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

One day he called me in with Beresnev and declared that on the recommendation of my boss, he couldn’t approve a large scientific report of mine. The reason was that my work was outside the scope of the laboratory’s annual plan.

At that moment, I was overcome by a bold desire to disgrace this schemer. I put on an innocent face, and asked him if he had any other objections to my report, possibly connected with insufficient research work that had been done. Or could it be that the material was badly presented or carelessly arranged?

“What are you talking about, Vil Sultanovich? There are no remarks like that and there is no way there can be any, because everything is great in that respect,” exclaimed Kostikin. “The only problem is that I can’t let the report, which contains subject matter that is different from that of your department, pass to the scientific and technical library”, he added in an apologizing tone.

“Well, if my report had been stipulated in the annual plan, would you have submitted it?” I asked, pretending to be a babe in the woods.

“Without any doubt,” the deputy stated categorically.

“Can you give me your word on that?” I urged him on.

“If you want to, of course, I can,” he agreed in a patronizing manner.

“Then could you please give the order to have the laboratory’s annual plan brought here from storage in the First Department,” I insisted.

To my astonishment, Kostikin immediately called the Scientific and Technical Department (NTO) at the institute and asked them to send over the plan. A few minutes later, the supervisor of our NTO Department, Antonina Vitchenko, brought the department’s file, with the required documents. Immediately I found a clause in the plan, which spelled out this topic for future work in black and white, with a remark attached that it should be completed by submitting a scientific and technical report.

A profound silence set into the office. A few minutes passed, and Kostikin’s face dissolved into a foolish smile. He was at his wit’s end, and had no idea what to do next.

“Leonid Ivanovich. You know, a few years ago Vil Sultanovich was planning on leaving the party,” the lieutenant of the “barrage fire detachment” said, rushing to his buddy’s aid. Kostikin forgot to wipe the stupid smile from his face and tried to feign indignation, “You don’t say so! Really?”

It is true that I was suffering deeply from discontent, in 1973, both with my “discovery” that people’s money was being squandered on our activities, and with the general situation in the country. Political persecutions were becoming rampant. Once we were celebrating someone’s successful defense of their thesis in a restaurant, and I mentioned that I wanted to drop out of the party. But it went no further than that, as I decided against this desperate move.

Of course, Beresnev’s remark was not by chance, though I was sure that a serious investigation of any charges based on a conversation in a restaurant was not in the best interests of the institute’s top management.

“Exposing” a dissident at an institute like GOSNIIOKhT would damage the reputation of the director and other “responsible” people. That is why I indignantly asked to continue this conversation at a Party Committee meeting. No, Kostikin didn’t want that! Immediately he found a way out, and suggested that my report should be submitted to our secret library, without his or my boss’s signature.

“If you don’t agree to that, I will immediately call Leonid Aleksandrovich Sokolov (Deputy Director for the Security Regime) and ask him to destroy the report,” he added. There was nothing left, but to agree.

Beresnev also invented a fail-proof system for not letting me defend my own thesis. According to the regulations of the Higher Attestation Commission, candidates for both doctoral and master’s of science degrees were required to have positive references, signed by the institute’s power triangle – the director, the chairman of the trade union committee, and the secretary of the Party Committee. Also, in order to receive these recommendations, each candidate had to get signatures of the corresponding people at his or her departmental level. This could only be done when the applicant had no administrative or party reprimands.

They started hanging these reprimands on me for every possible reason. For example, my junior assistant Boris Dubin once went to join the civilian militia squad after work. He got drunk, and got into a fight with someone.

“Vil Mirzayanov is to blame,” they decided at the departmental party meeting, on the recommendation of its head, Beresnev. I received a party reprimand “for poor emphasis on personal upbringing”. Consequently, I could receive no positive character references during the half year period after that.

The reprimands continued for the next five years, until one day I publicly announced that I never, under any circumstances, intended to defend any thesis. It seemed to me that this slightly placated my tormenter. However, just to make sure that I had given up on this idea completely, he decided to deprive me of my group and all my equipment.

This is when I unexpectedly received support from two people who had long sympathized with me, Professor Semeyon Dubov, the head of the Physical Chemistry Department, and Professor Vladimir Kurochkin, the head of the laboratory within Dubov’s department.

Dubov graduated from Moscow State University, and before the war began he was sent to one of defense plants producing tetraethyl lead, a highly poisonous compound which increases the quality of gasoline. Professor Dubov didn’t like to talk about that terrible plant. People often died there from poisoning, and the number of deaths was comparable to casualties on the battlefront.

Thanks to his good health and more than a bit of luck, Dubov survived in that Hell. When he returned to Moscow, he started working in the military-chemical complex. In the early 1950s, when Jews were persecuted in the USSR, Dubov had to go to Dzerzhinsk and work at the branch there of Post Office Box 702 (GOSNIIOKhT).

In the early 1960s, he was allowed to return to work at the headquarters in Moscow, where he soon became head of the Physical Chemistry Department.

I believe that Professor Dubov, like no one else, was the right person for his job –the head of a scientific division. Amazingly lively and in good shape with handsome features, he was always polite and attentive. He quickly won the sympathy of anyone he was talking with. Although sometimes Dubov could get carried away by some unrealistic ideas, he was very pragmatic for the most part, and always very careful.

Once he confessed to me that sometimes he was mainly concerned with running the trade union, party, and numerous other meetings for our team. These meetings were considered important elements of the so called “personal upbringing work”, which was used as a tool to dupe the entire population of our country, in the spirit of totalitarianism.

“While I’ve been working at GOSNIIOKhT,” Dubov continued, “I’ve never heard that anyone was punished for negligence or any shortcomings in scientific research, but a lot of people were punished for underestimating personal upbringing within the team.”

Since Dubov was a good organizer, he quickly attracted many talented young scientists, and made sure his department was supplied with modern scientific equipment. He created a notable team of scientists with the widest possible variety of interests, given the situation at that time. There was not one area of physical-chemical research that did not fall within the domain of his department’s development. They conducted fundamental research on the newly synthesized compounds, using methods of nuclear magnetic resonance and electromagnetic resonance, infrared and ultra-violet spectroscopy, X-ray structural analysis, mass spectroscopy, and chromatomass-spectroscopy. They studied the kinetics of reactions between physiologically active compounds and biochemical substrates, and the methods of quantum chemistry were applied to develop the preliminary forecasting of perspective chemical compounds. The results of these studies were applied to different works, on a modern level. Since there was such a wide range of research, they had to divide up the responsibilities of the team leaders and more than 160 people who worked under them.