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

I worked with my assistants, Tamara Beregova and Valery Djuzhev-Maltsev, to develop a whole group of chromatographic methods for the determination of low concentrations of POCA. These methods could completely replace the old cholinesterase method, as they were selective and provided objective analytical data. They also cut the cost of the analysis by a factor of ten. At the same time, we developed chromatographic methods for the analysis of micro-concentrations of CS (ortho-chlorbenzyledene-dimalononitrile) and CR (dibenz-b,f-oxidiazepine) in different media.

Eventually, my boss began to interpret my success in his own funny way. He believed it posed a threat to his own status and became very unfriendly towards me. I must say that administrative work never did attract me. It only distracts scientists from their real work – the business of doing science, and it wastes a lot of time with numerous meetings and conferences.

Certainly I did everything I could to make my attitude toward becoming a boss and a bureaucrat clear to everybody. But there was a glitch I hadn’t anticipated.

The board of directors of the institute drew up a secret list of all the potential candidates for replacing department heads, just in case they retired. Beresnev told me that he accidentally found out that I was on this list, as a possible candidate. This also came as a surprise to me, but I considered this list to be a pure formality. I did not pay much attention to it, and I did not even try to put my boss’s mind at ease.

But I should have! After that day I became an unwelcome rival in his eyes, and he openly started to show his disapproval of me in every possible situation. His hostile attitude manifested itself in the worst way possible. It became very difficult for my graduate students to defend their theses.

The Higher Attestation Commission had ground rules that governed the thesis process, along every step of the way. First, every thesis was discussed at the leading laboratory in the specialty area involved, before it was defended at the Science Council. The head of that laboratory had to familiarize himself with the thesis in advance and then make a decision to call an expanded seminar, in which the thesis was discussed. If he decided not to call for that seminar, it would block the progression of the thesis. He also completely controlled the list of people who had the right to participate in this expanded scientific seminar. Then a resolution was passed at the end of the seminar, regarding the compliance of the thesis with the requirements formulated by the Higher Attestation Commission.

This is where my boss created obstacles in every possible case, showing all of his punitive knowledge. Beresnev was a veteran, the former lieutenant of a special “barragefire” detachment, during World War II.

His unit had a very special job. Their orders were to wait well behind the front line, and if our troops were forced to retreat, their job was to shoot them. There was no limit to his resourcefulness at blocking us, but at the end of the day we managed to overcome all his obstacles, though only through a great waste of time and effort. Still, I found it was much easier to support and intercede for others, even if they were my students, than to get help for myself.

Our boss was also battling against my colleague and our senior researcher Igor Revelsky and his graduate students in the same way. Fortunately, Beresnev’s scientific ability was not held in high esteem, and GOSNIIOKhT scientists did not support him. Their presence at the expanded seminars, somewhat curbed our boss’ irrepressible fantasies.

It was clear that some KGB people supported Beresnev, and we were even sure that Director Patrushev was rather afraid of him.

My graduate student, V.L. Djuzhev-Maltsev was defending his thesis at the Science Council in 1979, and despite Beresnev’s attempts to obstruct the process, Djuzhev-Maltsev’s defense was rather successful. He answered all the questions thoroughly, showing deep knowledge of the problem. He had good references and recommendations from different institutes and organizations within the military-chemical complex concerning the work he had done and how useful it was. All the scientists who spoke afterwards unanimously approved of the thesis.

Then the time came for the secret voting. According to the Higher Attestation Commission rules, there had to be a quorum (minimum number of the Science Council members present). Although the number of members had exceeded the quorum at the beginning of the session, one person was missing when the voting time came. Deputy Director of Science Guskov, who was also a Science Council member, was urgently called to the Ministry during this session.

Normally, when someone left the Science Council, they signed a register to get a ballot, recorded their vote and put it into the ballot box. And this is exactly how everything was done in this case. But the chairman of the Science Council and director of the institute Patrushev knew what my boss was capable of, so he decided to wait for his deputy to return in order to repeat the whole procedure. When I asked him about it, he dryly reminded me that I knew very well why it was necessary.

After the lunch break, we had to wait three more hours and then repeat everything. Although all the members of the Science Council voted positively, everyone had a nasty aftertaste from this compulsory procedure.

I wrote my doctoral thesis in 1975 with great difficulty, having practically no time for that. In order to do it, I had to stay overtime in a special room of the First Department at GOSNIIOKhT practically every evening and write my thesis. I also understood that I had no chance of breaking through the barricade created by my boss. Still, I always wanted to do my best, and I decided to see it through to the end. I was also inspired by Revelsky’s successful defense of his doctoral thesis in 1974. Revelsky succeeded because of his good relations with military specialists and influential people on the Board of Directors, who had arranged for a preliminary discussion of his thesis in the expanded seminar, in the absence of our boss. At the end of the day, Beresnev just refused to go there, and the defense was a success as expected.

Soon after that Beresnev called me to his room, and he asked me in all seriousness, if he could become a candidate for a doctoral degree in chromatography. I answered that he could not, because he was not a specialist in the field.

In this way, I burned my last bridges behind me. The former “barrage fire detachment” lieutenant informed me that this time he wouldn’t repeat the mistake he had made in Revelsky’s case.

Indeed, he was very inventive. He organized my work in such a way that it yielded only practical results, without any detailed research. I had to do the theoretical part of my work covertly. Like all the other groups, we worked according to approved annual and quarterly plans, so it wasn’t that difficult to conceal additional research. When our boss asked a question “What are you doing?” each of my research assistants answered monotonically: “We are developing this analytical procedure.”

We had a difficult time though with internal publications, that is with writing reports on our additional research. The boss simply turned them down. No secret document was supposed to be published at the institute’s typing bureau without his permission. Sometimes we succeeded in doing that anyway, but our boss did everything he could to correct these “blunders.” He had a strong ally, Leonid Kostikin, the Deputy Director for Science who helped him with that.

Kostikin was a consummate Soviet bureaucrat, who saw everything through the prism of “self-serving”. To the end he was extremely slippery and unscrupulous. Following the principle “birds of feather flock together,” he quickly found a common language with Beresnev and became the next (and the worst) supervisor of the Analytical Department.