To all the people in this thread saying this was probably an accident:
Imagine you’re an operator inside a totalitarian regime, and you want someone assassinated. Maybe this person isn’t themself a critical target, your objective is to instill fear in a particular department to increase compliance on a morally abhorrent skunkworks project. You already know everything about this person, of course including details of their personal life and hobbies. Hey they’re a mushroom hunter. Mycotoxins are readily available and can be lethal in small, undetectable doses. Not difficult to figure out what happens from there. Everyone who knows Vitaly knows, hey he wouldn’t pick and eat a poisonous mushroom. The message is sent to the people who you want to hear it.
at the same time… why all the effort to make it look like a plausible accident. Why not stick to the fell out a window that has been the regimes calling card so that noone could possibly be confused about what happened.
My thinking is that the operator who got the order missed the point and got creative instead sticking to the script. He or she is probably going to fall out a window soon.
I see your point. On the other hand, chaos is a powerful terror tactic. If you’re a dissident, not knowing what angle you could be engaged from is stifling.
Also, people need to eat and drink daily. Poisoning is a horrible threat with multiple daily reminders.
The USSR especially knew this. If everyone who speaks out gets a matching pair of lead brain piercings, you know to be on watch for dudes with silenced handguns. If everyone who speaks out gets: shot, hanged, thrown out a window, has their vehicle blown up, poisoned, burnt alive, etc, it suddenly becomes much harder to be on guard, and thus it’s harder to even organize and grow a dissident movement because everyone’s terrified that everyone else is there purely to assassinate everyone else.
To all the people in this thread saying this was probably an accident:
Imagine you’re an operator inside a totalitarian regime, and you want someone assassinated. Maybe this person isn’t themself a critical target, your objective is to instill fear in a particular department to increase compliance on a morally abhorrent skunkworks project. You already know everything about this person, of course including details of their personal life and hobbies. Hey they’re a mushroom hunter. Mycotoxins are readily available and can be lethal in small, undetectable doses. Not difficult to figure out what happens from there. Everyone who knows Vitaly knows, hey he wouldn’t pick and eat a poisonous mushroom. The message is sent to the people who you want to hear it.
at the same time… why all the effort to make it look like a plausible accident. Why not stick to the fell out a window that has been the regimes calling card so that noone could possibly be confused about what happened. My thinking is that the operator who got the order missed the point and got creative instead sticking to the script. He or she is probably going to fall out a window soon.
The point is that it’s a lazy coverup that makes it obvious who actually did it, spreading fear effectively
I see your point. On the other hand, chaos is a powerful terror tactic. If you’re a dissident, not knowing what angle you could be engaged from is stifling.
Also, people need to eat and drink daily. Poisoning is a horrible threat with multiple daily reminders.
The USSR especially knew this. If everyone who speaks out gets a matching pair of lead brain piercings, you know to be on watch for dudes with silenced handguns. If everyone who speaks out gets: shot, hanged, thrown out a window, has their vehicle blown up, poisoned, burnt alive, etc, it suddenly becomes much harder to be on guard, and thus it’s harder to even organize and grow a dissident movement because everyone’s terrified that everyone else is there purely to assassinate everyone else.
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