It is said that after suffering a heart attack in 1922, the first leader of the Soviet Union, Vladimir Lenin, was in such pain that he asked his successor, Joseph Stalin, to give him cyanide. Stalin refused, but that was when the affair began.
Others claim that when Lenin was shot during the Bolshevik Revolution in 1918, his doctors believed that the bullet was also poisoned and this is where the conspiracy began.
But some sources agree that the Kremlin's poison factory was established in the early 1920s on Lenin's orders.
In this research center, the Soviet Union used to invent new ways to eliminate its enemies, which were impossible to trace.
The work is believed to have originated as the first political and military intelligence organization of Soviet Russia whose task was to block the path of those working against the revolution.
Just as the Soviet secret service was repeatedly renamed, it was also given new names. First it was called 'Special Office' and later it was given names like Laboratory 1, Laboratory X, Laboratory 12. During Stalin's time it was known as Camera or 'The Chamber'.
"Camera" means prison in Russian.
How mysterious it was can be gauged from the fact that after the fall of the Soviet Union, several of its secret missions were revealed, with many people confirming its existence, but the 'camera' remains a mystery to this day. Is.
Powerful weapons:
The tradition of using poison as a political weapon is old. It is also certain that the Soviet Union was neither the first nor the last country to use it.
It should be remembered that in the year 1960, the American secret agency CIA had planned to kill the Cuban leader Fidel Castro, so one way was also thought of giving him a cigar full of botulinum poison. Fidel Castro was fond of smoking cigars.
Whenever a plan was made to kill a particular person, it involved the use of deadly and effective poison.
A poison that kills and leaves no trace:
The purpose of the camera was to create a tasteless poison that would not be detected in a postmortem examination so that the death would not be suspected as unnatural. In 1957, the death of Soviet dissident author Lev Rebet was believed to be due to a heart attack, but four years later, a KGB agent claimed that he had injected poisonous gas onto Rebet's face through a cyanide-laced glass shard. Another politician, Reading Lamp, was killed by poison sprayed on his lamp. KGB agents also used sodium fluoride, which cannot be traced as the cause of death when consumed in a small amount as it is a common ingredient in many household items and can already be present in a person's blood.Although Dr. Thallium is familiar with the symptoms, it is still difficult for them to know whether someone was murdered and if someone's slow and painful death was caused by the damaging radiation of the radioactive Thallium.
Until an autopsy is performed, Thallium will remain undetectable, and there will be no evidence left of its poison.
In some cases, the poison was discovered, but it was impossible to trace the killer. In these cases, the use of anonymous weapons for murder is discussed.
Claiming suicide in the case of a bullet hitting the face at a certain distance is difficult, but in the case of poison, every possibility seems likely, and the killer benefits from it.
On the other hand, poison can work as a warning or lesson for others to see what will happen if they cross their limits.
Some poisons work instantly, causing immediate death, while others cause excruciating pain before death.
Experiments on humans:
The first reference to the existence of the Soviet Union's laboratory came to the attention of the West when 6 trunks containing documents written over 30 years were discovered by Vasili Mitrokhin.
Mitrokhin had collected these documents during his tenure at the KGB's foreign institute and its first directorate, as an archive of archives.
Many former Russian intelligence officers, some retired and some defected, had already revealed many secrets of the Secret Service.
However, the most disturbing information emerged when former Soviet spy, Pavel Sudoplatov, wrote about the laboratory and its director, Professor Grigory Maranowski.
They revealed that Maranowski deliberately administered poison to people in the name of routine medical check-ups.
On the orders of the head of Stalin's secret police, Lavrenty Beria, and General Vasily Blokhin, the products of the camera manufacturing plant were used on prisoners in the Gulag torture center. They included mustard gas, cyanide, and several other poisons.
Among those affected was a Swedish diplomat, Raoul Wallenberg, who was secretly killed while under Soviet protection. Some Ukrainian nationalists and deviants also fell victim to it.
At a global level from the Soviet Union, according to experts, during the height of the Cold War, a pattern emerged of using nerve agents and chemical weapons against political opponents, dissidents, defectors, and leaders of freedom.
Many people faced the horrors of it. The author of The KGB Poison Factory, who served in the Russian military intelligence service, wrote in his article for the Wall Street Journal that if there was no poison found, who could count the number of its victims?
The KGB continued its series of silencing its enemies towards the end of the Soviet Union. KGB agent Oleg Kalugin confessed that the Soviet Union was involved in the assassination of BBC journalist Georgi Markov in London in 1978.
But it is still uncertain whether the laboratory was ever closed or whether any form of it still exists in Russia today.
This article was first published on the BBC Urdu website in June of last year and is being re-presented today.
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