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

This became even clearer to me when I was a fifth-year student during an internship at the Shebekino Chemical Plant, not far from Belgorod, where the first industrial technology for producing primary alcohols was under development. A few students from our department studied the operation of this future plant, with a prototype unit. The performance of this unit was dynamic and full of surprises, but generally I felt it was terribly boring, routine and repetitive from day to day. The few night shifts that I spent with the unit finally and for all time convinced me that there was nothing remarkable about the job of a shift engineer, except the monotony of the technological process. The work is exhausting and it is not compensated by any creative satisfaction.

By that time, I had seriously fallen in love with my fellow student, Rita Skibko, who returned my feelings. She worked diligently at the department for the synthesis and technology of vitamins and drugs, headed by the famous scientist Nikolai Preobrazhensky. Soon we got married, dreaming about a family scientific career.

Bashkirov suggested that I do the work for my degree thesis in his laboratory, and I was very inspired by this opportunity.

Soon I was introduced to my supervisors – Yuli Kagan, a senior scientist, and Nikolai Morozov, a graduate student. When Kagan and Bashkirov went on an extended business trip to China, Morozov became my actual supervisor. We studied the role of proposed carbon complexes with an iron catalyst while different organic hydroxyl compounds were synthesized on it.

Nikolai was a kindhearted person who did everything possible to make me feel free to devote myself to the work. We conducted almost all experiments together and I certainly trusted him completely. I quickly mastered the experimental techniques, and I carried out the kinetic experiments with pleasure, drawing gas samples into adsorption tubes and weighing them. You literally kilometers run, for hours on end, rushing from the laboratory to the weighing room and back again.

Unfortunately, our early work was unproductive. We failed to get reproducible experimental data. All the time, we got different results, which were beyond any logical explanation. Sometimes, we made odd “discoveries”, when the catalyst we tested showed more than a 100% conversion of the carbon monoxide. Later it turned out that when we were cleaning the reactor, we had left a few threads of a worn-out cleaning rag behind.

We didn’t know what to do. The day when course papers had to be defended was approaching with a disastrous speed, but still we had no reproducible results. As if sensing that we were having problems, Kagan wrote a letter from China, though naturally he couldn’t help us from there.

Fortunately, Bashkirov returned from China earlier than planned. Though he didn’t know our work in detail, he taught us a valuable lesson. Bashkirov listened to Nikolai, who was just starting his career in science, and rebuked us properly. He demanded that we repeat all the experimental operations with the maximum possible accuracy and observe intervals between selecting the samples and the weighing. After this, things went smoothly, and I managed to finish my work on time.

Before we had to defend our theses, the members of our class of 1958 were assigned to various scientific research institutes and plants. I was offered work at “Post Office Box 4019”, located on the Highway of Enthusiasts in Moscow. I agreed to this, though I knew nothing about this enterprise or about my future work there. The institute was a secret establishment which was significant for the defense of our country, so my future seemed romantic and thrilling.

I came to work at the beginning of September, after military camp and a trip home to Stary Kangysh with Rita to meet my parents.

I arrived at my appointed time, but I couldn’t start working because I had no clearance to access secret documents. That process took a little more than a month. Then it turned out that I was supposed to work in the experimental unit, Workshop 17, for developing the technologies for producing boranes, which are highly explosive and poisonous compounds used in making rocket fuel.

I passed the test on safety measures, and I went to the plant, where there was a continuous line of machines and devices with valves, under a glass hood purged by a powerful stream of ventilating air.

Like all employees, I had to change into cotton work overalls before entering the workshop. They were a whitish-blue color and hung on me like an old potato sack, because of numerous washings with bleach. I was given a gas mask, which I had to carry with me at all times while working in the unit. We wore white cotton caps on our heads, and to be honest, we looked somewhat ridiculous. To top it all off, we had heavy crudely tanned leather boots, and our feet were wrapped in soldiers’ foot-wrappings. All this made us look like the prisoners in the movies of that time.

There was a pungent smell in the workshop that almost blew the caps off our heads, despite the powerful ventilation. It was literally killing us, as it slowly but constantly permeated our entire bodies. I was completely nauseated. I asked the assistant foreman Efimych, how long that smell would persist. He flashed me a toothless smile, and said that it would always be so. For some reason, Efimych’s eyes were sparkling unnaturally and he was waddling like a boatswain on a ship in stormy weather…

Soon I successfully completed my study at the unit and started working as a shift engineer. From time to time, the work was very intensive and dangerous, because the experimental reactor for producing diborane was leaking occasionally. It was damaged at high temperatures by the corrosive mixture of poisonous and explosive gas. In those days, it was very hazardous and labor-intensive work to trace the leak in time and to replace the reactor. If this happened during the night shift, it was twice as difficult, and of course people got seriously poisoned. We spent an hour in the chamber of this reactor saturated with poisonous diborane, replacing this damned unit.

Though we were in our so-called hose-type gas masks and breathed fresh air pumped in from the outside when we were in this chamber, our clothes absorbed a lot of diborane. When we finished our work and left the chamber, we went through a corridor where other shift workers without gas masks, were standing near the control panel. Then we went to shower and change our clothes. On our way through, we breathed in high concentrations of diborane emitted by our clothes, and the men and women standing around in the corridor were also forced to breathe in this poison.

People with various qualifications and levels of training worked on my shift. Most of them had solid work experience, and they helped me adjust well to this dangerous profession. After a few months, I developed good relations with my workers and they hardly ever let me down. Still, we did have a few accidents, which I will never forget.

During each shift I got about 30 liters of ethyl alcohol on receipt (it smelled strongly of toluene) to wash down the machines and units that were being repaired. We were pretty careful with this liquid, though not entirely. Everyone knew that it wasn’t poisonous, and sometimes people even drank it without any noticeable consequences. During one of the night shifts, I told two young workers, Kostya Dzhavadov and Dima Eminov, to wash down the alkaline hydrolysis unit with this alcohol, though I didn’t stay to supervise this operation because it was too trivial. Soon I heard Dima’s shrill cry, and he ran to his work station, along with some other workers. He buried his face in his hands and moaned with pain, so we dragged him to the water tap and washed his eyes and face. We did everything we had to, according to the safety instructions for cases of eye burns with alkaline solution. I called the ambulance, which immediately arrived and took Dima to a Moscow hospital.