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

Guskov called a meeting in his work office to decide this question. Just in case my boss Beresnev should show up, he sent for his deputy, Vasily Lysenko, who had been schooled for many years by our Party Committee. He had become an expert in these kinds of matters, and always managed to escape from them without defining his position, since he was simply a conformist.

In the course of an hour, I had to explain the fundamentals of chromatographic methods to the deputy, but I saw how they listened to me without any confidence, as though I myself had invented the methods and was trying to foist them off on my audience.

Up to that time I had acquired considerable experience lecturing on the subject of gas chromatography, including a three year period when I taught a course, while trying to increase the qualifications of the engineers and leading staff members of the Ministry of Chemical Industry. I had also taught a few brief courses for interested people at the Post Office Box, since I was trying in every possible way to promote gas chromatographic (GC) methods into areas of analytical chemistry that attracted me.

But in this meeting all my efforts were for nothing, and I saw that they simply didn’t want to understand me. This reminded me of another event that many authors wrote about.

In the beginning of 1930 a lecturer came to talk to some peasants about the tractor, how it was built and how well it ploughed. At the end of the presentation, the lecturer asked the men if they understood everything. One of them responded: “Sure, we understand our comrade very well. Only, we don’t understand… Where do we harness all this to the horses?”

The difference here was that those attending our meeting were literate, and possibly they understood what they were told. But, the workings of the power structure at the closed Post Office Box gave them the ability to reject any new work with impunity, discredit it, and discredit the researcher, while laughing at any attempts to encroach upon their monopoly. If necessary, they could turn down the very scientific method, and the scientist would think “Thank God! At least this didn’t mess up my life.”

“Aha! I understand that as a person, you don’t know the physical chemical properties of sarin. You have to know that sarin disintegrates before it reaches 150 degrees Centigrade, but in the injector of your chromatograph it was 180 degrees Centigrade!” Sheluchenko happily exclaimed.

“How could you use a flame-ionization detector for the registration of sarin, when it had to have been completely burned up there?” inquired the former secretary of the Komsomol Committee of the Post Office Box.

My replies were simple and obvious for specialists, as say a keyboard of a computer would be for any American student these days. I even tried referring to a classified American source on the use of GC methods at a factory producing sarin.

“You know, Vil Sultanovich, for your information, this is a typical example of disinformation, which the imperialists are using so well!” exclaimed Sheluchenko, emphasizing his special closeness to sources of this kind of information. All that was left for me was to shut up and accept my defeat.

I was only sorry that my work was not used for more than a year, since it was being passed along from one expert to another for second opinions, and this gave Guskov the chance to direct it into the closed library of the institute, without his signature.

Actually, I was pleased with this outcome. “It’s good that they can’t destroy anything at all,” I thought at that time.

But now I think that it wasn’t very good for all of us, because this same Sheluchenko became the chief specialist on issues of the destruction of chemical weapons in Russia, and to a considerable degree our safety depended on his level of knowledge. This “chief specialist” has never worked a single day in a laboratory, nor has he ever worked on researching methods of chemical weapons destruction. Instead, he simply became the chief of all those who were working on this problem. If a man in Russia is a boss, then it means he is automatically acknowledged as “smart”. The reason for this is that life there flows with difficulty, mirroring the tradition so well communicated in this old adage: “If I’m the boss – you’re a fool. If you’re the boss, then I’m a fool.”

It seems there were no limits to the imagination of someone who was dreaming of being seated on the Party Committee, to be near to the Director and other chiefs at the weekly meetings and to quietly, unobtrusively come closer to this maniacal feeding trough.

Sergei Vtorigin had been working for many long years as a senior research scientist, but he did not see any prospects for further advancement. So he simply went to the secretary and volunteered to take minutes at the Party Committee meetings, or if necessary, to rewrite them. Up to this point, a girl with a high school education had done this job. Anyway, Sergei easily managed to persuade the new secretary of the Party Committee, that he met the requirements, because you had to have a master’s degree in chemical science for this important party work.

After a year of rewriting the minutes, Sergei Vtorigin’s dream came true, and he became a responsible member of the Party Committee and chief of the laboratory. For this he dispatched a respected and entirely capable specialist, Lev Kaufman, to his retirement and pension.

You should have seen how happy Vtorigin was, sitting in his office, as the head of the laboratory! He didn’t consider it necessary to try to conceal his glee, sitting in an armchair behind a table with three telephones and a switch for a loudspeaker for dealing directly with his subordinates.

The secretary of the Party Committee usually was one of the shift engineers from the experimental plant of GOSNIIOKhT. Those engineers were really obtuse. They were not even thinking about anyone’s scientific career, because they deeply hated people from science. I believe that in their case the “general line” of the Party was properly reflected – support for the working class.

Although the director of the Institute had considerable power over all business, his fate depended considerably on party affairs and the way in which he could be represented to the Raikom (Regional party Committee), by the Moscow City Party Committee and by the secretary of the Institute’s Party Committee.

This secretary had his own direct channel to the Raikom, independent of the director. Additionally, the Institute was supervised by a special representative from the Central Committee of the CPSU, who primarily carried out the party influence through the Party Committee secretary. It was clear that the party organs always had the last word, and the fate of the director and the entire institute depended on them.

In the beginning of the 1970s, Director Martynov’s relations with the Ministry of Chemical Industry were not “approved”, and several times they registered “unsatisfactory” remarks for him in the “Socialist Competition”. This meant that the director could have been entirely swept away from his post. However, his party channels not only protected him from possible dismissal, but also GOSNIIOKhT began to change internally and quickly attained the status of a leading enterprise. Our Institute was given greater funding, in the form of currency, which allowed them to acquire a large consignment of modern instruments from the West, especially those produced in the United States.

Our institute acquired the following instruments – a nuclear magnetic resonance spectrometer (NMR) used to study the structure of chemical compounds and to identify them, electro-paramagnetic instruments used for the same purpose, unique x-ray crystallography equipment, infra-red and ultra-violet spectrometers, chromatomass spectrometers, and other chromatographs used for carrying out serial elemental analysis and other tasks.