Murdered Russian ambassadors throughout history. From Griboyedov to Karlov
On Monday evening in Ankara, policeman Mevlüt Mert Altıntaş committed Andrei Karlov. The diplomat died from his injuries. The Russian Foreign Ministry called the incident a terrorist attack, and the Investigative Committee of the Russian Federation opened a criminal case, regarding the murder as an act of international terrorism that resulted in the death of a person.
“I thought it was a trick”: AP photographer talks about the moment the Russian ambassador was killedThe photographer noted that he was shocked when he saw in his photographs that the killer was standing right behind Andrei Karlov during his speech - “like a friend or bodyguard.”Who should be held responsible for what happened, were there similar precedents in history, and how did they end?
The Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations of 1961 and the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations of 1963 establish unambiguous rules on the status of a foreign embassy and its employees.
Thus, Article 22 of the 1961 Convention establishes that the receiving State has a special duty to take all appropriate measures to protect the premises of the mission from any intrusion or damage and to prevent any disturbance to the peace of the mission or insult to its dignity.
Articles 29 and 40 state that the person of a diplomatic agent is inviolable. The receiving State is obliged to treat him with due respect and to take all appropriate measures to prevent any attacks on his person, freedom or dignity.
Even before the status of ambassador was consolidated, international legal customs were in effect in the Conventions, which most civilized states had to tacitly adhere to. However, despite all the guarantees, the position of ambassador was fraught with many dangers.
The host states were not always able to provide the required level of security, and often specifically created conditions for an attack. For criminals, extremists and terrorists of all stripes, a foreign embassy and ambassador represented a foreign state.
It is impossible to attack the state, since the forces are not comparable, but you can attack the ambassador, thereby hitting the state.
Massacre of the Griboyedov mission in Tehran
Main historical event, which is remembered in connection with the murder of Ambassador Andrei Karlov - a massacre at the Russian embassy in Tehran, which resulted in the death of the Russian Ambassador to Persia, diplomat and poet Alexander Griboedov.
In 1829, a diplomat was sent to Persia to ensure the implementation of a recently concluded lucrative peace treaty and the payment of indemnities under it.
The abundance of fanatics dissatisfied with the peace treaty at the court of the Persian Shah made Griboyedov’s mission extremely dangerous. The last straw was Griboedov’s decision to hide two Armenian women Christian faith who asked for asylum in the Russian mission in Tehran. Guided by the terms of the peace treaty between Russia and Persia, Griboyedov accepted the women under protection.
On January 30, 1829, a crowd of thousands of religious fanatics surrounded the embassy. The Cossacks guarding the embassy and Griboyedov himself entered into an unequal battle, but were all killed. The bodies of the dead were dragged through the streets of Tehran. All this happened with the connivance of the Shah.
However, then the scandal that broke out had to be resolved: the Shah was forced not only to severely punish the instigators of the massacre, but also to present Nicholas I with the famous “Shah” diamond - one of the most precious stones in the world (remained in the ownership of Russia to this day).
Murder of Count Mirbach by the Socialist Revolutionaries
After the Bolsheviks concluded a separate peace with Germany and Russia’s withdrawal from the First World War, a split emerged in the ranks of the socialist coalition. At the 5th All-Russian Congress, the Left SRs openly opposed the Bolsheviks, but remained in the minority. The leadership decided to switch to armed uprisings. A number of government agencies, Chairman of the Cheka F.E. was arrested. Dzerzhinsky.
An integral part of the plan of the Left Social Revolutionaries was an attack on the German ambassador, with the aim of renewing the war with Germany.
On July 6, 1918, in Moscow, the Socialist Revolutionaries Andreev and Blumkin killed the ambassador of Kaiser Wilhelm II, Count Wilhelm von Mirbach-Harff. Cheka employee Yakov Blyumkin appeared in person at the embassy under the cover of his official ID, and then shot at the ambassador and threw a bomb at him.
For the murder of the ambassador, Blumkin was sentenced to death by a military tribunal, but his extradition of his former Socialist-Revolutionary comrades and close acquaintance with Trotsky helped him obtain an amnesty. It also played a cruel joke on Blumkin a little later: he entered into negotiations with Trotsky, who had fled the country, as reported by his mistress Lisa Rosenzweig. Blyumkin tried to escape and fired back, but was arrested and on November 3, 1929 sentenced to death under Articles 58-10 and 58-4 of the Criminal Code of the RSFSR.
“On the path of progress”: the murders of Vorovsky and Voikov
On May 10, 1923, in Lausanne, Switzerland, the White Guard Maurice Conradi, guided by motives of revenge for relatives repressed by the Soviet authorities, shot and killed the USSR Plenipotentiary Representative in Italy Vaclav Vorovsky. Switzerland refused to assist in the investigation of the incident, citing the fact that it was not obliged to provide security to Vorovsky. At the trial, Conradi stated: “I believe that with the destruction of every Bolshevik, humanity moves forward along the path of progress. I hope that other brave souls will follow my example!”
Despite overwhelming evidence, the jury acquitted the defendants in a speedy trial, finding Maurice Conradi "to have acted under the pressure of circumstances arising from his past."
On June 20, 1923, the USSR issued a decree “On the boycott of Switzerland”, denounced diplomatic and trade relations and banned all Swiss citizens who did not belong to the working class from entering the USSR.
For similar ideological reasons, the USSR Plenipotentiary Envoy to Poland, Pyotr Voikov, was killed. On June 7, 1927, at a train station in Warsaw, the White Pole emigrant Boris Koverda shot the plenipotentiary, declaring that he had “avenged Russia, for millions of people.”
The murder of the plenipotentiary caused unprecedented anger from both the Soviet government and ordinary citizens. Poland categorically did not want to quarrel with the strengthened USSR. The court sentenced Coverda to life imprisonment, and 10 years later he was granted amnesty by the new Polish government.
Lebanon, Israel and USA
After the adoption of the Vienna Conventions, ambassadors received a number of official security guarantees. However, this did not stop the attackers.
Thus, on September 30, 1985, an event occurred in Lebanon that had many similarities with the terrorist attack in Ankara. Four Soviet diplomats were captured near the USSR Embassy by Muslim fundamentalists. The terrorists demanded that the Soviet Union stop supporting the Syrian army, which was conducting a military operation at the invitation of the official Lebanese government.
One of the kidnapped diplomats, Andrei Katkov, was executed and the Syrian army operation was suspended. However, the remaining hostages were never released, which forced the Soviet intelligence services to take extreme measures. As a result, the remaining embassy employees were released. In conditions, the activities of employees of Russian embassies in neighboring countries become extremely dangerous. This especially applies to Turkey, where only Last year Several dozen major terrorist attacks were carried out.
The murder of Ambassador Karlov is notable for the ease with which the terrorist, who was also a special police officer, was able to get close to the ambassador. It is clear that this is a serious failure of the Turkish security services.
Meanwhile, an attack on diplomats is primarily disadvantageous for the Turkish leadership, showing its inability to fulfill its obligations under the Vienna Convention.
The life, liberty and dignity of Russian diplomats must be the first priority for any country with which Russia maintains diplomatic relations.
On Monday, December 19, Ambassador Russian Federation in Turkey, Andrei Karlov was fatally wounded as a result of an armed attack at the Center for Contemporary Art in Ankara. The diplomat was giving a speech at the opening of a photo exhibition when he was shot at by 22-year-old police special forces officer Mert Altintas, who was standing behind him.
The violent death of the head of the diplomatic mission of our country is an extremely rare event, but not exceptional. BigPiccha recalls other precedents.
(Total 7 photos)
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Alexander Griboyedov, Tehran, 1829
On February 11, 1829, in Tehran, dozens of religious fanatics broke into the Russian embassy building and killed everyone inside, with the exception of secretary Ivan Maltsov. Among the 37 dead was the head of the diplomatic mission in Persia (now Iran), Alexander Griboedov, author of the play “Woe from Wit.” His body was so mutilated that the diplomat could only be identified by a scar on his hand received in a duel.
The massacre at the embassy naturally caused a diplomatic scandal. In order to normalize relations with the Russian Empire and reduce the size of the indemnity, the Persian Shah sent his grandson to St. Petersburg. He presented the famous Shah diamond weighing 88.7 carats as a gift to Emperor Nicholas I. Taking the precious mineral, the autocrat said: “I consign the ill-fated Tehran incident to eternal oblivion.”
Vaclav Vorovsky, Lausanne, 1923
Former White Guard officer of Swiss origin Maurice Conradie, who lost his family during Civil War, on May 10, 1923, shot and killed the USSR Plenipotentiary Representative in Italy Vaclav Vorovsky. The murder took place in the restaurant of the Hotel Cecil in Lausanne, where the Soviet delegation was staying during a conference on the Middle East. Having also shot at two of Vorovsky’s assistants, Conradi gave the pistol to the head waiter with the words: “I did a good deed - the Russian Bolsheviks destroyed all of Europe... This will benefit the whole world.”
The trial in this case began on November 5 of the same year and lasted ten days. More than 70 witnesses were questioned and told the court about the horrors of the Red Terror. Their testimony impressed the jury, and by a majority vote (nine to five), Conradi was acquitted, as was his accomplice Arkady Polunin. Soon the USSR broke off diplomatic relations with Switzerland; they were restored only in 1946.
Peter Voikov, Warsaw, 1927
The plenipotentiary representative of the USSR in Poland, Pyotr Voikov, died on the platform of the Warsaw station at the hands of 20-year-old white emigrant Boris Koverda. The criminal opened fire at about 9 a.m.; Voikov died in the hospital about an hour later. “I took revenge for Russia, for millions of people,” Koverda said during interrogation. The terrorist chose Voikov as a victim because he participated in the execution of the royal family.
A Polish court sentenced Koverda to life at hard labor, but a few months later the sentence was reduced to 15 months. On June 15, 1937, the killer was amnestied and released.
The shots in Ankara, which ended the life of Andrei Karlov, our ambassador to Turkey, on December 19, were heard at a time when Putin was preparing to attend the Maly Theater performance “Woe from Wit,” based on the great play by Alexander Griboedov, a writer, musician and diplomat of the highest rank, who died in Persia. This happened on January 30, 1829, during an attack by Islamic fanatics on the Russian embassy in Tehran, where Ambassador Griboyedov was sheltering several Armenians, saving them from massacre.
Türkiye will pay compensation to the family of the Su-24 pilot with the condition
This story is quite well known: the Shah of Persia was frightened to avoid violent retaliation from Russian Empire, sent his beloved grandson along with fabulously expensive gifts to St. Petersburg. The famous Shah diamond, which once adorned the throne of the Great Mughals and is now one of the main relics of the Russian Diamond Fund, turned out to be a sufficient redeeming argument for the tsar. Accepting the expensive gifts sent by the Shah along with his humble apologies, Nicholas I told his grandson that he was consigning “the ill-fated Tehran incident to eternal oblivion.” Thus, in a royal manner, the blood of Griboyedov, 37 Russian diplomats and Cossacks guarding the embassy was forgiven. The completely wild story of the attack on the Russian mission in Tehran remained for Persia without any serious consequences.
At the dawn of Soviet power, two more of our ambassadors were killed. In 1923, in Switzerland, Vaclav Vorovsky, the head of the embassy in Italy, was shot dead by a White Guard. The court in Lausanne too easily and quickly acquitted the suspect and his accomplice, declaring the murder of the diplomat an act of retaliation, and the young Soviet republic broke off diplomatic relations with Switzerland for 23 years. Four more years later, in 1927, the ambassador to Poland Pyotr Voikov was killed (not so long ago, during disputes about renaming the Voikovskaya metro station, this incident was described in some detail by our press).
So, Switzerland paid for the death of Vorovsky and the acquittal of the killers by breaking off relations, and for the death of Voikov Soviet Union responded with real internal terror: twenty representatives of Russian aristocratic families were arrested and shot without trial.
Of course, the dark symbolism of the brutal events with our ambassadors, the consequences of these murders suggest some associations and parallels. But now the times have come when Russia no longer trades in the blood and lives of its diplomats and does not respond with terror to terror - and the Turks, presumably, know this well. Almost immediately after the incident was reported to the Turkish leadership, President Erdogan called Putin, announced his personal control over the course of the investigation and promised to strengthen the security of the Russian mission and diplomats.
But is this enough?
A climate of incomplete trust, reticence and even outright suspicion still remains dominant in recent Russian-Turkish relations, and the terrorist attack against Andrei Karlov will certainly worsen all this. Tragic event in Ankara also exposed huge gaps in the security system protecting our diplomats in a warring state where terrorist attacks occur regularly. Experts in this field have already noted bad job both Turkish and Russian intelligence services.
Whatever the global goals of the killer named Mevlut Mert Altintas, a former police officer, Turkish official circles and the press immediately rushed to declare him a member of the semi-mythical terrorist organization FETO. This is how Erdogan now calls almost all of his internal and external enemies, without trial or investigation, adding them to the ranks of accomplices of the notorious political opponent Fethullah Gulen, although the Istanbul court recognized in the spring: there is no court decision, confirming the existence of an armed terrorist organization called "FETO". But under the guise of fighting this semi-mythical structure, a real “witch hunt” has been going on in Turkey for the third year now: in Turkish prisons there are now several thousand opponents of Erdogan, who are accused of organizing a coup attempt or simply aiding Gülen.
All observers unanimously noted that Altintash’s main goal was to deliver a targeted and extremely painful blow to the slowly recovering Russian-Turkish relations. Of course, this goal has been achieved, and much will now depend on Erdogan’s behavior. In the first seconds after the fatal shots, the killer clearly and unequivocally announced on camera that this was revenge for Russia’s actions in Syria, but the Turkish president, without any hesitation, immediately started his favorite song about the hand of Gülen, hiding in America.
Of course, only an open and honest investigation can convince Russian authorities The point is that it is really important for Turkey to preserve the barely emerging positive vector of movement in Russian-Turkish relations. But given the fact that Erdogan recently let slip about his true goals of intervention in the internal Syrian conflict (remember: the Turkish president unexpectedly declared the removal of Bashar al-Assad, his personal enemy, as his priority in Syrian expansion), which are radically at odds with the goals of Russia, it will now be extremely difficult to regain Putin’s trust difficult.
Today, December 20, a trilateral meeting of the heads of the foreign and defense ministries of Russia, Iran and Turkey is scheduled to take place, who will discuss the course of the Syrian conflict and ways to resolve it. Of course, Turkey’s position on these issues will now be key. If the Turks do not find the courage to admit that all traces of the current terror in the Middle East lead to the Islamic quasi-state banned in Russia, and continue to refer to the activities of Gülen in this matter, there will be no talk of any further progress in trust between our countries.
Be that as it may, it can already be stated that yesterday Turkey, at the expense of Russia, laid another bloody sacrifice on the altar of Middle Eastern terror, the adherents of which she has been flirting with for many years. It is obvious that the Russian authorities will continue to try, in conjunction with Turkey, to find both ways to resolve the Syrian conflict and ways to restore multidirectional ties between our two countries, but the reluctance of the Turkish leadership to admit obvious miscalculations in its internal and foreign policy, in the work of the intelligence services, the ambivalent position in relations with Russia is unlikely to lead to anything constructive in the foreseeable future.
In any case, there is no hope that after two years of almost complete downtime, the fairly rusty mechanism of Russian-Turkish relations, now drenched in the blood of our ambassador, will soon be restored and begin working properly. Erdogan now needs to try twice as hard - and he needs to start right now.
Murders and assassination attempts on ambassadors inXXIcentury
03/28/03 In the capital of Cote d'Ivoire, Abidjan, the Ambassador of Saudi Arabia to Cote d'Ivoire, Mohamed Ahmed Rashid, was killed.
12/29/03 Vatican Ambassador Michael Courtney was fatally shot in Burundi.
07/02/05 Egyptian Ambassador to Iraq Ihab al-Sherif was kidnapped in Baghdad. The body has not yet been found.
07/27/05 In Iraq, the Algerian ambassador Ali Belaroussi, who was taken hostage, was executed by Islamists.
08/20/06. Russian Ambassador to Kenya Valery Egoshkin was attacked by bandits. After treatment for a stab wound, the ambassador returned to his diplomatic duties.
09/20/08 Czech Ambassador to Pakistan Ivo Ždarek was blown up in a terrorist attack in Islamabad.
29.11.11 Ambassador to Qatar Vladimir Titorenko was attacked. He was struck several times by Doha airport security.
07/27/12 Venezuelan Ambassador to Kenya Olga Fonseca was strangled to death in Nairobi. The incident was filed as a domestic homicide.
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- source: rusjev.net
Seven Russian diplomats died in two months. This has not happened in a fairly long period of diplomatic work between Russia and the USSR.
Yesterday, Russia's permanent representative to the UN, Vitaly Churkin, suddenly died. He was only 64 years old. The diplomat died right at work, after talking on the phone with Putin. Now let's remember other tragic incidents that happened to Russian diplomats over the past two months.
So, on December 19 last year, Russian Ambassador Andrei Karlov was shot dead in Turkey. He was 62 years old. The next day, the body of a former employee of the Russian Foreign Ministry, head of the Latin American department of the department, was found in Moscow. He committed suicide.
On December 27, the body of a Russian diplomat and consulate general employee, Roman Skrylnikov, was found in Kazakhstan. The body was found in a rented apartment in Ust-Kamenogorsk. Experts found no signs of violent death. Three deaths thus occurred in just one week. Moreover, two of them were due to a heart attack (like Churkin).
This year the frightening trend has continued. On January 9, a 55-year-old Russian consul in Greece was found dead in Athens. Andrei Malanin was found dead in an apartment located in the old Russian Embassy building. According to preliminary estimates, death is likely due to pathological causes (possibly heart disease again). On January 14, the Russian ambassador was shot dead in Yemen, according to media reports. The Foreign Ministry, however, denied the information. But when Russian Ambassador Alexander Kadakin died in India on January 26, this was already an obvious fact. Interestingly, the cause of death was a “short illness”, again associated... with the heart. The ambassador was 67 years old. And now sudden death Churkina.
Summarize. Of the seven reports of the death of Russian diplomats over the past two months, one was denied by the Foreign Ministry. In other cases, the fact of death is confirmed. Two people were shot, one committed suicide. Three more (including Churkin) died suddenly. Moreover, no exact reasons were given.
Russian Jew.
Interesting article?
There are different versions of the assassination attempt on Andrei Karlov. The consequences are also predicted to be one more serious than the other. CEO analytical center "East-West Strategy" Dmitry Orlov suggests remembering why in different time cited the murders of diplomats.
Broken prohibitions
The first murder of ambassadors recorded in Asian history occurred in 1218. As Persian and Arab historians write, on the orders of the Shah of Khorezm Ala ad-Din Muhammad II, the envoys of Genghis Khan - Usun and ibn Kefredzh Bogra - were killed. Since the murder of ambassadors is a prohibition strictly observed in the Great Steppe even in those cruel times, this became the reason for Genghis Khan’s campaign against Khorezm and led to the inglorious end of the empire, which included a vast territory - from the borders of China to present-day Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Southern Kazakhstan.The famous battle of Russian princes with the Mongols at Kalka in 1223 was also preceded by the murder of ambassadors. As you know, Genghis Khan’s commanders Jebe and Subudai, pursuing the retreating Khorezm Polovtsians, went to the Black Sea steppes. Polovtsian Khan Kotyan tried to give them battle, but the Mongols defeated him and drove him to the Dnieper. Then Kotyan turned to his son-in-law, the Galician prince Mstislav Udatny, and other Russian princes for help, supporting his request with rich gifts. The Mongols sent ambassadors to the Russians, who informed the princes that they had nothing against Rus' - they only needed Kotyan. “The First Novgorod Chronicle” writes that the ambassadors said this: “We heard that you are coming against us, having listened to the Polovtsians, but we did not touch your land, nor your cities, nor your villages. They did not come against you, but came by the will of God against the slaves and grooms of your Polovtsy. You take peace with us; if they run to you, drive them away from you and take away their property. We heard that they did a lot of harm to you too; we beat them for that."
However, the princes killed the ambassadors. After this, the Mongols sent a second embassy to the Russians with the following words: “You listened to the Polovtsians and killed our ambassadors. Now you’re coming at us, well, go ahead. We didn’t touch you: God is above us all.” They did not kill the second ambassadors, but they rejected the peace proposals. Afterwards, the Battle of Kalka took place, which ended in defeat for Kotyan and the Russian princes - out of 21 princes, only nine returned home alive. It is noteworthy that during Batu Khan’s invasion of Rus', which some historians forget to mention, those Russian cities whose princes participated in the murder of ambassadors were raided...
In 1829 The poet Alexander Griboedov, Russia's envoy to Persia, was killed. This happened after an attack by fanatics (according to one version, incited by the British) on the Russian embassy in Tehran. Official history considers the reason for the attack to be that Griboyedov hid two concubines from the harem of the Shah’s relative Allahyar Khan Qajar and a eunuch from the Shah’s harem on the territory of the diplomatic mission.All those who defended the embassy died, and there were no direct witnesses left. Secretary Ivan Maltsov, the only one who survived, did not mention the death of Griboedov. According to him, 15 people were defending at the door of the envoy's room. Returning to Russia, he wrote that 37 embassy employees (all except him) and 19 residents of Tehran were killed. He himself hid in another room and, in fact, could only describe what he heard. The grandson of the Persian Shah, Khozrev Mirza, came to St. Petersburg to settle the scandal, and gave Nicholas I many rich gifts, including the famous Shah diamond, as payment for the murder of Griboedov. The Emperor allegedly told Khozrev: “I consign the ill-fated Tehran incident to eternal oblivion.”
From conspiracy to conspiracy
July 6, 1918 Employees of the Cheka - left Socialist Revolutionaries Yakov Blyumkin and Nikolai Andreev - arrived at the German embassy in Moscow. They were received by the ambassador, Count Wilhelm Mirbach. During the conversation, Andreev pulled out a revolver and shot at the diplomat, then also threw a grenade. Mirbach was killed by the last bullet. Blyumkin and Andreev ran out of the embassy and drove by car to the headquarters of the Cheka detachment under the command of the left Socialist Revolutionary Dmitry Popov, which was located in the center of Moscow - in Trekhsvyatitelsky Lane. The chairman of the Cheka, Felix Dzerzhinsky, came there for Blumkin and Andreev, who was taken hostage. This is how the Left Socialist Revolutionary rebellion began on July 6, which, however, the Bolsheviks quickly eliminated. By killing Mirbach, the Left Socialist Revolutionaries hoped to provoke a war between Germany and Soviet Russia, but they failed.
Tellingly, a month later the security officers uncovered the so-called “ambassador conspiracy,” in which diplomats from England, France and the United States participated - Robert Bruce Lockhart, Joseph Nulans and David Rowland Francis. Lockhart tried to bribe the Latvian riflemen who were guarding the Kremlin in Moscow in order to carry out a military coup, arresting the meeting of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee along with Lenin and occupying key points. The conspiracy was discovered. Without going into details, let's say that on August 30, 1918 - after the murder of the chairman of the Cheka there, Moisei Uritsky, in Petrograd and the Moscow assassination attempt on Lenin - the security officers detained all the conspirators at the British embassy. Only the naval attache, Francis Allen Cromie, was killed.
Researchers Michael Sayers and Albert Kahn wrote about this: “On the top floor, embassy employees under the leadership of Captain Cromie were burning documents incriminating them. Cromie rushed down and slammed the door in the face of the Soviet agents. They broke the door. The English spy met them on the stairs, holding them in both " However, the violation of the extraterritoriality of the embassy by the security officers does not lead to any consequences on the part of Britain for Soviet Russia did not lead.May 10, 1923 In the restaurant of the Cecil Hotel in Lausanne, Switzerland, the USSR Plenipotentiary Envoy to Italy, Vaclav Vorovsky, who arrived in Switzerland as a delegate of the Lausanne Conference to prepare a peace treaty with Turkey and establish a regime for the Black Sea Straits, was killed. The participants in this murder - former White Guards Maurice Conradi (the direct perpetrator) and Arkady Polunin - were acquitted by the jury. In response, the USSR broke off diplomatic relations with Switzerland.
February 5, 1926 On the stretch between Ikskile and Salaspils stations on the Moscow-Riga train, Soviet diplomatic couriers Theodor Nette and Johann Mahmastal were shot at. Nette was killed, Makhmastal was wounded. Two of the attackers were also wounded and retreated. They were later found dead and identified as the Lithuanian citizens of the Gavrilovich brothers. The police investigation yielded no results...
June 7, 1927 At the Warsaw train station, former White Guard Boris Koverda shot and killed the USSR Plenipotentiary Representative in Poland Pyotr Voikov. For this murder he was sentenced to life imprisonment, but 10 years later he was released under an amnesty.
In October 1933 In Lvov, which was then part of Poland, a militant of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, Nikolai Lemik, shot and killed the secretary of the USSR Consulate General, Alexei Mailov. Later it became known that Mailov turned out to be an accidental victim - Lemik was supposed to kill the Consul General himself, but he was not there that day, so the reception of visitors was led by Mailov, who was also a legal resident of the Foreign Department of the OGPU.
Thus, Mailov became the first citizen of the USSR to be killed by OUN militants, who previously preferred to carry out terrorist attacks only against Polish officials. The Lviv court sentenced Lemik to death, which was later commuted to life imprisonment. After the outbreak of World War II, Lemik escaped from prison and later became the organizer of the Marching OUN. In October 1941, he was arrested by the Gestapo and shot.Having received news of Mailov's death, the chairman of the OGPU, Vyacheslav Menzhinsky, ordered the development of a plan to combat Ukrainian nationalists. It was according to this plan that in 1938, NKVD employee Pavel Sudoplatov eliminated OUN leader Yevgeny Konovalets, giving him a mine in a box from chocolates at the Atlant Hotel in Rotterdam.
History knows 13 more particularly serious crimes against Soviet and Russian diplomats different levels. Of course, this includes murder. In general, practice shows that diplomats are killed for a reason, but for specific purposes. The short-term goal of the murder in Ankara is obvious - to create a rift between Russia and Turkey. As for long-term goals, in the light of the “big game” they can be anything...