In Riga, Latvia, a 69-year-old journalist died the day before yesterday from poisonous mushrooms he had picked in his yard.
Grigori Nekhoroshev was no ordinary retiree. He was the man who, as editor-in-chief of the newspaper “Moskovsky Korrespondent”, revealed in 2008 that Putin was planning to divorce his wife Lyudmila and marry Olympic rhythmic gymnast Alina Kabaeva.
The revelation sparked the wrath of the Kremlin. The newspaper was shut down, the secret services interrogated Nekhoroshev , and the threats began, until he was forced to leave Russia. Putin denied everything, dismissing the reports as “erotic fantasies.” From then on, Putin had placed the journalist high on his list of enemies.
Friends of Nekhoroshev said that the Russian president had ensured all these years that the journalist to live in a strange state of constant fear, bordering on a daily and unending nightmare.
Not even his self-imposed exile to Lithuania, where he had been living for the past 11 years as a political refugee, could alleviate his fear. He had fled there in the hope that he could live undisturbed because it was a member state of NATO, but to no avail.
As for the rumors about Putin’s romantic relationship with Kabaeva, the Russian president never confirmed them, even when other rumors surfaced about two boys he was said to have had with her, Ivan and Vladimir.
Nevertheless, his friends describe him as a man who had a zest for life and made plans for the future, always keeping in mind that it might be others, shadowy figures might ultimately be the ones to decide his life expectancy.
These same people will say that his love for mushrooms was well known, and that he even organized trips for “mushroom hunting.” Specifically, if the relevant information is accurate, it is said that he collected them from the garden of his home in Riga.
His case is reminiscent of that of Russian rocket scientist Vitaly Melnikov, who was found dead at the age of 77 in 2023. His death was attributed to “consumption of inedible mushrooms.”
The pattern of “poisoning” as a state tool for settling scores with enemies of the Kremlin leadership is a very old story. And of course, it didn’t start with Putin.
The secret poison laboratory was founded in 1921 and went down in the history of espionage as “Laboratory No. 1,” “Laboratory X,” “Laboratory No. 12,” and finally as “Camera” under Stalin. According to international literature, the goal of these laboratories was to produce a poison that could not be detected after the death of the person who had ingested it. These laboratories, under the direction of Professor Grigori Mayranovsky , experimented with dozens of poisons such as thallium, cyanide, colchicine, strychnine, curare, and others. Their first “test subjects” were political prisoners.
In 1936, the Communist leader of Abkhazia Nestor Lakoba was poisoned during a dinner with NKVD chief Beria, and his death was reported as a heart attack.
The most striking case is that of the Bulgarian dissident Georgi Markov: On September 7, 1978 in London, he was assassinated with a microscopic bullet made of platinum and iridium containing ricin. The poison was injected into his foot through the tip of an umbrella he was holding, operated by a Bulgarian secret service agent under the supervision and technical support of the KGB. This method of assassination became known in the history of espionage as “the Bulgarian Umbrella.”
The Dead of the Putin Era
Since 1999, when KGB agent Vladimir Putin came to power, more than 20 of his personal critics have died under unexplained circumstances.
Anna Politkovskaya, a journalist for “Novaya Gazeta” who documented human rights violations in Chechnya, was shot to death in the elevator of her home on October 7, 2006—Putin’s birthday.
Alexander Litvinenko, a former FSB officer who was investigating her death, died three weeks later after being poisoned with polonium-210 in a cup of tea in London.
Sergei Skripal and his daughter survived an attack in 2018 in Salisbury an attack involving the nerve agent Novichok, which killed a British woman. Boris Nemtsov, a former deputy prime minister, was shot to death on a bridge near the Kremlin in February 2015. Alexei Navalny was poisoned with Novichok in 2020 and died in a Russian prison in 2024.
