KGB Poison found at Alnwick Gardens

When the KGB are not poisoning dissidents with green tea laced with Polonium-210 or Ricin coated pellets fired from umbrellas (OK, I know that was the Bulgarians - but they were helped by the KGB), their tipple of choice is Gelsemium Elegans - according to the guide showing me around the deadly plants growing in the Poison Garden - this is a fenced-off section of Northumberland's Alnwick Garden containing many intoxicating and poisonous plants.

I was at the Alnwick Garden on Saturday when the guide presented this information as if it were a well known, frequent and, more importantly, current practice of the Russian "KGB" when wishing to rid themselves of troublesome "dissidents". Now there was much to take issue with here, but my mind was struggling to make sense of what the guide was actually referring to; e.g. was this poison used by the KGB in Soviet times or did he mean the current Russian security service - the FSB; and against whom was / is the poison used?  Did he mean Soviet dissidents who had emigrated from the Soviet Union or those Soviet dissidents who had not emigrated and were not incarcerated in labour-camps or psychiatric hospitals?  Or was he referring to some other, more recent events?

I am not trying to be flippant here or suggesting that none of it was true, rather, I am offering an excuse as to why I didn't ask the guide to clarify what he meant. Anyway, we moved on to the star attraction in the garden - cannabis - before I had a chance to form a coherent question, so I thought I would just look it up on the internet on my return home.

It turns out that Gelsemium Elegans had recently been in the news (August 2015) at a pre-inquest hearing into the death of  Alexander Perepilichny, an exile living in the UK.  There was a suggestion that this poison had been used to kill the Russian businessman, and "whistleblower" into a massive tax fraud in Russia, who died in 2012 after collapsing when out running.

Nevertheless, it was a very interesting but brief tour of the deadliest plants in Alnwick Garden, I was taken aback by the fact that many of the plants in the garden were not necessarily rare or exotic plants, but some very mundane and common varieties found in the UK.  For example, Rhubarb leaves can induce a particularly horrible death if ingested.

http://www.alnwickgarden.com/

Viz Top Tip advice for FSB

Reading about the inquiry into the murder of Alexander Litvinenko, which began yesterday, I am reminded of a Viz Top Tip of many years ago:

"INTERNATIONAL master criminals. Tell your guards to shoot James Bond in the head at the first opportunity. Under no circumstances give him a guided tour of your base, or leave him in the custody of attractive women in bikinis."

Similar advice could be given to would-be FSB assassins:

"shoot your renegade operatives in the head at the first opportunity rather than try three times to poison them with a cup of tea laced with expensive radioactive material which can be traced back to you door"

Alexander Litvinenko, a former officer of the FSB (the Russian security service) died from radiation poisoning in 2006.  He had left the FSB, where he specialised in organised crime, and fled to the UK where he became a fierce critic of the Kremlin and worked for security service MI6.  His wife's lawyer has described his murder as "an act of state-sponsored nuclear terrorism on the streets of London" and the blame for his murder being placed directly at the Russian state. 

It is beyond my capacity to comment on the murky world of espionage, organised crime and the nefarious activities of Russian oligarchs, but I reckon it was Boris Berezovsky.

Iron Felix to stay put - again

Back in 2002, I wrote on my old web site about proposals by the then Mayor of Moscow, Yuri Luzhkov, to restore the statue of KGB founder, Felix Dzherzhinsky, to its former position in the centre of Lubyanka Square outside the KGB offices.

"the Moscow City Duma's monuments committee rejected an appeal by Communist Party members in Irkutsk for Dzerzhinsky's return. The Communists said in a letter sent last month that the monument to Dzerzhinsky was a "symbol of the fight against crime." 

A long-simmering drive to resurrect Dzerzhinsky from his graveyard at the Central House of Artists gained momentum in October when Luzhkov declared that the 16-ton statue was an "excellent" monument that had been "the highlight of Lubyanskaya Ploshchad." "We should remember that he solved the problem of homeless children and bailed out the railroads in a period of devastation," Luzhkov said at the time. 

His remarks were an about-face from four years earlier when he fiercely opposed the statue's return. Liberal politicians slammed Luzhkov for supporting the return of a man blamed for the deaths of millions in the 1920s and 1930s. 

The statue, one of the more notorious icons of the Soviet past, was toppled from its pedestal near the former headquarters of the KGB by protesters after the failed coup by Communist hard-liners in August 1991.

Dzherzhinsky's statue along with with other communist statues were daubed in grafitti and unceremoniously dumped in the park next to the Central House of Artists in Moscow.  However, in recent years the statues have been cleaned up and returned to an upright position in in the sculpture park." (http://rossiya_david.tripod.com/n_dzhershinksky.htm)

11 Years later and they are still talking about putting Felix back on the Lubyanka Square pedastal.  On Saturday, Moscow city lawmaker, Andrei Metelsky, said that the Dzerzhinsky statue was a historical landmark and could return to its place in front of the Federal Security Service's headquarters (the KGB's successor) after the monument's restoration, at the cost of 50 million rubles ($1.5 million).  However, the city legislators were quick to refute that claim: Vladimir Platonov - legislature speaker - said that the city parliament made no plans concerning the return of the statue of Felix "Iron Felix" Dzerzhinsky.