In 1547, Grand Prince Ivan of Moscow declared himself tsar of Russia. He is now better known as Ivan the Terrible. For almost 400 years, the tsars ruled one of the largest empires in history, stretching across forest and steppe. Opaque and brutal, the mighty Russian Empire hid all sorts of dark secrets.

10The Wild East

Not too long after Columbus discovered America, the Russians began colonizing Siberia. The initial expansion was driven by merchants like the powerful Stroganov family, who were hungry for priceless furs.

Their agents were Cossack mercenaries who expanded Russian power with extraordinary cruelty. When the Sakha chief Dzhenik revolted, he was skinned alive and then his baby son was suffocated with the skin. The Aleut Islanders attacked tax collectors in 1764, so the Russians burned 18 villages and massacred hundreds.

Germs were even more effective than Russian guns and steel. The isolated Siberians were almost as unprepared for European diseases as their distant cousins in the Americas. In the 17th century, smallpox killed over 50 percent of many Siberian tribes. Among the Sakha and Evenk, the death rate was at least 80 percent. The Aleut population dropped from 20,000 to under 5,000 in less than two generations.

9Torture

The Russian emperors often resorted to cruel tortures to shore up their power. Ivan the Terrible was known for roasting his enemies alive in a giant skillet, which he had made specially. This apparently started a trend since some Cossacks complained in 1640 that a provincial official had been roasting them in huge pans as well as “pulling out their veins.”

The Empress Elizabeth was fond of having tongues ripped out with pliers. Peter the Great preferred the knout, a brutal leather whip that sliced 1.3 centimeters (0.5 in) into the flesh with every blow. Peter also personally supervised prisoners being stretched on the rack and burned with hot irons.

Under Catherine the Great, rebels were suspended by a metal hook pushed through their ribs and left to die. Others were hanged on rafts, which floated down the Volga as a warning.

8The Court Was Brutally Violent

Theoretically, the Russian tsar was perhaps the most absolute ruler in Europe with the noble boyars as the only real check on his power. In practice, the Russian court tended to be a snake pit, with competing factions often resorting to violence to gain power.

As a child, Peter the Great huddled terrified in a corner while armed men rampaged through the palace massacring his mother’s relatives. Ivan the Terrible was sure that boyars had poisoned his mother when he was just eight.

They were relatively lucky. Feodor II lasted seven weeks on the throne before he was strangled. Peter III was murdered on the orders of his own wife, who ruled for 30 years as Catherine the Great. Paul I was throttled and kicked to death in his bedroom. One of the assassins then woke up Paul’s son with the words, “Time to grow up. Go and rule!”

Little wonder that many tsars became paranoid and cruel. Peter the Great had his own son flogged to death. Ivan the Terrible also killed his son during an argument.

7The Imprisonment Of Ivan VI

Ivan VI became tsar in 1740 when he was just two months old. He was overthrown a year later by his cousin Elizabeth. On her orders, Ivan was placed in solitary confinement at age four. He remained there for 20 years.

For most of that time, he was kept in the Schlusselburg Fortress, where nobody even knew who he was. His cell had no windows, so he never saw daylight and “never knew whether it was day or night.” The guards were forbidden to speak to him. His only entertainment was a copy of the Bible.

Unsurprisingly, Ivan developed mental problems. He remained locked in his room at Schlusselburg until 1764 when Catherine the Great took pity on him and had him murdered.

6The Oprichniki

After a troubled childhood, Ivan the Terrible became increasingly deranged after a period of illness and the death of his wife. Turning against the powerful boyars, Ivan surrounded himself with a group of mercenaries and commoners who were given land grants around Moscow.

These were the notorious Oprichniki, who dressed all in black and carried severed dog heads as a symbol of the fate that awaited traitors. They acted as Ivan’s secret police, torturing and executing anyone suspected of disloyalty to Ivan.

In 1570, the Oprichniki stormed into the city of Novgorod and massacred over 10,000 of its citizens. The once mighty trading town never truly recovered.

5Impostors

The Russian Empire was oddly afflicted by impostors, who usually claimed to be a deceased member of the royal family. During the “Time of Troubles” in the early 17th century, no fewer than three impostors emerged and claimed to be Ivan the Terrible’s son Dmitri, who had died as a child.

False Dimitri I even managed to be crowned tsar in Moscow, although he was soon murdered. False Dimitri II was essentially impersonating False Dimitri I and gathered a vast Cossack army that ravaged the north. False Dimitri III was called the “Thief of Pskov” after taking that city, but he was defeated and executed in 1612.

In the 18th century, the Cossack Pugachev orchestrated a huge revolt by claiming to be the murdered Peter III. Another False Peter turned up in Montenegro, which he ruled for five years until the Ottomans paid a barber to cut his throat. At least three other Russians also claimed to be Peter, including a founder of the Skoptsy sect.

4Cults And Sects

The Russian Church was intense and prone to schism, and it seemed that sects and cults flourished everywhere in the vast Russian Empire. The Khlysty were known for their frantic singing and dancing and were said to wildly whip themselves to show contempt for their physical bodies.

The Molokane (“Milk Drinkers”) refused to serve in the military and tried to establish pacifist communes in Siberia. The Doukhobors (“Spirit Wrestlers”) preferred their Living Book of hymns to the Bible.

Strangest of all were the Skoptsy, who considered sex the source of all sin and practiced ritual castration and genital mutilation. Male Skoptsy would slice off their testicles and cauterize the wound with a hot iron. Others went further and hacked off their penises as well.

Female Skoptsy were expected to slice off their breasts or nipples, and some form of female circumcision was practiced as well. The Skoptsy also castrated their young children, so the sect only survived by converting new recruits. It lasted over a century.

3Self-Immolation

The largest Russian religious split came under Peter the Great, when Patriarch Nikon undertook reforms to bring the Russian church into line with the rest of Eastern Orthodoxy. Among other things, he decreed that the Russians should make the sign of the cross with three fingers instead of two. Led by the Archpriest Avvakum, many Russians refused to accept this.

Calling themselves the Old Believers, these traditionalists held services in secret where they crossed themselves with three fingers. The state called them Raskolniki (“Splitters”) and persecuted them relentlessly. Many Old Believers came to believe that the end of the world was at hand. If they suspected they had been discovered, whole villages would gather together, set fire to the church, and burn themselves alive.

2Famines

The Russian Empire was never noted for its efficiency, and its rulers often struggled to respond to the periodic famines that were a feature of life in the provinces. As late as 1891, the tsar responded to widespread crop failures by forbidding newspapers to report on the problem or even use the word “famine.”

After much foot-dragging, he eventually banned crop exports and attempted a program of famine relief. As a result, “only” about 400,000 people died in the famine of 1891–92.

There were worse examples. In 1601, a volcano erupted in Peru and sparked a series of unusually long winters. The resulting famine killed two million Russians, one-third of the population at the time. The tsar was too busy with a looming civil war to do much. “Dead bodies were found with hay in their mouths, and human flesh was sold in pies in the markets.”

1Serfdom

The Russian Empire was built on the backs of the serfs, who were bound to a particular estate and forced to work for the landowner who controlled it. By the 17th century, landowners were allowed to buy and sell serfs, effectively making them indistinguishable from slaves.

Nobles were not technically allowed to kill their serfs, but they could flog or punish them as they saw fit. There were no real consequences if a serf died of his injuries. Landowners could also send their serfs to Siberia or enlist them in the army against their will.

Serfdom was abolished in 1861. At that point, Russia had a population of almost 63 million, at least 46 million of them serfs.

Former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill once said: “I cannot forecast to you the action of Russia. It is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.” These words, first uttered in 1939, still ring true today. Despite the collapse of the Soviet Union over thirty years ago, many still regard Russia as a land of spies, ambiguity, and secrets. A land where individuals die mysteriously.

Such mysterious deaths have not been confined to Russia’s borders either. London and Berlin are just two examples of cities where Russian individuals have died under suspicious circumstances. Many of these deaths remain unsolved, even decades later. In this list, we take a look at ten of the most mysterious Russian deaths.

Related: 10 Russian ‘Closed Cities’ That Still Exist

10 Boris Nemtsov

On February 27, 2015, politician and former Deputy Prime Minister Boris Nemtsov was assassinated within a stone’s throw from the Kremlin walls. At 11:31 in the evening, Nemtsov and his partner, Anna Duritskaya, were walking along the Bolshoy Moskvoretsky Bridge in central Moscow when Nemtsov was shot four times from behind, dying instantly. Immediately afterward, the assailant fled the scene in a white or grey car. Anna Duritskaya managed to escape unharmed.

Following the assassination, an investigation was launched by the Russian government, with the Russian president overseeing the investigation personally. In late July 2017, four Chechen men were found guilty and given jail sentences between 11 and 19 years as accomplices. The convicted killer was handed a twenty-year sentence. However, to this day, the person who ordered the killing has not been found.

Suspicions continue to surround the murder as Nemtsov was a popular and vocal opponent of the Russian government. On the evening in question, Nemtsov had given a radio interview in which he had accused President Putin of lying over Russia’s military takeover of Crimea. At the time of the murder, all nearby security cameras had been switched off for maintenance.^[1]

9 Anna Politkovskaya

On October 7, 2006, Anna Politkovskaya was shot dead in the elevator of her apartment block. She was shot in the heart, shoulder, and head. An investigative journalist for the liberal newspaper Novaya Gazeta, Politkovskaya had been involved in reporting on human rights abuses in Chechnya. Politkovskaya was a vocal critic of the Kremlin as well as of the then Prime Minister of the Chechen Republic, Ramzan Kadyrov. Politkovskaya was murdered on the birthday of the Russian president and only two days after Kadyrov’s 30th birthday celebrations. Ominously, in an interview with Politkovskaya in 2004, Kadyrov referred to her as an “enemy” and said that she should be shot.

Many years later, in 2014, the final trial (after previous trials and acquittals) took place. The actual murderer, Rustam Makhmudov, was sentenced to life in prison. Other accomplices were given various sentences. However, yet again, the person who ordered the killing remains a mystery.^[2]

8 Alexander Litvinenko

“You may succeed in silencing one man, but the howl of protest from around the world will reverberate, Mr. Putin, in your ears for the rest of your life.” These were the last words of former KGB officer Alexander Litvinenko, who died in London in 2006 after being poisoned with the radioactive substance polonium.

Born in the Russian city of Voronezh, Litvinenko spent much of his childhood in the North Caucasus. After attending military college, he was recruited as an officer of the KGB (Russian security services now known as the FSB) in the Organized Crime Department. In this role, Litvinenko was given orders to assassinate oligarch Berezovsky, which he refused. He later publicly denounced the FSB in a press conference. Fearing for his life, Litvinenko and his family fled to the UK, where they were granted asylum.

On November 1, 2006, Litvinenko suddenly fell ill. Two days later, he was admitted to the hospital in London. He died on November 23, 2006. A UK government inquiry concluded that Litvinenko died after ingesting radioactive poison from a teapot in a London hotel. The inquiry considered it a “strong probability” that the killing was directed by the Russian security services (FSB).^[3]

7 Unnamed Diplomat

On October 19, 2021, the body of a Russian diplomat was found outside the Russian embassy in Berlin. The 35-year-old man had apparently fallen out of a window on the upper floor of the embassy. The Russian embassy referred to the death as a “tragic accident” but made no further comments. The deceased was reported to be the son of General Alexey Zhalo, the deputy director of the FSB’s Second Directorate and head of the FSB’s Directorate for Protection of Constitutional Order—which is concerned with terrorism cases.

The German authorities requested permission to perform an autopsy, but this was refused by the Russian embassy. Instead, the victim’s body was repatriated back to Russia. German police did not investigate the death due to the deceased’s diplomatic status. This is not the first incident of its kind. In 2003, another worker at the same embassy also died after falling from an upper window.^[4]

6 Yegor Prosvirnin

In late 2021, another mysterious death was reported in Russia, with the deceased again falling from a window. This time, the victim fell from his apartment window in central Moscow. The deceased was named as thirty-five-year-old journalist Yegor Prosvirnin. Prosvirnin was a controversial right-wing journalist who founded the blog “Sputnik and Pogrom.” The website was blocked by the Russian government in 2017 for promoting ideas of “ethnic and religious hatred.”

Mysteriously, Prosvirnin’s body was found naked under the windows of a residential building. Moments before his death, Prosvirnin allegedly threw a knife and gas can (some report pepper spray canister) from the window. Neighbors had also heard screaming and swearing before he fell. Some initial reports indicate he may have been intoxicated, and his death is likely either a suicide or accident.^[5]

5 Sergei Magnitsky

In 2009, Russian tax advisor Sergei Magnitsky—just 37—died in a Russian prison under suspicious circumstances. Magnitsky was a lawyer and tax auditor at Firestone Duncan, a Moscow law firm, and worked with Hermitage Capital, an asset management firm led by American Bill Browder. Browder was banned from Russia in 2005 as a national security threat. This ban came after his company accused State corporations of large-scale corruption.

In 2008, the offices of Hermitage Capital were raided and documents seized. These documents were used to transfer ownership of several holding companies and then successfully apply for a tax rebate of $230 million. At the time, Magnitsky had been defending Hermitage Capital.

In November 2008, Magnitsky was himself arrested on allegations of complicity in tax evasion. He died while in detention after repeated pleas for medical help. His official cause of death was toxic shock and heart failure due to pancreatitis. However, allegations that he was beaten by guards before he died were found to be credible by the European Court of Human Rights. It also concluded that Magnitsky had been deprived of medical care. In 2013, a Moscow court found Magnitsky guilty of tax evasion posthumously.^[6]

4 Vladimir Marugov

Vladimir Marugov, otherwise known as Russia’s “sausage king” due to his ownership of multiple sausage factories, was brutally killed at his country estate outside of Moscow in late 2020. On the morning of the attack, Marugov was sitting in his outside sauna with his partner Sabina Gaziyeva. Suddenly, two masked intruders broke into the estate, tying the couple up and demanding money. Gaziyeva managed to escape. However, Marugov’s body was later found by police next to the crossbow used in the attack.

The man accused of the murder, Alexander Mavridi, was subsequently detained. Yet, in August 2021, Mavridi, along with several other detainees, managed to escape detention. However, he was later caught via facial recognition technology. At the time of his murder, Marugov was going through a bitter divorce with his ex-wife. In a bizarre twist, it was reported that Marugov’s ex-wife was a close acquaintance of the accused killer. She denies prior knowledge of the attack.^[7]

3 Nikolai Glushkov

Former deputy director of the Russian airline Aeroflot and acquaintance of the aforementioned Boris Berezovsky (see number eight), Nikolai Glushkov is another controversial figure to die under mysterious circumstances. After being accused of fraud, Glushkov fled Russia and was granted political asylum in the UK, where he lived until his death. A Kremlin critic, Glushkov was due to attend Commercial Court in London on March 12, 2018, to defend himself against fraud claims. However, he never showed up. His daughter found his body at his home later that day.

A coroner found that, despite attempts to make his death look like a suicide, Glushkov was, in fact, strangled in his own home by a third party. A pathology report found that the injuries were “consistent with a neck-hold, applied from behind, and the assailant being behind the victim.” Despite contacting over 2,000 witnesses, the murder remains unsolved.^[8]

2 Boris Berezovsky

Next is Boris Berezovsky, a man who has already featured prominently on this list. Once Russia’s second richest man, Berezovsky fled Russia in 2000 amid accusations of fraud and money laundering. He went to the UK, where he was granted political asylum in 2003. Extradition requests were refused, much to the ire of the Russian government. Berezovsky, a vocal critic of the Kremlin, had apparently been the target of an intended assassination (foiled by his acquaintance, the late Alexander Litvinenko from #8).

In contrast to his previously lavish lifestyle, toward the end of his life, Berezovsky was said to be in financial difficulties after losing a disastrous court case against fellow oligarch Roman Abramovich. He was reported to have subsequently fallen into a deep depression. Berezovsky was found dead at his UK home in March 2013 with a ligature around his neck, indicating suicide. However, a coroner later recorded an “open verdict” due to contradictory evidence of whether he took his own life or was unlawfully killed.^[9]

1 Natalya Estemirova

Last but not least is Natalya Estermirova. An award-winning human rights campaigner and friend of Anna Politkovskaya, Estemirova was born in the Russian province of Saratov. A graduate of Grozny University in Chechnya, she went on to report on human rights abuses, especially during the Second Chechen War in 1999. She later joined the human rights organization Memorial and wrote articles for liberal newspaper Novaya Gazeta.

On July 15, 2009, Estemirova was abducted on her way to work in Grozny, Chechnya. Her body was later found in a wooded area in neighboring Ingushetia with bullet wounds in her head and chest. While it did not find sufficient evidence of State involvement, the European Court of Human Rights concluded that the Russian authorities had failed to conduct a full and thorough investigation into the murder. No one was ever convicted of her murder.^[10]