-year-old Ukraine-born oligarch named Mikhail Watford, who’d made a fortune
when the Soviet Union collapsed, was found dead at the start of the Ukraine invasion.
Like many oligarchs, he’d made his home in England after the UK pretty much laid out a
red carpet for those people who’d looted Russia, but the warm welcoming suddenly turned sour when
Putin decided to launch his special operation. British cops said Watford’s body was found at
his home in Surrey. They explained that they had no cause of death but that it didn’t look
suspicious. The British Press said the death came at a time when wealthy Russians living in Britain
had been attacked, possibly on the orders of Russian authorities. A thing to remember here
is that when the Soviet Union fell, it was Putin that made deals with the oligarchs,
basically telling them he wouldn’t have them arrested if they played ball with him.
Did Putin see a traitor in his old ally? It’s not certain that Watford had spoken out against Putin,
and it seems the British authorities might have hit him with sanctions at
some point. Maybe he was just stressed. Subsequent reports suggested that stress
and what he did about it was the cause of his death, although some reports said these
coincidences were getting ridiculous and his death certainly “raises questions after
other suspicious deaths of Russian nationals.” Then there was the man who fell down the stairs,
a mafia-style death if ever there was one. He was the 72-year-old Anatoly Gerashchenko,
the former rector of the Moscow Aviation Institute and yet another man with links to the Kremlin.
Such a death might not, in normal circumstances, look suspicious. Still,
given all the other deaths and in light of his aviation expertise being used in
a military capacity, you might question how he just managed to fall down some steps – according
to the Russian media, “from a great height.” In September, another Russian with ties to
the Kremlin and with expertise in aviation also met a strange end involving a fall.
At the time of his death, Ivan Pechorin was the Managing Director for the Aviation Industry of
the Corporation for the Development of the Far East and the Arctic. He was also said to be a
close Putin ally. His body washed up in the Sea of Japan in September somewhere near Vladivostok,
with official reports saying he fell off his boat. The CEO of the same company,
43-year-old Igor Nosov, had died of a stroke just months earlier.
Again, this might not look suspicious to some of you, but you ought to know that it is unusual for
such young men, young men that look very fit, to die of strokes. You might also want to know
that poisoning can cause something that looks like a stroke. It’s thought people who’ve died
from radioactive polonium poisoning have had their deaths ruled as a stroke, not a result of poison.
Arsenic poisoning could also cause a stroke but might not show up on the death certificate.
Maybe we are connecting too many dots here. We could be, no doubt about it,
but it would be irresponsible of us not to at least look at the possibility of
mass assassinations. After all, Putin and his secret services have committed such acts in
the recent past. While we probably shouldn’t connect too many dots from the distant past,
purges and poisonings have been the Russian government’s modus operandi for decades now,
going back to the dark times of Joseph Stalin. It should also be pointed out that while some
defectors have said that Putin could be behind many of these deaths, others have said it wouldn’t
be the first time that the oligarchs have been part of a kind of mafia war. Remember, many of
these men, or at least their relatives, were called gangsters in the past, not businessmen.
As the filmmaker Adam Curtis said in his 6-hour documentary on the collapse of the Soviet Union,
when the oligarchs-to-be were making hay while regular Russian citizens starved,
they soon were embroiled in very violent mafia-style wars. You just don’t know that
because Hollywood hasn’t made movies about it. There was so much money up for grabs and so
little trust among men, and with Russia falling apart at the seams,
the powerful had to make alliances. That’s why many of them were found with their throats cut
or pulled out of a bloody mass of bodies at some snazzy restaurant. The turmoil in Russia,
the money available to grab, the power vacuums in industries and governance,
meant mass bloodshed. Now, Russia is experiencing turmoil again, although not on that kind of level.
But are the oligarchs at it again, killing each other? Are they being picked off by Putin? Or
are they suffering from what some people have ironically called the Russian Death Syndrome,
which could be related to the shake-up of Russian money and simply down to depression, ill health,
and the occasional outlandish accident? You also have to remember that Putin will not
tolerate dissent. Russia has already introduced laws that can mean a lengthy prison sentence
for speaking out of turn. These laws so far are aimed at regular citizens and brave journalists,
so you have to ask what could happen to the Russian elites if they also speak out of turn,
maybe not always in public but to friends or acquaintances. When things get totalitarian,
everyone becomes a possible enemy. Any Russian oligarch who’s looked
at these deaths and perhaps knows nothing about them will still certainly think twice now about
opening their mouths, regardless of if the deaths were related to
heavy-handedness from the bosses in the Kremlin. Now you should watch “How Putin Went From KGB Spy
to President of Russia.” Or, have a look at “The Insane Protection of The President of Russia.”