Vadim Birstein - The Perversion of Knowledge

In their book, Bobryonev and Ryazentsev insisted that some of Mairanovsky’s victims were criminals condemned to death; usually that they were picked up at Butyrka Prison. But some were political prisoners, charged with Article 58 of the Russian Criminal Code. Among them there were Soviet citizens, German and Japanese POWs, Poles, Koreans, and Chinese. Japanese POWs, officers, soldiers, and diplomats were used mainly for experiments with tranquilizers. 293These experiments were performed at Lubyanka No. 2 building (there were two interrogation prisons at the Lubyanka Square in the center of Moscow, Nos. 1 and 2). Mairanovsky’s colleague, the pharmaceutical chemist Naumov, testified: “While I was present, experiments were done on spies and saboteurs, as far as I could tell from their interrogations.”

During Beria’s investigation, the procedure was described by the former commandant of Lubyanka Prison, Vasilii Blokhin, on September 19, 1953:

I was assigned to deliver the arrested to the special cells. All of the work was directed by Beria or his deputies Merkulov and Kobulov. They gave orders to the First Special Department or Department “A” [i.e., Gertsovsky] to collect the appropriate arrestees from among those sentenced to execution—according to their health, whether ailing or flourishing, according to age, whether young or old, and according to weight, whether thin or fat. In accordance with these orders, Department “A” or the First Special Department selected the appropriate people from among those sentenced to the highest measure of punishment [death] and a list of prisoner’s names was given to me. Each time when I received the list, I would personally check with Merkulov or Kobulov whether the names were the right ones and whether they should be delivered to Mairanovsky. After Merkulov or Kobulov confirmed the orders I delivered the prisoners to Mairanovsky. 294

On October 14, 1953, Gertsovsky testified:

Before 1942, when I did not work as Head of the First Special Department, in general I had nothing to do with the executions… and only knew of Mairanovsky’s experiments from [A. M.] Kalinin. He told me about the experiments in [L. F.] Bashtakov’s presence and in his office… I believe only Kalinin, [V. N.] Podobedov, and, I think, Bashtakov had some relationship to the putting to death of prisoners by Mairanovsky and Filimonov. But Kalinin died shortly before the war. Podobedov has been working recently as Head of the First Special Department in the Ukrainian MVD… 295

Later, on October 23, 1953, Gertsovsky added more detail:

Filimonov [Mairanovsky’s superior] usually came to Podobedov and used the sentences to select the number of prisoners he would need in order to ask permission from Merkulov or Kobulov to hand them over to him for the experiments. I do not know if Filimonov would first go to the prison to select prisoners sentenced to the highest measure of punishment according to Blokhin’s criteria. Podobedov could not have gone to the prison with Filimonov for making such a selection without my authorization… The prisoners were handed over to Blokhin in his capacity as prison warden by the usual orders from Military Tribunals to execute the sentences. Blokhin’s transfer of prisoners to Filimonov was done by verbal instructions from Merkulov or Kobulov, which were transmitted to Blokhin through me, and as can be seen from Blokhin’s testimony, were rechecked by him personally with Merkulov and Kobulov.

I understand that Merkulov’s and Kobulov’s instruction to execute the sentences by poisoning rather than by shooting, as was indicated by the court sentence, was a violation of the law. But I considered these violations justified under war conditions. 296

As noted earlier, the condemned were usually killed by gunshot in the back of the head, administered by a single executioner—either Blokhin himself or a member of his small team—in a special basement room of the Varsonofyevsky Lane building.

Podobedov’s name will come up in another case, that of the geneticist Nikolai Vavilov. His duties at the NKVD/NKGB First Special Department were very grim—to be present at executions and then register the deaths. According to the rules, the executioner carried out the verdict, with Podobedov and a prosecutor in attendance. Additionally, in 1941 Podobedov was put in charge of contacts with Mairanovsky’s laboratory. He and a prosecutor were present when corpses of Mairanovsky’s victims were taken from the laboratory. Both wrote “a protocol” (a report) that the death verdict had been carried out. The names of the other witnesses of the execution are still top secret. 297

At least four German POWs (quite possibly, real Nazi war criminals) were experimented on in 1944. 298In late 1945, three other Germans were transferred to Mairanovsky’s laboratory. 299This time the prisoners were apparently not Nazis but political emigrants from Nazi Germany. All of them were injected with poisons and died in fifteen seconds. The bodies of two of the victims were cremated, but the third corpse was sent to the Moscow Sklifosovsky Hospital. The autopsy showed that the prisoner died of heart paralysis, but medical examiners did not find any poison in the body.

Probably, the “truth” drugs and other drugs were also widely tested on prisoners. Dr. Charles Schandl, a Hungarian lawyer who had been in contact with the Hungarian underground and British Intelligence in Budapest during the war before being arrested by the Soviets, testified in 1958 to Swedish authorities in Toronto about his experience in Lefortovo Prison in 1946:

The constant noise from the [hidden] speaker made him dizzy, sometimes he got cramps and after some time he had not been able to determine whether the speaker was on or the voice was his own hallucination. He also noticed that the guards sometimes gave him different food from what the other prisoners received, and he was convinced that the prison authorities had mixed some drug in his food and maybe also in his drinking water since after certain meals he felt an increase in the activity of all his glands and at the same time had an upset stomach. 300

This description of symptoms echoes that of Mairanovsky’s victims. Possibly because of these experiments, Schandl was kept under the highest level of secrecy. After conviction to twenty-five years’ imprisonment as an “American spy,” Schandl was deprived of his name and became No. 26, under which he was sent to Vladimir Prison. 301However, Schandl had nothing to do with American espionage: In December 1944, he accompanied a Dutch officer, Hendrik van der Waals, who wanted to contact British Intelligence with information about the German military technical secrets. They ended up in the hands of Soviet Intelligence, which was not interested in their military information at all. 302It is not clear why Schandl was a numbered prisoner because, as I noted in Chapter 1, only those prisoners involved in the most important political cases that fell under the Department for Investigation of Especially Important Cases were given numbers after conviction. 303

Although it is not known how many prisoners were used for experiments between 1938 and 1949, in trial testimony Mairanovsky made it clear that there were more than a few. “By my hand many dozens of sworn enemies of Soviet power, including nationalists of all types (including Jewish) were destroyed—this is known to Lt. General P. A. Sudoplatov,” Mairanovsky wrote from Vladimir Prison in his appeal to MVD minister Beria on April 21, 1953. 304Sudoplatov and Grigoriev named at least 150 victims. 305

Mairanovsky had other victims, not subjects of experiments but of executions. These acts were organized and conducted under the supervision of Sudoplatov and Eitingon and Department “DR” of the NKGB/MGB. In 1966, as part of his appeal for rehabilitation, Sudoplatov wrote about the activity of “DR”: