Vadim Birstein - The Perversion of Knowledge

Mairanovsky’s sons tried to appeal for rehabilitation again in 1989–1992. Every time, their request was rejected. “His guilt has been proven by the materials of the case. There are no reasons for reinvestigation of the case,” wrote the senior assistant to the USSR general prosecutor, Viktor Ilyukhin, in 1989. 119

Sudoplatov and Eitingon were luckier. In December 1991, Chief Military Prosecutor General Pavel Boriskin endorsed the decision to rehabilitate both of them. 120Also, he dismissed the murder charge against General Kalugin for Markov’s murder in London. Therefore, at present all three of these executioners are considered innocent according to Russian law.

When Mairanovsky was experimenting on humans, he did not work alone. There were about twenty other scientists who took part in the experiments. In their book, Bobryonev and Ryazentsev mention only a few names: Mairanovsky’s assistant Aleksandr Grigorovich; senior chemist V. D. Shchegolev; senior researcher and the head of the bacteriological group, Professor Sergei Muromtsev; pharmaceutical chemist Vasilii Naumov; a technician, Anna Kiriltseva; and Mag, Dmitriev, and Yemelyanov. MGB officials Filimonov, Eitingon, Osinkin, and Lapshin were present at the experiments and even participated in them. Like their Nazi colleagues, the NKVD-MGB used imprisoned scientists to conduct the experiments: Bobryonev and Ryazentsev mentioned at least two names of such prisoners, a biologist Anichkov, and Gorsky. 121The relationships between the colleagues at this laboratory were the same as those in thousands of regular laboratories: There were serious conflicts between Mairanovsky and his collaborators; especially between himself, Naumov, and Grigorovich. Both considered Mairanovsky to be professionally ignorant.

It would be interesting to know the attitude of these “researchers” toward their work: How did they feel administering lethal poisons to healthy human beings, then observing the subsequent terrible suffering and death? Filimonov started to drink after ten experiments; Muromtsev quit after fifteen. 122While some executioners became drunkards, others were placed into psychiatric hospitals, and a few committed suicide. What follows is an excerpt from Mairanovsky’s letter from Vladimir Prison addressed to the general secretary of the Central Committee, Nikita Khrushchev, regarding how he himself dealt with the situation in 1955:

This was extremely difficult work with methods that have caused welldeserved doubts and criticism. I and some of the other people who conducted this work had great misgivings: there was the struggle of personal feeling with state necessity. This very difficult state of the nervous system can explain the suicides of Shchigalev and Shchegolev, the psychiatric illness and the acute unrestrained alcoholism of Filimonov, Grigorovich and Yemelyanov and the severe illness of Dmitriev, Mag, and others. 123

It seems that these Soviet experimenters were not as tough as their Nazi colleagues in concentration camps. Of the group, only Mairanovsky served a term in prison “for the abuse of his position and illegal keeping of poisons.” Filimonov was fired from the central MGB in 1947 and transferred from Moscow to Lvov in the Ukraine in 1948, then fired from the MGB in 1954 because of his chronic alcoholism; officially, the reason for firing was “because of the facts discrediting an officer.” 124Seven times he was placed in psychiatric hospitals when he suffered hallucinations of prisoners who had suffered and died during experiments. 125Naumov and Grigorovich were apparently under arrest for a while during Beria’s investigation. In 1964, Naumov, now with the title of professor, still headed a secret KGB laboratory named Military Unit No. 10-55.

Mairanovsky’s colleague Sergei Muromtsev (1898–1960), the head of the second secret MGB laboratory, was luckier than Mairanovsky. Muromtsev is an excellent example of the merger between the NKVD-MGB and Lysenko’s interests. In 1923, he graduated from the Medical Department of First Moscow University. Like Mairanovsky, he joined the NKVD in 1937, and until 1951, “he was the NKVD-MGB employee as Head and Senior Researcher at several technical facilities.” 126Before that he had served as head of the Microbiology Laboratory at the Institute of Experimental Veterinary Medicine. In 1935, he was given a Doctor of Biology degree without defending his doctorate thesis. This was a mystery because degrees without defense were given only to prominent scientists, and Muromtsev was a microbiologist working in veterinary science, which was not considered a particularly prestigious field of science. Moreover, his publications in 1950–1952 during the time he supported Lysenko revealed his deep ignorance in scientific issues. Possibly, Muromtsev was a good administrator: In 1931, he was one of the organizers of the centralized system of state control of veterinarian vaccines. He continued to work on vaccines until 1943 and in 1946 received a Stalin Prize (for which Mairanovsky was so desperate) for a new method of preparation of vaccines for animals. 127However, Muromtsev’s degree in 1935 might also point to his probable connection with the NKVD as far back as 1935. In 1940, Muromtsev joined the Communist Party.

The goal of Muromtsev’s NKVD-MGB bacteriological laboratory was to develop bacterial toxins for the agents’ use. In his memoirs, Sudoplatov recalled that in the late 1940s–1950, he provided Muromtsev with spy information from Israel on recent developments in bacteriological weapons. 128In 1948, while heading the MGB secret lab, Muromtsev was among thirty-five new members of the Agricultural Academy (VASKhNIL) appointed by the USSR Council of Ministers for their support of Lysenko. 129Stalin himself, as the chairman of the USSR Council of Ministers, signed the list of newly appointed “Academicians.” This was a unique event: Academicians were no longer elected but rather appointed by the government and Stalin himself as a reward for their Lysenkoism. Having been an MGB officer (which all biologists were aware of), Muromtsev openly supported Lysenko at Lysenko’s triumphant session in August 1948 (Chapter 4) and later, in 1950–1952, during the period of the introduction of Lysenko’s ideas into Soviet microbiology. Following the beliefs of Lysenko, Muromtsev stated that microorganism species are unstable, that they can turn into each other. 130Moreover, according to Muromtsev, viruses and bacteria can appear “from changed proteins of animal, plant, and bacterial cells.” 131

In August 1951, before the arrest of Mairanovsky, Colonel of Medical Service Muromtsev was dismissed from his position as MGB laboratory head and from the MGB, officially because of his “bad health.” In fact, his dismissal was evidently connected with the MGB reorganization. In 1956, Muromtsev was appointed acting director of the Gamaleya Institute of Epidemiology and Microbiology (IEM) within the USSR Academy of Medical Sciences. Nobody at the institute knew how this came about. 132In the terms of that time, it indicated that the KGB was involved in the appointment. Muromtsev was so unpopular with the IEM that even the institute’s Communist Party organization raised the issue that a former head of a secret MGB laboratory could not be director of an open scientific institute. The Medical Academy never approved Muromtsev’s directorship. Muromtsev died in 1960. Not one staff person from the IEM attended his funeral. But the KGB appears to have been more generous: An article about Muromtsev appeared in 1974 in the Great Soviet Encyclopedia. 133This was a violation of the encyclopedia rules, which specified that only biographies of Academy of Sciences members and not members of the Agricultural or Medical Academies appeared in this publication. Muromtsev was an “appointed” member of the Agricultural Academy, and only a powerful organization such as the KGB could order the encyclopedia staff to publish his biography. Of course, the article made no mention of his cruel command of the secret NKVD-MGB laboratory, the beating up of imprisoned famous scientists (Chapter 4), and experiments on humans that were conducted under his order.