Killing Patton

The NKVD has been developing lethal poisons at a laboratory in Russia known as the Kamera, or “the Chamber.” There, “poisons of all kinds were tested on Russian political prisoners” (375). The aim was to create fast-acting and slow-acting poisons that could be concealed in food or drink. Such poisons had to be odorless and tasteless, and leave no visible marks on the body, so that they could not be identified in an autopsy.

Stalin and the NKVD assassinated political enemies, willing to commit these murders on foreign soil and against non-Soviet citizens. The most famous assassination in non-Soviet territory occurred in August 1940, when Soviet agent Ramon Mercader killed Leon Trotsky in Mexico. Trotsky, the leader of the Red Army after the Bolshevik Revolution of October 1917, had been Stalin’s main rival for power after the death of Vladimir Lenin, the first leader of the Soviet Union. Stalin also ruthlessly purged all those associated with Trotsky.

Due to the clandestine nature of NKVD activities, it is hard to verify whether they ever succeeded in developing an untraceable poison. However, in one suspicious and suggestive case, after Lev Sedov, Trotsky’s son, died mysteriously in Paris in 1938 at age 32, an autopsy found “strange purple bruising on his abdomen” (374).