Pavel Sudoplatov was the organizer of one of the most famous political murders of the 20th century.

He devised the plan to kill Stalin's inner-party adversary Leon Trotsky in exile in Mexico in 1940, assembled the commandos involved, and directed the operation.

This was not the only murder of opponents of the Soviet regime for which Sudoplatov was responsible.

At the beginning of this year, Novaya Gazeta, which was critical of the Kremlin and recently ceased publication in view of the persecution by the Russian regime, described him as the “Supreme Terrorist of the Soviet Union”.

Reinhard Veser

Editor in Politics.

  • Follow I follow

Sudoplatov not only prepared some murders, but carried them out himself.

In 1938 he killed the Ukrainian nationalist leader Evhen Konovalets in Rotterdam.

Former Russian President and Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev described this act as an "episode from the glorious past" in a text on Tuesday on his Telegram channel entitled "About fakes and real history".

What the Deputy Chairman of the Russian Security Council writes in it is typical of the tone in which supporters of the Russian regime are currently speaking about Ukraine.

They try to outdo themselves with hateful statements about Ukrainians.

The Bucha massacre was carried out by the Ukrainians, Medvedev claims: "In order to dehumanize Russia and denigrate it as much as possible, the mad beasts from the Nazi battalions and the territorial defense are ready to murder their own peaceful inhabitants on the fly." That's what they did because "Ukrainianism, fed on anti-Russian poison and an all-consuming lie about its identity, is one big fake".

This "apparition" has never existed in history, "and it does not exist now".

Medvedev's nonsensical theses

According to Medvedev, the history of Ukraine begins after the collapse of the Soviet Union, when radicals wrote a "pseudo-history of Ukrainian statehood".

Their gallery of heroes consists only of "zoological Nazis, cutthroats and collaborators".

The passionate part of Ukrainians "have been praying to the Third Reich for the past 30 years".

And Ukraine will also suffer his fate.

Russia's most important goal is "to change the bloody consciousness of part of today's Ukrainians, which is full of lying myths".

This is necessary "in order to finally build an open Eurasia - from Lisbon to Vladivostok".

The completely nonsensical equating of Ukrainian identity with Nazism and the associated justification of violence against all Ukrainians, as well as the false claim that Ukraine has no identity and culture of its own, have become commonplace in Russian propaganda.

Medvedev's text stands out among these hate speeches because of the passage about the 1938 assassination attempt in the Netherlands, because it crosses rhetorical lines that Moscow had previously observed.

The murder instrument was a bomb hidden in a box of chocolates.

The Stalinist henchman Sudplatov presented it to his victim with the words "This is a gift from Kyiv".

"There will be many more such 'gifts' for Nazi criminals!" writes Medvedev.

Wild threats and fantasies of violence against opponents of the Putin regime are nothing new in Russian propaganda.

But so far they have been cast out by guests on talk shows and, less frequently, by their hosts, not by active politicians, let alone those in the front row.

Until now, Russian politicians have categorically rejected the accusation that they have anything to do with murders or attempted murders outside Russia.

hidden signals

Such was the case with the poisoning of former Russian agents Alexandr Litvinenko and Sergei Skripal in the UK in 2006 and Sergei Skripal in 2018 and the shooting dead of a Georgian man in Berlin's Tiergarten in 2019. Medvedev's praise for a terrorist attack more than eighty years ago does not necessarily mean that action will soon follow .

It can also be a cynical play on the fears of both the West and Ukrainians.

But the threat should be taken seriously, because a politician who has a prominent position at the heart of the Russian security apparatus is unlikely to have written it out like that.

It is also striking that Medvedev does not refer to the much better known murder of Stepan Bandera, who is the central hate figure of first Soviet and now Russian propaganda against the Ukrainians.

After Bandera, who was killed in Munich in 1959 (like Konovalets, a problematic figure because of his extremely nationalistic ideology and his actual connections to National Socialism), nationally conscious Ukrainians are named "Banderowtsy" by the Russian side.

The choice of example could be an expression of the penchant for wacky symbolism and hidden signals that Russia's leadership cultivates.

Pavel Sudoplatov, who was born in 1907 in the Ukrainian city of Melitopol and died in Moscow in 1996, was no accidental perpetrator.

Before the Second World War he headed a department of the Soviet repressive body NKVD that specialized in assassinations abroad, and after the war he headed a secret laboratory that tested poisons for their suitability for assassination attempts.

The association with the attacks on Litvinenko, Skripal and Navalnyj comes to mind.