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

At that time, the tax agents were merciless. One cruel agent with eyes empty from drinking was especially ferocious. He had a Russian last name, Murov, though he was a Tatar. He would enter the house where a family couldn’t pay taxes, make a list of all the things that could be confiscated, and then he took the sheep and goats.

Once he came to the home of a widow, who was our neighbor. At that time, there were only two sons at home, 16-year-old Madikhat and 7-year-old Favaris. Kanifa-apa herself was serving her compulsory “labor minimum” at the collective farm. Each adult had to serve a required number of “working units” there. If anyone failed to do this, for any reason, he or she was inevitably sent to do corrective work collecting wood in the mountainous regions of Bashkortstan.

Cursing away, Murov started collecting things from the house. When that seemed too little for him (what could be precious in poor peasant homes at that time?), he seized an axe and threatened the boys. He told them he would kill them if they didn’t tell him where all the valuables were hidden. The heart of the poor Madikhat couldn’t stand it and he fainted. My mother and the whole village came running to save the boy. At that time, we couldn’t even dream of doctors. There were none in the neighborhood. The villagers managed to nurse the boy back to health.

We were the children of teachers (at that time, we were a family of four, plus my grandmother), but we suffered the same hardships and often we were starving. The salaries of our parents, minus the numerous taxes and the state loan installments, which sometimes amounted to half of your annual salary, weren’t even enough to put food on the table, never mind buying any decent clothes. Every day after school, my younger sister Lisa and I grated two large buckets of potatoes with a homemade grater made from a half-rusty piece of iron sheet. Our hands were constantly bleeding and aching because of this monstrous labor. But what could we do if we had no flour and potatoes replaced bread?

The news that “Voice of America” reported about the fate of our war captives terrified me. When my father was sharing his war experiences, he said that he had never used up all his bullets, because he kept the last one for himself. He was planning to shoot himself, if he was ever surrounded and in danger of being taken prisoner. He knew that any prisoners of war would be considered traitors to Russia, with all the ensuing consequences.

At that time, a soldier who had been taken captive made it back to our village. He told us about the extensive horrors of Fascist captivity, but preferred to remain silent about the conditions in our camps, which were equally atrocious. Each month he went to the regional center to confirm that he was still residing in his native village and hadn’t gone off anywhere. He was released from the Soviet camp for former prisoners of war, only on this condition. A few men from my village served ten-year sentences of hard labor in the Donbass mines in Ukraine, and they remained there forever. They were guilty in the eyes of the Motherland, because they had been freed from the Fascist camps by British and American troops. These were our allies, who then handed them over to the NKVD (People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs). Later, it became clear they had returned to their country only to be sent to the Siberian gulags.

I can’t help noting the shameful role that Winston Churchill played in all that. In 1945, he betrayed millions of Soviet war captives, by ordering that they should be forcibly sent to the Eastern zone of Germany occupied by the Soviet troops. [5] On the fate of Soviet prisoners of war, see Nikolai Tolstoy, The Secret Betrayal: 1944-1947 (New York: Scribner, 1978); Mark Elliot, “The United States and Forced Repatriation of Soviet Citizens, 1944-1947,” Political Science Quarterly 88, No. 2 (June 1973): 253-75; Mark Elliot , Pawns of Yalta: Soviet Refugees and America’s Role in Their Repatriation (Urbana, Ill: University of Illinois Press, 1982); John Whitley, “Countless Prisoners Of War Handed Back To Stalin By Churchill,” at http://www.rense.com/general47/butch.htm ; Aleksey I. Briukhanov, “Vot kak eto bilo: O rabote missii po repatriatsii sovetskikh grazhdan” Vospominaniia Sovetskogo Ofitsera (Moscow, 1958): 38.

An acquaintance of mine, a Tatar who now lives in New York, was in German captivity at that time and he knew what to expect in his Motherland. He told me that a lot of people had committed suicide to avoid the Stalinist camps or had crippled themselves, cutting off their hands or even their whole arms. According to him, that caused quite a stir in the West, for example in the U.S. in 1945-1947, and it helped a few lucky men avoid being dispatched to the USSR.

Soon I found someone to talk with, who shared my interest. He was an accountant at the boarding school, where my father had started working as the director. My father bought a radio-set for the boarding school, and it turned out that this accountant had also been listening to “Voice of America” at night. He warned me very sternly that I must not tell anybody about this obsession of mine, because it could result in my imprisonment and a severe penalty for my parents.

I kept my word. Now I am writing about it, when the man I was talking to and my parents are no longer alive, and it seems that “Voice of America” is breathing its last breath, due to the evil scheme of some American politicians. [6] The Tatar version of Radio Liberty – Radio Azatlyk right now is broadcasting from Prague (Czech Republic) paid for by American taxpayers’ dollars, but its journalists are working under the supervision of the Russian Government and this radio has nothing to do with its very title and the distribution of real information about American democracy and American values. Isn’t it too early to dismiss Communism, when millions of believers in this flavor of Fascism openly want to take revenge, not only in Russia, but also in other countries devoted to the ideas of the free market and the pluralism of opinions?

My discovery of America didn’t set me against the Soviet regime, nor did it make me a partisan of the West. When I was young, I believed that everything would be fine in our country. We only had to follow Lenin’s guidelines. I thought that the enemies of the Soviet state deliberately set people against the party, to return them to their dark past. Nevertheless, the seeds of doubt remained in my soul for years to come, after listening to “Voice of America”.

I think it already influenced me, when I was summoned to the regional department of the KGB, during my last year in high school. They suggested I go to their school for Chekists, but I refused. It is difficult to say what prompted me to make that decision then, but I think mostly I was encouraged by the “enemy’s” influence, as it was called by officials, “Voice of America.”

My refusal to be recruited was a bolt out of the blue for Lieutenant Colonel Nasirov, the regional head of the KGB. At that time, I was the top student not only in my high school, but also among all the high schools in the region. I was the secretary of the Komsomol Committee at my school and a member of the bureau at the Komsomol Raikom (regional committee). Nasirov didn’t show any emotion; he only asked me not to tell anybody about our conversation.

The lieutenant colonel was sitting under the portrait of his leader, Lavrentii Beria, and he severely cautioned me about the possible consequences of my insubordination. He added that this was the first time he had met anyone who refused such an honor to serve the party by being a member of the KGB. All of this happened in the middle of March of 1953, soon after Stalin died.