Anatoly Gerashchenko meets the same end as other Russian dissident voices

Anatoly Gerashchenko had run the Moscow Aviation Institute for years and died there last week having fallen down several flights of stairs.

Russian scientist Anatoly Gerashchenko had been involved in developing and testing weapons now being used Ukraine. Picture: Moscow Aviation Institute

OBITUARY

Anatoly Gerashchenko. Scientist.
Born December 2, 1949; died September 21, Moscow, aged 72.

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Anatoly Gerashchenko, with a ­degree in electrical engineering, spent his entire career in aviation research, investing 45 years in the Moscow Aviation Institute where he rose to be chief mechanic and, for eight years from 2007, rector – effectively vice-chancellor. The MAI is an elite high-technology education centre and boasts on its website that it is ranked by The Times Higher Education unit’s annual university survey. (It is, too, at No.1201+. Australia’s top-ranked university is Melbourne at No.33.)

The MIA focuses on research into and design of advanced fighter jets, drone technology, aero-electronics, composite materials, biotechnology, rocketry and spacecraft. Its students and researchers would have been involved in recent decades with the technology that appears to be failing the Russian defence forces that at the direction of Vladimir Putin are trying but so far failing to illegally annex Ukraine.

Ukraine’s top-ranked Sumy State University also specialises in STEM subjects and has been operating for only 32 years but is already ranked between 500 and 600 by The Times.

Gerashchenko’s work – including more than 100 scientific papers – did not escape attention; over the years he has been awarded a first-class Order of Merit for the Fatherland, a prize founded by Russian president Boris Yeltsin (whose successor, Putin, awarded Yeltsin the same), and an Order of Honour (Putin has one of these).

Gerashchenko officially retired in 2015 but remained at the MAI as a doctor of technical sciences while advising his successor as rector. He was reported to be influential there and at the Ministry of Defence, which has recently been the subject of criticism and scrutiny. He had been involved in developing and testing weapons now being used on Russia’s western front lines.

It had long been reported that he had fallen out with Putin. Then, on September 22, Russian online news channel Enews112 announced that the former MAI boss had been killed at work: “Anatoly Gerashchenko fell from a height, flying several flights of stairs. The scientist sustained ­injuries incompatible with his life.” Doctors went to his aid but were unable to revive him.

Twelve days earlier, the body of Ivan Pechorin, the managing ­director for the Aviation Industry of the Corporation for the Development of the Far East and the Arctic, washed up at Cape Ignatyev, near Vladivostok, in Russia’s east. Pechorin, 39, was reported to have slipped overboard while sailing. Days before, the businessman had attended an economic forum with Putin.

Coincidentally, on September 1, Enews112 had reported: “The chairman of (oil and natural gas producer) Lukoil’s board of directors has died as a result of a fall from a Moscow hospital window. Ravil Maganov, 67, was being treated in a ward on the sixth floor.” Weeks after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the Lukoil board was critical of Putin’s decision.

One of the first people to flee Kyiv when Russia launched its ­attack was former Moscow-based finance chief Dan Rapoport, a critic of Putin and associate of jailed opposition leader Alexei Navalny. He was found dead on August 14, having “fallen” in his Washington apartment.

The month before, the body of Yuri Voronov, 61, whose shipping firm had transport contracts with Russia’s state-owned energy giant Gazprom, was found in the pool of his luxury mansion in Vyborgsky near St Petersburg. He had been shot apparently after “a dispute with business partners”.

Alexander Subbotin, another Lukoil board member, died in May in odd circumstances having reportedly visited a West Indian shaman in Moscow. It was suggested he died of bufotoxin poisoning.

A week earlier, Andrei Krukovsky, who ran a ski resort owned by Gazprom, died when he fell down a cliff while hiking. A fortnight before, Sergey Protosenya, who once ran the natural gas conglomerate Novatek, a competitor to Gazprom, was found hanged in his Spanish seaside apartment with his wife and daughter stabbed to death in the next room. His son Fedor said: “He could never do anything to harm them. I don’t know what happened that night but I know that my dad did not hurt them.”

The day before, former Kremlin insider and Gazprombank vice-president Vladislav Avayev, 51, was found shot dead beside his murdered wife and daughter in their Moscow apartment.

In March, Vasily Melnikov, 43, owner of medical supplies company Medstorm, was found dead alongside his wife and young sons in their home at Nizhny Novgorod, east of Moscow. He was the third businessman to die in ­unusual circumstances in the days after the incursion into Ukraine.