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

The court cut short its work until February 10th. When the guard in the basement ordered us to stand up with our faces to the wall, so they could handcuff and lock us in pairs, a prisoner of about forty with an intelligent face happened to be near me. He was constantly scratching himself and killing lice under the collar of his shirt. He greeted me and said he was Nikolai Koltsov, the former chairman of one of the first cooperatives in the north of the U.S.S.R. He was arrested back in 1989, but the trial of Koltsov and his colleagues had only just started when I was in court. He had no time to tell me about his case. But I learned that he was in one of those cells meant for 35 in Matrosskaya Tishina, where they kept 120 people. I was appalled when I saw a louse on him – a sad symbol of the notorious Matrosskaya Tishina cells. I met Koltsov a few days later and we were able to talk about his case.

In the evening I read an article by Valery Rudnev in Izvestia . [338] Valeri Rudnev, “Sentence should be Passed on the Mirzayanov Case”, Izvestia , February 9, 1994. He was both a lawyer and a journalist, and I had met with him several times. After I read his publications I was convinced of his highly professional erudition. That is why his article was extremely valuable for me. Rudnev started his article by saying that my trial could end without a verdict because Article 6 of the Criminal and Procedural Code could be applied. It stipulated that even if the defendant were guilty, circumstances could bring the case to a close. This decision was ambiguous according Rudnev, and he insisted that the court pass its verdict.

However, I didn’t trust the court, which pushed with all its strength to reach an unjust verdict in my case. For that reason, I hoped that the Attorney General’s Office would drop the case as being illegally instituted.

On February 10, 1994 the court session started with a surprise that Prosecutor Pankratov had prepared for me. He said that Victor Petrunin, Director of GOSNIIOKhT, had been summoned to the trial. The judge also reported that he had summoned Lev Fedorov and Andrei Mironov as witnesses.

Petrunin was the first to testify. When he entered the courtroom and saw the conditions I was sitting in there, he couldn’t conceal his embarrassment. Then he regained his composure and even greeted me before he was about to give his testimony. I don’t know whether it was his confusion or his usual hypocrisy, but Petrunin started his testimony… with a complimentary tirade directed at me. He said that he had known me for more than 25 years as a gifted scientist, and that he had always helped me as much as he could. He was my official opponent at the defense of my doctoral dissertation, and had given it a positive review. Then he had appointed me as the head of the Department for Foreign Technical Counterintelligence. Petrunin told the court that he had never had a personal grudge against me, if you didn’t take into account the articles in which I had disclosed so many secrets which had caused irreparable damage to the defense capabilities of the country. Petrunin complained that enormous expenses and the labor of many thousands of scientists, engineers, and workers were wasted because of my articles.

When he was answering the prosecutor’s question about what the consequences of my articles were for the regime of keeping state secrets, Petrunin exclaimed pathetically, “Comrade Prosecutor! Before Mirzayanov’s articles we didn’t have any big worries about security, and everything was calm and quiet. Nobody was interested in our institute. But now we don’t know what to do: we are literally besieged by the intelligence services of foreign states! You yourself understand how dangerous it will be for everybody if our new research ends up in the hands of people like Hussein!”

I immediately envisioned the picture that Petrunin was painting for the judges: tall concrete walls with barbed wire and roguish spies with binoculars, climbing these fences to penetrate a building stuffed with various test-tubes and fluorescent electronic instruments, wanting to steal the secrets of our beloved motherland… Just like in a Soviet movie with our glorious intelligence officers and the impudent spies from imperialist countries.

Petrunin broke out into a sweat as he finished giving his testimony, and his face became red, although it was freezing cold in the courtroom. He answered questions obsequiously, demonstrating his full loyalty with endless bows in the direction of the judge. Obviously he was afraid that he would also be ordered to sit on the defendant’s bench near me. It seemed that his zeal made him shrink a bit, even though he wasn’t very tall to begin with. I felt really sorry for him.

Judge Sazonov probably wasn’t able to stand the shock he had experienced and declared a break before the witness Fedorov arrived. Asnis came up to me during the break. He was vexed. “I don’t understand why the prosecutor is procrastinating,” said my lawyer. “He was given instructions to terminate the trial.”

Of course this news greatly excited me, but I tried not to kindle any hopes ahead of time (who knows, they could change their minds!), and I answered that if this campaigner was given “instructions”, then he was certain to implement them. [339] As a typical Soviet bureaucrat, he was not in any rush to fulfill a given order. This could be explained by the state of turmoil in the Attorney General’s Office in those days. Duma began discussing amnesty for all the participants of the October 1993 Coup attempt against Yeltsin. President Yeltsin and his administration were furious about this action by Duma, and they prompted Alexey Kazannik to declare that he would not disobey Duma’s resolution, which he was obliged to enforce. As an honest individual, Kazannik refused to violate Russian law, and decided to immediately resign after executing Duma’s Resolution N 65-1G about amnesty, on February 23, 1994. My trial and Kazannik’s saga coincided, creating some options for Pankratov to procrastinate with his order. Nevertheless, one of Kazannik’s last decisions was to order me to be freed from jail.

My co-author Lev Fedorov was the next to testify. Before his turn, I asked my lawyer not to react to his testimony and not to ask him any questions. I thought: “Let him say whatever he wants for as long as he wants, until they stop him.”

There were an extraordinary number of lies and a swagger to Fedorov’s speech. To begin with, he decided for some reason to share the details of his glorious biography, how he had graduated from Moscow State University with honors, how he quickly had defended his master’s thesis, and then had successfully contended with his doctoral dissertation. Fedorov said defiantly that he had written all the articles, and that Vil Mirzayanov had only signed them. Then, in a very arrogant tone, he started talking about his work on a book about chemical weapons. He mentioned that this process was very difficult and added casually, “Of course, you can’t imagine it.” At these words Sazonov couldn’t restrain himself any longer and burst out from the indignation that overwhelmed him, “Good God! Perhaps I can imagine a little. I write books, too.”

Later I learned that Sazonov had published a few law books.

When Lev Fedorov was asked how he had received such detailed information about the new chemical weapons and binary weapons, he said without any embarrassment that he had read about all this in the foreign press, although he had never worked in the area of chemical weapons! The mouths of the judges and the prosecutor, who had had plenty of life experience, twisted sarcastically because his assertion was so ridiculous. It meant that Fedorov considered them to be complete fools. Judge Sazonov finally decided to put the witness in his place, “Witness Fedorov, could you tell us where and when this information was published? Then we could read all that, too.”