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

Many of these organizations also sent letters addressed to U.S. Ambassador to Russia Thomas Pickering asking him to intervene personally in this case. On February 1, 1994, Senator Bill Bradley addressed Baturin in a special fax, asking him to take measures to stop the closed trial. On January 29, 1994, the International Science Foundation founded by Mr. George Soros, published a statement in my support.

On February 2, 1994, Agencé France Presse reported (with a reference to ITAR-TASS ) that the widow of Andrei Sakharov had urged the authorities to open up the Mirzayanov trial. Elena Bonner said that the closed trial violated my legal rights, and she also denounced the so-called “non-intervention” of the Russian Academy of Sciences and its inertia in not defending me. She said that she had called the president of the Academy twice and asked him to intervene, but she got the impression that the organization “had adopted the same position… that the Soviet Academy of Sciences took when Andrei Sakharov was persecuted.”

January 30th was Sunday, and nobody was in a hurry to transfer me anywhere. Time passed in endless conversations, sprinkled with the television news. This time I agreed to take my turn sleeping on the mattress, and it seems to me it was a very wise decision. Finally, I managed to have a good sleep, and on the morning of January 31st life in jail didn’t seem so unbearable to me. After breakfast the window in the door opened and I heard the command, “Mirzayanov, take your stuff and head for the exit!” This meant that I had a total of five minutes to get ready. All my cellmates decided that I would be transferred to the other half of Matrosskaya Tishina. Soon the doors of the cell opened and the guard ordered me to follow him.

We spent a lot of time trying to find our way through various corridors and underpasses. Finally, we arrived in a completely different building, where the guard handed me over to the local security guards. One of them ordered me to follow him. We went up to the third floor of the building where there were some small holding cells. He left me there and ordered me to take off all my clothes. The security guard was examining all my clothes carefully, especially the seams.

They kept me there for more than an hour and then took me to the shower. I washed myself with pleasure using my undershirt as a washcloth. So I washed it at the same time. After this I was taken back to the cold holding cell.

Finally, the door opened and I was ordered to enter a room that smelt of some chemicals. They would photograph me and take my fingerprints again. Then I was taken to the fifth floor. I found myself in a short corridor with cells on each side. We stopped at one of them, and the security guard opened the door. A tall and likeable young man with an intelligent face was standing in the cell.

His face was a little yellowish, which showed that the prisoner hadn’t been in the sun or in the fresh air for a long time.

There were four beds in the cell and three of them were empty. We got acquainted, and I found out his name was Aleksei Kostin.

I took a place near the barred window opposite Aleksei’s bed. Between our beds there was a table with benches firmly attached to the concrete floor. The cell was freshly painted and clean, and the walls were roughly finished with coarse concrete for noise reduction. There was a toilet and a washbasin near the door, behind a short concrete barrier. In the middle of the cell there was a refrigerator with a small television set on it. There was a small nightstand next to each bed for underwear and toilet articles, and we had mattresses and small black pillows. In fact, the conditions here were much better than in my previous cell.

I mentally thanked my lawyer that for having me transferred there. Soon Aleksei told me about his case. He had already been waiting for his trial for almost four years. He had been in almost all the cells of Matrosskaya Tishina, both in this part and in the other half of the jail. Aleksei had been the head of the personnel department of the U.S.S.R.’s first Soviet-American joint venture in St. Petersburg. He had been in this cell with Anatoli Lukiyanov, former Chairman of the U.S.S.R. Supreme Soviet, Yuri Plekhanov, head of security for the U.S.S.R. President Mikhail Gorbachev, and former U.S.S.R. Prime Minister Valentin Pavlov, whose bed I was going to occupy. I was curious about how the coup supporters were treated. Alexei said that ringleaders of the Committee for Emergency Situations were kept under good conditions and under constant medical supervision. Food was brought in for them from a neighboring café, and of course, Alexei enjoyed these privileges, too.

Former Prime Minister Pavlov, who was dead drunk even when he was arrested, enjoyed his favorite pastime here as well. His lawyer brought him vodka and cognac, and prisoner Pavlov hid the bottles under his clothes and brought them to the cell. I think that the guards simply turned a blind eye to this. On someone’s order, of course.

Aleksei said that from time to time heated political discussions flared up in the cell, for example, about the true face of the Communist leader Lenin. Plekhanov, the former senior bodyguard for Mikhail Gorbachev, worked himself into such a state of excitement, that he cried and asked them not to offend the memory of the “leader.” Nowadays where could a person with such orthodox thinking appear from? Plekhanov was relatively young. When he was a young Pioneer on one of Moscow’s streets, Plekhanov saw a camera dangling from under the unbuttoned coat of some foreigner. The young Leninist immediately ran to the policeman on duty. There was a secret institute in the vicinity, and the foreigner was arrested. Nobody knows what happened to him; however, the Chekist career of the future bodyguard of our last Soviet General Secretary started at that moment. First, Plekhanov went to the school for young Chekists where he studied his favorite subject – radio engineering and other subjects important for his future profession. Then he was lucky enough to catch the eye of Vladimir Kryuchkov, the future head of the KGB, who later became his mentor and promoted him in a career that finally led to his important position near the body of Gorbachev. It wasn’t surprising that at a critical moment he betrayed him, since he had been trained to serve his master Kryuchkov, not Gorbachev.

As for the origins of the refrigerator, Aleksei said that his enterprise had delivered 15 refrigerators free of charge to the jail, so he was allowed to keep one in his cell. Aleksei mostly ate what his relatives had been bringing for him. Parcels were allowed once a month, but they couldn’t exceed seven kilograms, so experienced Aleksei asked his relatives to bring mostly dry products and food concentrates. They were not very tasty, but they were a hundred times better than the food they served in jail.

There was other good news that day too. In the evening I received a parcel from my wife and my daughter Elena, who had stood the whole day in the line so they could hand it through the cherished window just before the service closed. This was great luck because, as Aleksei explained to me, next month I had the right to receive another parcel, but not earlier than 15 days after the previous one. The security guard who had brought the parcel explained that he would give me only one disposable safety razor, and he would give me the new ones as I returned the used ones. I had to submit a written application addressed to the head of the jail for this. Things turned out to be not so bad. I had a good cellmate, there was enough air in the room, and I had my own bed and could sleep. I also had a refrigerator, a television set, and the newspaper Izvestia . All this lifted my spirits somewhat.

There were no negotiations through vent window panes in this part of Matrosskaya Tishina, and nobody sent jail mail. I decided that obviously there must be other channels for communication here. My cellmate said that the local authorities often pressured prisoners by threatening to send them to the first half of the jail, to the cells with a hundred or more prisoners. Yes, such threats will surely make you unwilling to establish open contact with other cells. However, from time to time I heard someone knocking on the radiator, and my cellmate sometimes answered. Unfortunately I didn’t have a clue about how this alphabet worked.