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

Today, the director, who was a member of the regional bureau of the C.P.S.U. and a permanent member of the Party Committee, resigned from the party. How convenient it is for him this way. However, just a month or two ago, he called together the heads of the laboratories who had resigned from the party and branded them traitors. Emphatically and cynically, he gave his order about an agreement with the Party Committee, under which he was obligated to provide free transportation, work space, etc. in exchange for supervising ideological work.

Our director, who presents himself as a true patriot, is ready for any fraud. Here is a typical example that I witnessed myself in 1988. At one of the operating plants, I discovered that the concentration of chemical agents vented into the air, as well as those released into the waste water, which formed a lake near a densely populated region exceeded the norms of maximum permitted concentrations by more than a hundred times. The director prohibited me from reporting this to higher authorities.

The question is: Why are we misleading the West again? The real power in the VPK is concentrated in its enterprises, which have no desire to convert because their directors with their numerous aides don’t want to. They are just waiting for their time to come, simply procrastinating. In chemistry there is a term – inversion. It means that a chemical unnoticeably changes from one form into another, without changing its chemical formula. This phenomenon can only be detected with the help of special instruments. However, sometimes inversion can be reversible. Aren’t we witnessing a similar process with our so-called conversion?

If, by any chance, this is not true, we can sooner suppose that the dawdling with conversion is a prelude to the creeping privatization of enterprises by the top leadership of the VPK. I got this idea from the fact that just the other day our enterprise received eight brand new Mercedes from the Ministry of Petrochemical Industry. Two of them were given to our director. All of this is taking place while the country lacks the money to buy food and medications, and while our chemical industry is in a deep crisis because of the shortage of imported raw materials.

How long are we going to put up with it?

“On May 5 of 1990, Vil Sultanovich, head of Department 11, dared to resign from the ranks of the C.P.S.U. and to give a rather unflattering evaluation of the criminal essence of the party in his notice. That is where it all started. Could our administration, which faithfully served the interests of the totalitarian system and its own, leave this heresy unpunished? Of course, not. Soon on June 28, 1990, Order N 531 appeared about breaking up the department headed by Mirzayanov. On August 13 of the same year, another decree was issued (N 664) about appointing the rebellious chief to Department 45 in the capacity of leading research scientist. Then, for some reason, another order followed (N 129 dated February 1, 1991), transferring him to Department 20. Then, due to some circumstances of which we know nothing, on April 30th 1991, the management cancelled this order by a different one (N 332).

Finally, after all these tribulations Vil S. Mirzayanov was returned to Subdivision 45, and the head of this subdivision, Yuri V. Skripkin, addressing the question of his employment, put him on the list of employees “subject to staff reductions”. Be that as it may, Vil Sultanovich avoided this downsizing.

We think the August events contributed to that in a significant way. However, the administration had recovered from the August shock and didn’t want to leave their “favorite” unpunished, especially since he had also dared to criticize them in the mass media. Finally, he encroached upon the most “sacred” item – power. He went to the Ministry of Industry of the RSFSR (Russian Socialist Federal Soviet Republic) along with Vyacheslav G. Agureev to determine if the actions of the administration were legal. He wanted to inquire how enterprises should be transferred under the jurisdiction of Russian law. He wanted to know if such a hasty transfer could save the enterprise from financial collapse, so that a person could re-appoint himself director and sign a very convenient contract with himself (violating the laws of Russia). Then the patience of our glorious management was exhausted.

The above-mentioned meeting was conducted at the request (?) of the directorate. Another farce was performed in the best traditions of the 1930s—the farce of “common censure.”

(Hello, Iosif Vissarionovich Stalin! Yes, the traditions that you founded die hard and probably they will last as long as Communist chaps like Victor A. Petrunin and Yuri V. Skripkin are at the helm. You taught them to run to the people for help, so that they could use them to get rid of disagreeable people.)

This is the whole story. This took place yesterday, in 1991, in the so-called post-Communist time, not in 1937.

Moreover, you shouldn’t forget that this is no ordinary research scientist who is being persecuted, but a scientist of the highest qualification, a specialist in the analysis of micro-concentrations (in ecology). His competence and skills will not be at all superfluous to our enterprise.

So, dear workers and scientists, who will be next? Shall we continue trampling on people? Or maybe there are people at our enterprise who can stand up for the specialist, the professional as the man who wouldn’t allow glastnost to be stifled? Will anyone support this person who was one of the first to start fighting against our corrupted totalitarian system?

DESPITE EVERYTHING IT SEEMS TO US THAT YOUR TIME, DEAR COMMUNISTS AND NOMENKLATURA, IS OVER!”

Scientists insist:

§ Our country’s international assurances have been and still are at variance with the real production and testing of chemical weapons.

§ Moscow is threatened with poisoning.

§ Generals of chemical warfare are again running high.

Today it is widely known: for many decades now chemical weapons have been developed in Moscow. True, elegant attempts have sometimes been made to reduce this work merely to the development of chemical agents with plans to use them on the battlefields somewhere “far away” from our borders. But we want to warn right now: we have already stockpiled large amounts of such agents which are said not to be toxic, which have been adopted for service and more often are not in service (existing quietly in experimental consignments) and are nevertheless particularly dangerous. The latter circumstance is also born out by the fact that in “the international talks on banning chemical weapons” (an affair of many years which is so dear to the heart of widely traveling bosses) all these “non-combat” agents figure very prominently as full-fledged objects of discussions.

Not with a vengeance upon the past it is worth recalling a statement made by Soviet scientists on May 8, 1982: “Strictly abiding by the Geneva Protocol of 1925… the USSR has never used chemical weapons and has not transferred them to other countries.” It has used them, only on our own battlefields. The last time this happened in spring 1989 in Tbilisi where CS gas demonstrated its effectiveness. Preparations were also underway to envelop Russia’s White House with noxious smoke in August 1991.

As a matter of fact, politically we have always sought to be “clean”. As early as April 1982, SOMEONE made a statement for Der Spiegel Magazine: “There is no need for the Soviet Union necessarily to counter the escalation of chemical weapons with an escalation in the same field.” That was an official rebuke to the American programme of the development and production of a new variety of chemical weapons (binary weapons). And a decade later, after yet another meeting at Geneva, SOMEONE declared that in 1987 we completely discontinued the production of toxic agents (Izvestia, August 27, 1992).