Вил Мирзаянов - State Secrets - An Insider's Chronicle of the Russian Chemical Weapons Program

Soon I watched my neighbors write something; then they rolled and wrapped their letter in polyethylene film. They sealed the edges of the roll together with the flame from a match, making a capsule. This was tied it to a string, and the other end was attached to something in the cell. Then Victor N., the prisoner with the swarthy face, thrust his hand out through the bars of the ventilation window, shouted out an address. Then he threw the letter-capsule upward. We heard a cry of approval, which meant that the message reached its destination, or one of the transfer points of the jail mail system. All this was new to me and very different from Lefortovo Prison.

Finally I fell asleep, but only for a short while. I woke up because it was cold and my whole body ached from those damned iron strips. My cellmates noticed my suffering and encouraged me to take a bed with a mattress. I did so, but only later. It was time to get up and have breakfast. It smelt of thick tea. It turned out that my cellmates had prepared a generous portion of chefir, which they immediately offered to me. Curiosity got the better of me, and I tried this concoction. However, I didn’t feel the euphoria that you might feel after a glass of wine or vodka. Still, there was something about the chefir. My heart was beating faster and my head cleared up, but drinking normal tea had the same effect.

I thought that this prison drink had no effect on me, as for example diethyl ether, because the longtime exposure to chemicals weakens the body’s reactions to these substances. Still, to keep company, I joined my cellmates from time to time when they were drinking chefir. When they sipped this drink, they got very excited and began ardently discussing their stories, coming up with various theories about their upcoming prosecutions and trials.

My cellmates treated me with respect. The rumors that “first-timers” were always subjected to humiliating trials proved to be completely wrong.

My cellmates also told me that when the jail regime was toughened and the security guards started beating prisoners half to death for no reason, they had made a collective decision that under no circumstances should any prisoners fall for these provocations by coming to the defense of someone who was being beaten. The security guards were only waiting for such an excuse to start shooting, and to shift the blame for their outrageous treatment of the prisoners. However, the prisoners explained to me that the only ones who returned to jail were those who hadn’t learned to be smart and rich enough to avoid further arrest and investigation. Even if someone found himself back in jail, the money made his life there less onerous, and possibly quite tolerable. He always had something to drink and good food to eat. He even had women…

I thought this sounded like thieves’ bragging and doubted their words, but they assured me that in jail, just like in the world outside everything could be bought and sold, only it cost much more inside, because the people who provided “all this” charged for the increased risk. They even described some ways of obtaining this “heavenly” life, which I won’t go into. It has nothing to do with my emotions; the point is that it is true. Criminals in the armchairs of power joined with criminals who supervise the thieves’ world. This is completely logical, because the nature of the criminal Communist regime cannot operate differently.

After lunch the door to the cell opened and the security guard who appeared commanded, “Mirzayanov, get ready to exit!” This meant that I was being summoned to meet with my lawyer. We took a winding route through many corridors, and finally, the guard led me into a room with a table and two chairs that were welded to the floor. Aleksander Asnis was sitting at the table. He couldn’t hide his agitation when he saw how worn out and exhausted I was. I must admit I was also excited to see my lawyer. I was very glad that he had found me in this terrible prison. I made an effort to suppress a brazen attitude that was beginning to rise up in me, and I started to answer his questions. Naturally, Asnis asked about my present situation and was deeply disenchanted that they kept me under such terrible conditions. I comforted him, by saying that these conditions were not the worst, although I didn’t have a mattress. I had left home as an inexperienced “first-timer” without warm clothes, soap, tooth paste, tea, and other necessities.

I told Asnis about the prison cells where, according to my cellmates, they packed 70-120 people into 30 square meters. Despite the ventilation window and the window in the door which were always open, there simply wasn’t enough air to breathe. People went to the door vent to light a cigarette, since it was the only place where the match didn’t snuff out because of lack of oxygen… Regardless of the season, those prisoners stripped down to their underwear, because their clothes were always wet from constantly oozing sweat and the high humidity. The heat made the situation worse in the summer, and most people would just lie around on the concrete floor in a state of prostration. Sometimes a towel hanging on the wall would ripple, because the prisoners finally gave up struggling with the lice which propagated so quickly. Prisoners in those cells slept in four shifts, because of the shortage of space, mattresses, and pillows.

It turned out that my lawyer knew all about it, because he often dealt with prisoners from such cells. I felt that I was probably in a relatively “privileged” cell and we could suppose that I was lucky.

My lawyer told me about what was going on in the world “at large.” My arrest had created a storm of protest in our country and abroad. Gale Colby and Irene Goldman had called a few times to tell what measures different people had taken in the U.S. to try to help secure my release. Asnis had brought along two issues of the newspaper Izvestia with articles about my case. He had also called my wife to learn that everything was fine and the children were healthy.

The next court session was scheduled for February 4, 1994. Asnis asked if he should petition the judges to release me from prison, but I replied that I wasn’t going to ask anybody about it, especially not the judge who was an inveterate hypocrite.

Our meeting finished with that, and we said good-bye to each other until the next court session. The guard took me back to my cell by a different route. Jailers had their own original, though naive, tactics.

I arrived and told my cellmates about our meeting. Soon porridge and bread were brought and we started our dinner. On the NTV channel, Tatiana Mitkova reported that Vil Mirzayanov had finally been found in Matrosskaya Tishina Prison, in a cell with criminals and murderers. I was horrified. I had told my lawyer about my first night in the cramped holding cell with such people. Evidently my story had evolved a bit, before it reached the NTV anchorwoman.

My cellmates were not offended and didn’t demand any explanations from me, though they certainly guessed that I was the source of the information in this report. I was ashamed and told my cellmates that I was very sorry about Mitkova’s words. They began to comfort me, and said that surely I would be transferred the next day to the other half of Matrosskaya Tishina, where they kept the “political prisoners.”

The next day was Sunday and it would have been naive to hope that anyone would arrange for my transfer. That proved to be the case. Meanwhile, nothing had changed in our typical prisoners’ life: we spent long hours lying around on the bed, in deep and endless speculation, interrupted by sad outpourings of the heart.

I was fortunate that the press responded with significant and unrelenting pressure after my arrest. The wire services Reuters , Agencé France Presse (AFP), Associated Press , and others published reports about my arrest on January 27th. They stressed that the underpinnings of my case were political, which provoked a wide protest in the public and scientific circles of different countries. The U.S. administration reacted immediately. While answering a correspondent’s question at a press conference in the Russian-American Center on January 28, 1994, Thomas Pickering, the U.S. Ambassador in Moscow, summed up the official American position: