Andrei Zheleznyakov (nonfiction)

Andrei Zheleznyakov was a scientist involved in the development of chemical weapons for the Soviet Union.

Zheleznyakov was exposed to the residue of an unspecified Novichok agent while working in a Moscow laboratory in May 1987. He was critically injured and took ten days to recover consciousness after the incident. He lost the ability to walk and was treated at a secret clinic in Leningrad for three months afterwards. The agent caused permanent harm, with effects that included "chronic weakness in his arms, a toxic hepatitis that gave rise to cirrhosis of the liver, epilepsy, spells of severe depression, and an inability to read or concentrate that left him totally disabled and unable to work." He never recovered and, after five years of deteriorating health, died in July 1992.

Fiction cross-reference

• Crimes against chemical constants
• Gnomon algorithm
• Gnomon Chronicles

External links

• Novichok @ Wikipedia
• ‘It’s got me’: the lonely death of the Soviet scientist poisoned by novichok @ The Guardian - Andrei Zheleznyakov was working on chemical weapons in the 1980s when a hood malfunction exposed him to the deadly nerve agent