Vadim Birstein - The Perversion of Knowledge

This was not the first time in my life when I consciously refused to work under Soviet structures I considered immoral. Before my graduation in 1966, representatives of the Defense Ministry visited Moscow University and talked to every student who might be useful to the biological warfare institutes. During our years at the university, all of us were trained as specialists in biological warfare and automatically received the rank of junior lieutenant of the medical service and, in principle, could be forced to work at a military institute. The officers who visited the university promised a lot—a high salary and a quick career in military biological science. At that time, sophisticated methods of genetic engineering had just been discovered, and the military desperately needed high-level molecular biologists for the development of new programs on biological warfare.

It was easy to reject the offer of the military. But the next step was more difficult. After my graduation, I was assigned to work at one of the newly created Main Administration of the Microbiological Industry (Glavmikrobioprom) institutes, the VNII Syntez Belka, that is, the Institute of Protein Synthesis. In the Soviet university system, after graduation students must sign a contract with their future place of work, not according to the interests of the student but according to the demands of scientific institutions and schools that particular year. Supposedly, this was the price for the free university education. But there were some tricks that allowed students to escape this signing and get hired by an institution where they wanted to work.

When I visited the VNII Syntez Belka for the first time, it became clear to me that it was connected with secret work, probably with the development of some biological weapon. It was heavily guarded by plainclothes KGB men. The head of the Personnel Department, who appeared to be a retired KGB officer, submitted my documents for the special clearance needed to be employed at that institute (it was not clear if I would be accepted at all because of my Jewish name). To work at a secret institute on a military project was the last thing I wanted in my life. But I was lucky. The checking took a long time, during which I passed exams for a graduate student position (aspirantura). I started to work at the Radiobiology Department of the Kurchatov Institute of Atomic Energy on my Candidate (Ph. D.) dissertation on classic genetics of the fruit fly Drosophila, which had nothing in common with military projects.

The Radiobiology Department was created within the Kurchatov Institute in 1958. At first it included only two laboratories, Microorganisms Genetics and Selection, headed by Sos Alikhanyan (I will describe his career in Chapter 4), and the Biochemical Laboratory, headed by a well-known molecular biologist and geneticist, Roman Khesin (1922–1986). At the beginning of the 1960s, seven more DNA and genetics laboratories were established within the department. I was accepted at Dr. Khesin’s laboratory, at the time the only laboratory in the USSR that worked on the biochemical genetics of eukaryotes. Much later, on January 1, 1978, the Biology Department was renamed the Institute of Molecular Genetics and transferred from the Ministry of Medium Engineering (i.e., the Atomic Ministry), under which Kurchatov Institute existed, to the system of the Academy of Sciences.

In the 1970s, VNII Syntez Belka became one of the basic institutes working on biological weapons. 300Later, in 1985, the Glavmikrobioprom was merged with the USSR Ministry of Medical Industry into the Ministry of the Medical and Microbiological Industries (Minmedbioprom). 301The former head of Glavmikrobioprom, Valery Bykov, was appointed to head the new ministry. He was also appointed chairman of the Inter-Agency Scientific and Technical Council, which coordinated the Biopreparat program on new types of biological weapons. 302

Concerning both of these jobs, I could reject the work that I considered immoral only because I was a Muscovite and had Moscow’s propiska (police permission to live in Moscow, a system that still exists despite being declared unconstitutional in the early 1990s). I could be finicky and wait until a position in academic science came through. Other talented scientists mentioned in this book, for example, Drs. Vil Mirzayanov and Ken Alibek, did not have the same privilege. They were born in small towns far from Moscow. Working on chemical and biological weapons was their only chance to have a serious professional career and gain the propiska required to live in Moscow.

In 1985, I appealed to my former “boss” Khesin, who became a corresponding member of the academy, for help regarding my job after I had been interrogated by the KGB counterintelligence (Second Main Directorate) concerning Khesin’s closest friend, David Goldfarb. Dr. Goldfarb was the father of my old friend Alex, who had emigrated first to Israel and then to the United States. Dr. Golfarb was also trying to emigrate to Israel but was not allowed to go by the Soviet officials and, therefore, was a long-term “refusenik.” 303I visited Dr. Goldfarb from time to time simply as his son’s friend. During my interrogation, the KGB counterintelligence officers became furious. They did not get any information from me about Dr. Goldfarb and his friends (and I honestly did not know anything regarding their questions), but I managed to get information from them: that the KGB had been trying to create a political case against a “plot” of Jewish scientists who allegedly tried to smuggle scientific secrets to Israel and the United States. After this interrogation, my professional future looked very grim. Khesin, with whom I had an uneasy relationship but who had the reputation of being courageous both as a scientist and a person, 304was at the peak of his career at this time. He was very upset to hear about Dr. Goldfarb’s problems with the KGB. However, he told me that he could not take me into his lab or provide me with any other support. He evidently did not want to or could not afford to have a problem with the “organs” after providing me with help.

In 1986, I escaped the further interest of the KGB by moving from Moscow to the northern part of Russia, above the Arctic Circle. I signed a three-year contract with the academy’s small Murmansk Marine Biology Institute, located in the Dalnie Zelentsy inlet about 300 miles from Murmansk on the Kola Peninsula (later, after I left it, the institute was transferred to Murmansk). This was the same institute where two anti-Lysenkoists, Yurii Polyansky and Mikhail Kamshilov, found jobs after they had been expelled from their institutes after the August 1948 session of the Agricultural Academy, or VASKhNIL. 305However, during my time in Murmansk, the professional level of most of the scientists working at that institute was very low. The head of the laboratory in which I was placed (and the Party secretary of the institute), a histologist by training, immediately told me after my arrival that he did not know what terms such as “genes” and “chromosomes” meant. The director of the institute was a Party appointee who had succeeded in defending his doctoral dissertation at Moscow University only after a special request of the Murmansk Regional Party Committee to the Moscow University Party Committee (in the 1990s, he became an academician). However, this director was not aware of my problems with the KGB. Work above the Arctic Circle gave me a legal opportunity to retain my Moscow propiska and to later return to Moscow without a problem. After I left for Murmansk, my wife, who had stayed in Moscow, suddenly started to receive phone calls from the Moscow City police, who desperately requested information about my whereabouts. Of course, very soon the local KGB curator of the Murmansk Institute found out exactly where I was.