Vadim Birstein - The Perversion of Knowledge

It becomes clear from reading the reports of independent journalists in Chechnya in 2001 that the methods and mentality of FSB officers have remained unchanged to the present day. Without any hesitation, twenty-year-old FSB lieutenants attach electrodes to the hands of a sixty-year-old Chechen woman and increase the current step by step because she does not “dance” enthusiastically; that is, in their opinion, her convulsions are not strong enough. 320Her only “guilt” is that she is a Chechen civilian who has been kidnapped by the Russian military for ransom. Someday these young officers will return to Moscow and other Russian cities. They have acquired good practical knowledge of how to control people.

FOR THIRTY YEARS FROM the early 1920s until the death of Stalin, biochemists, chemists, and toxicologists working for the security services researched deadly chemicals used in executions and assassinations and conducted deadly poison tests on humans. This wags in addition to and allied with military research on biological and chemical weapons. The most disturbing aspect of this research was that this group was not isolated from regular scientific circles. A group of well-known scientists, professors, and academicians knew about these experiments and approved them.

In this chapter, I have used some documents from the 1953 investigation files of the Beria and Grigory Mairanovsky cases published by military prosecutor Vladimir Bobryonev and journalist Valery Ryazentsev, who had special access to the files. These documents were published in Russian in Bobryonev’s roman à clef “ Doktor Smert,” ili Varsonofievskie prizraki (“Doctor Death,” or the Ghosts of Varsonofyevsky Lane), which I will cite as “Doktor Smert.” In this book, Mairanovsky becomes “Mogilevsky” and his laboratory is named Laboratory “X,” but the real names of most of the other people are retained. Transcripts of the 1953 interrogations are cited with the real dates and names of the interrogators, but the questions and answers are not preceded by speakers’ names. However, excerpts from the transcripts with the speakers indicated, as well as Maironvsky’s letters, are given in the English translation of the main part of the unpublished version of this book by Bobryonev and Ryazentsev, entitled The Ghosts of Varsonofyevsky Lane: Laboratory of Death—How The Soviet Secret Police Experimented on People and Poisoned Their Enemies. To avoid misinterpretation, I have used the English translation of the documents cited in this version. 2

I also provide information in this chapter about two more people who worked closely with Mairanovsky: Pavel Sudoplatov and Naum Eitingon. Sudoplatov, one of the most ruthless people in Stalin’s NKVD/MGB, began working at the GPU in 1921. In the 1930s, he worked at the OGPU/NKVD Foreign Department and was in charge of organizing political assassinations, including the murder of Leon Trotsky in 1940. During World War II, he headed the NKVD/NKGB Fourth Department, which was in charge of sabotage and terrorist activity behind enemy lines. In 1945, he was promoted to lieutenant general, and in 1946, he was appointed head of the MGB DR Service (sabotage and terror). From 1950–1953, Sudoplatov headed Bureau No. 1, in charge of terrorist activity abroad.

Naum Eitingon (alias “Colonel Naum Kotov” during the Spanish Civil War, “Comrade Pablo,” “Pierre,” “Leont’ev,” “Rabinovich,” “Sakhov,” “Valery,” and “Lyova”), Sudoplatov’s longtime deputy, joined the CheKa Foreign Department in 1921. 3He spoke many languages fluently and throughout the 1930s worked all over Western Europe and the United States. He was in charge of terrorist acts in Paris and organized the kidnappings of White generals Aleksandr Kutepov and Yevgenii Miller, as well as the killing of Trotsky’s son, Lev Sedov. In 1939, he was appointed deputy head of the NKVD Second Department under Sudoplatov. In 1940, Eitingon worked with Sudoplatov on the Trotsky assassination. In the United States, the activity of Sudoplatov’s Bureau No. 1 and Eitingon’s role in the assassination of Trotsky were described by the defector and former MGB/KGB officer Peter Deriabin in testimony before a Senate committee in March 1965. 4A recently published 1939 NKVD document described a detailed plan to assassinate Trotsky (referred to as “a Duck”) and included the code names of the main participants, including Sudoplatov and Eitingon. 5An unpublished secret decree of the Presidium of the USSR Highest Council mentioned awarding the following persons for their execution of the organization of Trotsky’s murder: Caridad Mercader (mother of Ramon, the killer), Naum Eitingon, Lev Vasilevsky (NKVD rezident, i.e., an undercover Foreign Intelligence chief, who served as first secretary of the Soviet Embassy under the alias “Tarasov”), Pavel Sudoplatov, Iosif Grigulevich, and Pavel Pastelnyak (acting rezident in 1940). 6Later, under Eitingon’s supervision from Moscow, Vasilevsky-Tarasov tried to organize an escape of the killer Ramon Mercader from a Mexican prison. 7From 1946 to 1950, the team of Sudoplatov, Eitingon, and Maironovsky carried out executions of victims on the order of Stalin and Politburo members. I will present the details of these assassinations below.

In 1994, the publication of Sudoplatov’s memoirs, Special Tasks: The Memoirs of an Unwanted Witness, written with one of his sons, Anatolii, and two American historians, 8caused a furor in both American and Russian historical and scientific communities. The book presents a mixture of real information and false statements. Misinformation that the leading American and European physicists J. Robert Oppenheimer, Enrico Fermi, Leo Szilard, and Niels Bohr acted as Soviet spies by transferring secrets to the Soviets was criticized by both American and Russian physicists and historians, 9as well as by Russian and U.S. government officials, 10and former secret service colleagues. For instance, Zoya Zarubina, a former MGB officer who worked as a translator at Sudoplatov’s “S” Department in charge of the Atomic Bomb Papers, refuted Sudoplatov’s claims about Oppenheimer. 11The historian David Holloway responded: “Sudoplatov’s motives [to make money or to magnify the role of the KGB] may be understandable, but his American coauthors are very much to blame for not making the effort to check out his serious, but unsustained, charges [against the American and European physicists].” 12

Sudoplatov does provide some real information on the role of Eitingon and Mairanovsky in numerous killings, 13but many details about Mairanovsky’s work and Sudoplatov’s characterization of him as a high-level scientist are fictitious. 14I can add to this that the memoirs of Sudoplatov’s former cell mates in Vladimir Prison do not support his version of events regarding the period after his arrest. 15Their descriptions of Sudoplatov’s simulation of a psychiatric illness contradict the details given in the book. The last version of Sudoplatov’s memoirs, Special Operations: Lubyanka and the Kremlin, the 1930s–1950s published only in 1998 in Russian, contains a more truthful version of these events. 16Also, the recently released documents show that the MVD doctors took part in the falsification of Sudoplatov’s disease. 17Sudoplatov’s transfer from Moscow’s Butyrka Prison to the MVD Leningrad Psychiatric Prison Hospital during the investigation of Beria’s case saved Sudoplatov’s life. Otherwise, there was a high probability that he would have been condemned to death along with Beria, Merkulov, and their close associates.