As a journalist for the newspaper Novaya Gazeta (NG), Shchekochikhin investigated apartment bombings allegedly directed by the Russian secret services and the Three Whales Corruption Scandal which involved high-ranking FSB officers and was associated with money laundering through the Bank of New York.

Shchekochikhin died suddenly on 3 July 2003 from a mysterious illness a few days before his scheduled departure to the United States, where he planned to meet with FBI investigators.

Beginning in the 1990s, he published many articles critical of the First and Second Chechen Wars, human rights abuses in the Russian army, state corruption, and other social issues.

In the summer of 1988, Shchekochikhin published an interview with a lieutenant colonel of the militia Aleksander Gurov, in which the existence of organized crime in the Soviet Union was first publicly stated.

That brought fame to both Gurov (who became the head of the 6th Agency of the MVD of the USSR which struggled against organized crime) and Shchekochikhin.

Since early 1995, he has been an author and host of an investigative journalism program called "Special Team" on ORT, Russian television's first channel (then owned by Boris Berezovsky).

[5] From 2002, Shchekochikhin was a member of the Sergei Kovalev Commission, which investigated allegations that the 1999 Moscow apartment bombings had been orchestrated by the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) to generate support for the war.

He also tried to investigate the Three Whales Corruption Scandal and criminal activities of FSB officers related to money laundering through the Bank of New York and illegal actions of Yevgeny Adamov, a former Russian Minister of Nuclear Energy.

[17] Some news reports drew parallels between the poisonings of Shchekochikhin, Alexander Litvinenko, and president Vladimir Putin’s former bodyguard Roman Tsepov, who died in a similar way in St. Petersburg in September 2004.

Религия предательства), tells the real stories of some of the many people forcibly recruited by the Russian KGB (the domestic operations of which later became the FSB) to work as undercover informers or agents.

[21] The Prosecutor General of Russia closed the criminal case in April 2009 after the examination had failed to prove poisoning or violent death.