A closer look
Edward Snowden's exile looks like an all-inclusive vacation compared to the fate of 17th-century Russian whistleblower Grigori Kotoshikhin. A high-ranking clerk in the Muscovite bureaucracy, Grigori defected to Sweden and wrote a massive, highly cynical tell-all book exposing the sheer incompetence and brutal corruption of the Russian state. His new life in Stockholm was going great until he drunkenly murdered his landlord in a dispute over a woman. The Swedes beheaded him, but because he was a traitor with no family, his body was given to the local university. For centuries, the ultimate Russian spy hung in a Swedish medical school as an anatomy prop.
