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

At that time, according to the media reports, the first joint ventures with foreign firms began sprouting up in Russia (though more on paper, than in reality). These joint ventures were developing various business projects for environmental protection, analytical instrument making, etc. Bogomazov was getting ready to work for one of them. This time, his vanity defeated him. By believing strongly in his indispensability and his privileged position at GOSNIIOKhT, Bogomazov completely lost his caution and his orientation.

Once, he came to work, and with obvious pride he began showing off his new business ID card written in English. For GOSNIIOKhT, this was like waving a red cape in front of a bull. He was immediately dismissed from his position as the head of the laboratory, and he was demoted to the position of junior researcher.

Humbled and insulted to his core, Bogomazov soon resigned from GOSNIIOKhT altogether and went into private business. According to the rumors, this did not work out either. Finally in 1994, he suffered a stroke and turned into a helpless invalid. At the age of 40-something, he was all alone. Everyone including his wife had deserted him. After a while Bogomazov recovered a little from his stroke, and decided to return to GOSNIIOKhT, but his days there were numbered and he died as a rank and file employee.

Fortunately, my debunking of Bogomazov’s discovery and the disappointment it caused my bosses did not reflect unfavorably on my own work. I continued my research and wrote my doctoral dissertation – “Development and Study of New Methods of Frontal and Elution Chromatography for the Determination of Micro-Concentrations of Chemical Agents.”

By the beginning of 1985, I had submitted my thesis work to the Science Council for defense. Most doctoral candidates have problems choosing official opponents for their theses, due to the limited number of institutions and people that can be asked to review their work, but I did not have any problems with that at all.

Long before Petrunin was appointed Director of GOSNIIOKhT, he agreed to be my official opponent. I think he agreed because he appreciated my work that had benefited the Volsk branch of GOSNIIOKhT, which he headed at that time. I gave all the assistance I could to the branch’s Physical Chemistry Department and acted as a scientific advisor to the graduate students who worked there. Two talented scientists, Valery Djuzhev-Maltsev and Nadezhda Steklenyova, wrote their master’s theses in chemistry under my guidance.

Two other people agreed to be my official opponents, Georgi Drozd and Vladimir Smirnov, and they also gave my work favorable reviews. Additionally, my work was received favorably by a number of interested scientific institutions that I had sent my dissertation and abstract to. Among those organizations was a department of UNKhV.

I successfully defended my dissertation in June of 1985, and all members of the Science Council unanimously voted “in favor” of it. During the defense, only Sheluchenko, made an attempt to question the validity of my results. He made some kind of a statement, saying that the results presented in the dissertation were obtained only from experimental research conducted in the laboratory, while in practice some of them might not be confirmed. Still, he acknowledged that the regularities revealed were of great importance.

Martynov, the former director of GOSNIIOKhT, was sitting in the front row, and he retorted immediately: “It’s great that this work opens up new prospects – as a doctoral thesis should!”

Sheluchenko pulled himself up short, seeing that the seeds of doubt he was trying to sow did not fall on fertile ground as expected. He continued “Despite my remarks, I think that the work meets the demands of a dissertation for a doctoral degree.”

Oh my God! People’s hearts are so mysterious! I still had a vivid recollection of a serious conversation with Martynov in his director’s office, back in 1976. It was immediately following a staff meeting, at which Beresnev blamed Revelsky and me for his own failures in the department, making us the scapegoats responsible. Martynov was infuriated, and after that meeting he openly threatened me with reprisals, saying he could do whatever he wanted with me. He also said then that I would hardly ever be able to defend a doctoral dissertation. After that incident my life became very hard, as Martynov actually gave out carte blanche for any actions against me. I don’t know whether Beresnev was telling the truth when he once confessed to me that if it hadn’t been for my talent and my ability to get results at work, he would have “handled” me as I deserved a long time ago.

The Degasification Department (Department D) had an important place in the scope GOSNIIOKhT’s work. This department developed methods for degasification of chemical agents and any equipment contaminated by them. According to the regulations, all the safety manuals had to be evaluated, revised and re-approved every five years. These manuals contained descriptions of degasification methods, checks for completeness, and the safety and first aid rules.

In the beginning, like my co-workers, I believed that the degasification methods described in the manuals were not subject to any doubt. But once I started to question them and began to study their efficiency independently of the planned revision schedule, I began to regret that I started this too late.

Back in the mid 1970s, Department D was reorganized in order to make it more clearly focused, goal oriented and efficient. Retired Colonel Grigori Drell, who had been a senior researcher from TSNIVTI, became the head of this department and one of its laboratories. My good friend and a retired colonel, Imam Yamaleev, became the head of another laboratory.

I collaborated with Drell’s laboratory in mastering the methods of chromatographic analysis. They had good American equipment purchased according to my recommendation, but unfortunately this equipment could never produce the results expected. This was due to the bone-headedness of the chief of this department.

Drell distinguished himself by his cruelty to his staff. He was entirely confident that they were making enormous efforts to violate safety rules and were to blame for all the emergency incidents which happened so often in his department. So, when one of his researchers, Olga Kolyada, was badly poisoned by mustard gas, Drell did his best to shift the blame to the victim. In reality, a drop of mustard gas happened to fall onto her glove, but she did not see it in time. Yperite has a highly effective rate of penetration and easily passes through rubber, causing lesions in the form of hard to treat burns and severe inflammation of the skin. If you consider that it is also one of the strongest mutagens, the consequences of contact with mustard gas can be terrible.

Immediately after the lesion was discovered, wet swab samples taken from the glove were brought to me. I analyzed them with the American Perkins Elmer chromatograph with a flame-photometric detector, which could selectively register chemical compounds containing sulfur or phosphorous atoms.

From the resulting chromatogram, you could tell there were several sulfur compounds, but not mustard gas. Surely, the degasification agent must have destroyed the mustard gas when Olga Kolyada decontaminated the glove at the end of the working day, according to safety procedures.

Chromatographic analysis of the control samples taken from a fresh glove surface did not show the presence of sulfur compounds either. So, it was practically proved that an organic sulfur compound got onto the surface of Kolyada’s glove, and it had to be mustard gas, as no one in the laboratory worked with any other sulfur-containing compounds.