Vadim Birstein - The Perversion of Knowledge

On Eitingon’s order, Mairanovsky also experimented with curare. Curare is a blackish, resin-like substance derived from tropical plants of the genus Strychnos , especially S. toxifera . Also, it can come from the root of the South American vine pareira (Chondodendron tomentosum), used by some South American Indians for poisoning arrowheads. Curare acts by arresting the action of motor nerves. The Soviet secret service had been interested in curare since the time of VCheKa and Yakov Agranov. During the show trial against thirty-four members of the Social Revolutionary Party in Moscow from June 8 to August 7, 1922, the two defendants Grigory Semenov-Vasiliev and Lidiya Konopleva testified that they had provided Faina Kaplan, the unsuccessful assassin of Vladimir Lenin, with bullets poisoned with curare. 204

This attempt took place on August 30, 1918. Lenin survived, and Kaplan was shot without trial almost immediately after the attempt. The attempt upon Lenin’s life provoked the beginning of the Red Terror as a formal response to “counterrevolution activity.” The terror was unleashed after two more Bolsheviks, chairman of the Petrograd Bolshevik Committee Moisei Volodarsky and chairman of the Petrograd CheKa Moisei Uritsky, were assassinated on June 20, 1918, and August 30, 1918. After these three assassination attempts, the VCheKa shot approximately 6,185 prisoners and hostages, imprisoned 14,829 persons, put 6,407 into concentration camps, and detained 4,068 as hostages. 205

However, the testimonies of 1922 sound like a typical fabrication by Agranov and the OGPU. Both defendants, who “repented” of their crime, served in the VCheKa from 1919 and joined the Bolshevik Party in 1921. Moreover, they were acquitted during the trial. It is also unclear whether the very short-sighted Kaplan had shot at all or whether it had been somebody else. In 1992, Boris Petrovsky, a member of the Medical Academy, evaluated the description of Lenin’s illness after he had been shot: “There was no poisoning allegedly caused by ‘poisoned’ bullets… One should not talk about poisoned bullets. However… the wound was rare and very dangerous for [Lenin’s] life.” 206

According to Mairanovsky, after the injection of curare he observed the following symptoms:

Loss of voice and strength, muscular weakness, prostration, labored breathing, cyanosis and death with symptoms of suffocation while retaining complete consciousness. Death was excruciating, but the man was deprived of the ability to shout or move while retaining complete consciousness. Death of the “patient” ensued within 10–15 minutes after a sufficient dosage. 207

Eitingon testified in 1954:

I was present during experiments at [Mairanovsky’s] laboratory. Four Germans, who were condemned to death as active Gestapo men that had taken part in the execution of Soviet people, were the test objects. An injection of curare into blood was used for testing. The poison acted almost immediately, and the men were dead approximately in two minutes… 208

Those in charge of Mairanovsky’s work had no doubt about the necessity of experiments on humans. During his interrogation in September 1953, while facing the death penalty, Merkulov testified:

I believed that since these experiments were being performed on people sentenced by execution as enemies of the Soviet government, and since, in the interests of the Soviet government, these people were turned over to Soviet intelligence in order to provide a reliable means of eliminating enemies through sabotage, then the experiments were not illegal. Furthermore, these experiments were sanctioned by [Commissar] Beria and consequently were considered necessary to the work of the NKVD. 209

It is worthwhile to add that Merkulov visited Mairanovsky’s laboratory once and watched the administration of a poison to a prisoner and the resulting behavior of the prisoner through a peephole in the cell’s door. Bogdan Kobulov, who also supervised Mairanovsky’s laboratory in the 1940s, had a similar opinion. During his interrogation in 1953, the interrogator, Lieutenant Colonel Bazenko, asked him: “Don’t you think that such experiments are crimes against humanity?” Kobulov answered:

I do not think so, since the end purpose of the experiments was the war against enemies of the Soviet government. The NKVD is an agency that can use such experiments on convicted enemies of Soviet authority in the interests of the Soviet government. As an NKVD employee, I obeyed the orders to perform the experiment, but as a person I believed they were undesirable. 210

Finally, Beria himself testified about the experiment on August 28, 1953: “I gave orders to Mairanovsky to conduct experiments on people sentenced to the highest measure of punishment, but it was not my idea.” 211The USSR chief prosecutor, Rodion Rudenko, who headed the interrogation, ignored this statement, fearing that Beria would say that these orders came from Stalin and the Politburo. Four days later, in the next interrogation, Beria tried to diminish his role in the experiments:

I do not know, perhaps experiments were done on 100 people, but I gave the sanction for only three. Merkulov was more involved with it… Mairanovsky reported to me the methods used to poison people. He informed me of the possibility of using the toxic substance ricin to poison people through inhaled air. I proposed that he work on researching this means of poisoning. I was interested in these poisons in connection with an operation that was being planned against Hitler. Then the potency of action of these poisons was tested in experiments on low [sic!] people—convicts… I state categorically that I know nothing about this [the results of experiments on subjects]. 212

Later it was not possible to find out the truth. On December 18–23, 1953, Beria, Merkulov, Kobulov, and four others of Beria’s closest NKVD-KGB men were tried by a closed session of the Special Session of the USSR Supreme Court chaired by Marshal Ivan Konev. 213All defendants were found guilty and were shot to death immediately after the trial. 214

In 1942, Mairanovsky discovered that under certain conditions, ricin had a special effect on subjects, compelling them to become trusting and open. This provoked a two-year series of experiments on obtaining “truthful testimonies” under the administration of chloral scopolamine and phenamine benzedrine. The CIA, which was created in July 1947, started experiments with the same idea ten years later, in 1950–1952. 215Mairanovsky’s series of experiments with “truth drugs” were approved by Merkulov and the head of the NKGB/NKVD Second Main Directorate (Counterespionage), Pyotr Fedotov. Also, Mairanovsky mentioned the involvement of Fedotov’s deputy, Lieutenant General Leonid Raikhman. 216In 1940, Raikhman (alias “Zaitsev”), as head of the NKVD Polish Office, was one of the main organizers of the murder of Polish POWs. 217In September 1941, as Fedotov’s deputy, Raikhman was involved in the deportation of the Volga Germans of the Saratov Region to Kazakhstan and Siberia. 218After World War II, he worked with Sudoplatov in Lvov (western Ukraine) on “cleansing” the area of Ukrainian and Polish partisans. 219Raikhman was arrested after Abakumov’s arrest and released after Stalin’s death. In 1953, during Beria’s investigation, Raikhman denied his involvement in the affairs of Mairanovsky. Instead, he named the head of the MGB Investigation Department at the time, Zimenkov, as a source of information about Mairanovsky’s experiments. 220

Mairanovsky’s colleague, Vasilii Naumov, an assistant professor at the Pharmacy Department of the Moscow First Medical Institute, who had been mobilized by the NKVD through the Party Central Committee, considered Mairanovsky’s attempts to find a truth drug to be useless and without serious results. 221Nevertheless, in 1946, Soviet MGB “advisers” in Hungary tried actedron pentothal, scopolamine, and morphine on political prisoners. 222