Poison has always been a tool of autocrats the world over; Russia is no exception. The tsarist regime was something of an expert in the field, but the October Revolution did not put an end to the practice: Lenin had a special laboratory set up to get rid of his opponents. Faithful to this tradition, the Russian secret services need little encouragement to use poison to intimidate or to kill (Litvinenko in 2006 and Skripal in 2018 are recent examples of this) (see EUROPE B12176A5).
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