The KGB poisoned dissident writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn in 1971, but the dose was too small to kill him, Britain's Guardian newspaper reported Monday from Moscow. Its report quoted a retired officer of the former Soviet Union's security service, Boris Ivanov, as saying he witnessed the assassination attempt when he was assigned to a group of agents tailing the dissident.
Solzhenitsyn suffered an undiagnosed illness at the time, three years before Soviet authorities put him on a plane to the West. The Guardian said the poison was believed to be ricinine, an extract from the castor oil plant, which the KGB used to murder Bulgarian dissident Georgy Markov in London in 1978. Markov was apparently jabbed by a man with an umbrella.The newspaper quoted Ivanov as saying a KGB agent holding an unidentified object in one hand moved close to Solzhenitsyn in a store in the southern Russian town of Novocherrkassk. After the man left the store "our boss started to smile" and said the dissident would not live much longer, Ivanov said.