Journalism and politics are the most dangerous jobs in the former Soviet Union, writes Seamus Martin.
The ravaged face of Viktor Yushchenko has been the iconic image of Ukraine's electoral process. Poisoned with dioxin, Yushchenko lived to tell the tale and have his case proven by medical tests in a Vienna hospital. Others, a large number of them journalists in eastern and central Europe, have not been so lucky.
Yuri Petrovich Shchekochikhin, like Yushchenko, fell ill at a crucial stage in his career. A deputy in the Russian parliament for the pro-western Yabloko party, he was also deputy editor of the investigative journal Novaya Gazeta and was intent on exposing corruption in post-communist Russia just as he had done in the communist era.
After a visit to the city of Ryazan in the summer of 2003, he developed a slight fever. Suddenly his symptoms began to resemble those we recognise from Yushchenko's recent photographs. His face broke out in blisters, and his skin began to peel. He died nine days later.
The official cause of death was given as Lyell's Syndrome, or Toxic Epidermal Necrolysis, an extremely rare allergic reaction to medication, infections or other illnesses.
His friends and colleagues believe he was poisoned. Andrei Mironov, a Soviet-era dissident journalist and Gulag survivor, doubted from the beginning that Shchekochikhin died from natural causes. The publication of Yushchenko's photographs from Kiev has confirmed his suspicions.
Journalists on Novaya Gazeta opened their own investigation, but could not come to a definite conclusion, even though some doctors involved in the case were convinced that poison was administered.
Their task encountered some serious obstacles. A request for samples of Shchekochikhin's hair for forensic analysis, while he still lived, was refused. Thus they were unable to discover what type of toxin may have ended his life. In an even more suspicious development, the official file on his death was classified as secret.
I knew Yuri Shchekochikhin quite well, spoke to him frequently and sipped his favourite Armenian brandy in his office in the Duma during my time as Moscow correspondent of this newspaper. He spoke often of the difficulties his colleagues on Novaya Gazeta faced as journalists in today's Russia.
He spoke of reporter Igor Domnikov, who was beaten to death at the entrance to his apartment block. He believed that the intended target was another Novaya Gazeta journalist, Oleg Sultanov, who lived in the same building and was investigating the affairs of the giant Russian oil company, Lukoil.
He told of Oleg Lurye, who was hospitalised after a similar attack. He mourned the death of Larisa Yudina, the murdered Kalmyk journalist and Yabloko member. He talked, too, of an attack made on his paper's office in Ryazan, and it was events in that city which may have led to his own death.
Shchekochikhin was working on two stories in the final weeks of his life. One concerned possible tax fraud by a furniture company called Tri Kita, linked to members of the Federal Security Service (FSB). The other involved the apartment bombings attributed to Chechen terrorists which killed almost 300 people in 1999 and which swung public opinion in favour of a second Chechen war.
A strange incident occurred at that time in Ryazan, when members of the FSB were reported to have been seen unloading white powder in the basement of a block of flats. The FSB admitted responsibility, but said its agents were merely engaged in a security drill, and the powder was innocuous.
The fate of many of those who investigated this incident has been unusual. Mikhail Trepashkin, a former lieutenant colonel in the KGB, was due to issue a report on the incident in October on behalf of a parliamentary commission. He was arrested, however, and sentenced to four years in prison for "revealing state secrets".
Trepashkin had identified Vladimir Romanovich, a former FSB man, from a photo-fit picture as a suspect in the apartment bombings. Romanovich was later killed in a car crash in Cyprus.
Two of the four Duma deputies looking into the bombings have since died: Shchekochikhin from the disputed allergy, and another who was shot dead outside his apartment building in spring of this year.
Physical attacks have been the most common method of murdering politicians and journalists in Russia, Ukraine and other former Soviet republics. In the case of Georgy Gongadze, the attack was particularly brutal. His headless body was found near Kiev, and an examination indicated that he had been decapitated while alive.
Tape recordings were released in which a voice sounding like that of President Leonid Kuchma called for Gongadze to be removed.
But poison has also been regarded as a legitimate weapon by the KGB, from which both the Russian and Ukrainian intelligence services emerged. A former FSB agent, Alexander Litvinenko, told the New York Times earlier this month that a secret laboratory for the study of poisons was still operated by the FSB in Moscow.
The New York Times report pointed to the death of a Russian banker, Ivan Kiviledi, who died after his phone was dosed with poison in 1995. The Saudi combatant known as Khattab, who fought alongside insurgents in Chechnya, is believed to have died after opening a poisoned letter.
More recently, Anna Politkovskaya of Shchekochikhin's Novaya Gazeta, a persistent critic of the war in Chechnya, became unconscious on a flight to the northern Caucasus to cover the terrorist attack on the school in Beslan. She was told by a nurse that there had been an attempt to poison her.
There is little doubt that close links continue between the Russian FSB and the Ukrainian SBU, both of which were part of the KGB, and sharing of technology between eastern European intelligence organisations has also been well documented in the past.
While there has been evidence of political compliance in the murder of Gongadze in Ukraine, freelance activity by current and former security agents is seen as the most likely cause for the murders in Russia.
Journalism and politics remain the most dangerous jobs in the former Soviet Union. To ply both trades, as Shchekochikhin did, was to make life perilous in the extreme.
* Séamus Martin is a member of the national executive of the National Union of Journalists and a former international editor of The Irish Times.