A job to die for

Everyone knows that too much stress can be lethal. Hence it’s logical to infer that the greatest number of job-related deaths would be caused by the most stressful jobs.

These, according to my painstaking research, are (in this order): military personnel, police officer, firefighter, social worker, broadcaster, newspaper reporters, emergency dispatcher, mental health counsellor, anaesthesiologist, A&E nurse.

Well, let me tell you: comparatively speaking, all of these are sinecures involving no health risks whatsoever. Relegating them to that lowly status is the most dangerous job in the world: top executive in the Russian oil industry.

In the two years that have passed since Putin decided he had had enough of Ukrainian sovereignty, 18 holders of such jobs have died under mysterious circumstances. The latest such demise was announced yesterday by Lukoil, one of Russia’s biggest oil companies.

Its vice president, Vitaly Robertus, died at 53, for reasons not divulged. Robertus is the fourth Lukoil executive to die since the beginning of Putin’s war. One of his colleagues, Chairman of the Board Vladimir Nekrasov, died of a heart attack last October. But the other two deaths were rather, shall we say, baroque.

Nekrasov’s predecessor, Ravil Maganov, was treated for a cardiac complaint in hospital. His condition was so serious that he fell to his death out of a sixth-floor window, a known side effect of heart trouble. And in May, 1922, another top manager, Alexander Subbotin, died during an ESP séance run by a shaman.

Lest you may think that Lukoil is the only Russian oil company suffering such personnel attrition, Gazprom is giving it a good run for its money.

A few days before the invasion, Leonid Shulman, manager of Gazprom Investa, was found dead in his bathtub. He had died of multiple knife wounds, all of them, according to the suicide note, self-inflicted. One would think that an obviously intelligent chap should have thought of a less demanding method of suicide than using himself for knife practice, but there you have it.

Then the day after the invasion, Alexander Tulyakov, Deputy Treasurer, was found hanged in his Petersburg flat. The contents of the suicide note haven’t been revealed, possibly because no note existed.

Doing business with Gazprom can be as dangerous as serving on its board. Thus Yuri Voronov, Director General of a major Gazprom contractor, was found floating in his swimming pool. He had been shot in the head point-blank, which had to be ruled suicide even in the absence of a note.

On 18 April, 2022, former vice president of Gazprombank, Vladislav Avdeyev, his wife and 13-year-old daughter died by what was described as murder-suicide.

Avdeyev was believed to be so jealous of his wife that, before topping himself, he shot not only her but also their daughter. Shakespeare could have got to the bottom of that family drama, but I can’t. All I can do is speculate about the daughter’s role in that triangle, but shan’t for fear of offending your sensibilities.

Another murder-suicide at about the same time involved a company in a different line of work. Vasily Melnikov, head of the medical technology concern MedStom is supposed to have done the deed with a knife. He first killed his wife, then his two little sons, then himself. According to the family and neighbours, theirs was a loving close-knit family, but hey, what do they know?

But back to the hydrocarbon industry and its jinx. That Russian gremlin seems to ignore international sanctions and travels globally with ease.

Former head of the gas company NOVATEK, Fyodor Protosenya, and his family settled in the Catalan resort town Lloret de Mar. On 18 April, 2022, the police of that town reported that Mr Protosenya had first killed his mother and sister, then hanged himself in the garden. His son categorically stated that his father was no murderer.

Closer to home, almost exactly a year ago another oil magnate, Michael Watford (né Mikhail Tolstosheya) was found hanged in the garage of his Surrey house. He emigrated to Britain in the early 2000s, changing his name and citizenship, but there is no statute of limitations in Russia. Shortly before his death, Watford had told his friends he was scared of Putin’s kill-list, to which he had been “added two years ago”.

In January, 2023, Dmitry Pavochka, former Lukoil manager, provided material proof of the government warning ‘smoking kills’. He fell asleep with a lit cigarette in his hand and burned himself to death.

A month later, Vyacheslav Rovneiko, co-founder of Ural Energy, was found unconscious in his house. For all the doctors’ efforts, he died in hospital of indeterminate causes.

The most recent oil death, on 5 February this year, struck Ivan Sechin, 35, whose father Igor owns Rosneft, where Ivan himself was an executive. Igor Sechin isn’t just any oil billionaire, but also one of Putin’s closest cronies whom many regard as the dictator’s unofficial deputy. Ivan’s death was ascribed to the same diagnosis as Alexei Navalny’s: blood clot.

Please remind me not to apply for any top position in the Russian oil industry. Such jobs seem to be too demanding by half.

Then again, similar death rates have been recorded among Russian journalists, dissidents and any opponents of Putin who didn’t manage to flee Russia in the nick of time (and even some who found what they thought was a safe haven in the West).

I think the annals of medical science should be expanded to include a new phenomenon, ‘sudden Russian death syndrome’. My innate modesty won’t let me claim all credit for this vital contribution to medicine. One, I must add, that’s denied by such a respectable expert as Mark Galeotti.

Prof. Galeotti points out any number of possible explanations for that spate of mysterious deaths, from the general Russian propensity to suicide to professional hits commissioned by business competitors.

The first possibility is refuted by Russian immigrants in the West who rise to high positions in the oil industry (when I lived in Houston, I knew quite a few). All of them courageously resist the temptation to kill themselves and their whole families. The second possibility may well be a factor, but again, during my 10 years in Houston, I never once heard a story of, say, an Exxon president ordering a hit on a Tenneco chairman.

In any case, Prof. Galeotti ought to know that the Russian energy industry doesn’t function according to the laws of competition and free enterprise. It’s wholly controlled out of the Kremlin, where Putin and his closest cronies decide who prospers, who goes bust and, more to the point, who lives and who dies.

Russia is a fascist gangster state, a megalomaniac crime family with global ambitions. So we shouldn’t look for far-fetched explanations. Let’s just pull the old Occam’s razor out and accept that criminals act in criminal ways: murderers kill, thieves steal, embezzlers pilfer – and Putin’s Russia acts in character.