Vadim Birstein - The Perversion of Knowledge

Yevgenii Primakov is an example of both the merger of the KGB with the academy and the merger of Soviet (now Russian) espionage with diplomacy. This alliance has a long history. During the last years of Stalin’s dictatorship, in 1947–1949, the MGB’s First (Foreign or Espionage) Directorate and the Military Intelligence were simply combined with the Foreign Ministry into a governmental structure, the Committee on Information, or KI. 239The KI was in charge of political, economic, and scientific-technical intelligence operations, and the Soviet ambassadors were in charge of intelligence and illegal (i.e., spy) networks. A good example is Aleksandr Panyushkin, who was the Soviet ambassador to the United States at the beginning of the Cold War, in 1947–1952. 240Documents recently released from the KGB archives show that besides his diplomatic duties, Panyushkin (under the alias “Vladimir”) also controlled and coordinated the activity of Soviet spies, including Americans involved in Wallace’s election campaign in 1948. 241In 1952–1953, he was also deputy chair of the “Small” Committee on Information, called the “Small KI,” under the USSR Foreign Ministry. 242The Small KI was the Foreign Ministry merged with a small group of intelligence service after the Military Intelligence (GRU) had returned to the Ministry of Defense and the Foreign Intelligence had moved back to the MGB. 243It is not surprising that after this job, former Ambassador Panyushkin headed in 1954–1956 the KGB First Main Directorate, which after the fall of the Soviet Union became the SVR, headed by Primakov (in 1991–1996). Before 1991, not less than 50 percent of the staff of Soviet embassies and companies abroad were represented by KGB officers from the First Directorate. 244Currently, the percent of intelligence officers under diplomatic cover seems to have grown because of the smaller number of real diplomats, that is, the employees of the Russian Foreign Ministry. 245

On May 12, 1999, Primakov was sacked by Russian president Boris Yeltsin and replaced by First Deputy Prime Minister Sergei Stepashin. 246The FSB head, Vladimir Putin (later prime minister and then president), visited the former prime minister and gave him a traditional KGB gift, 247a hunting rifle, as “a reward for his help in protecting Russia’s security.” 248According to the Russian press, in the summer of 2000, Primakov was moved back to the presidential administration. 249

After Stalin’s death it became typical that retired MGB-KGB functionaries were appointed to work in science. This was not really anything new (more on this in Chapter 4). In the 1950s, science simply became a place for retired MGB/KGB veterans. This was more than the collaboration of individual scientists with the secret services; it was a general collaboration of academic institutions with the KGB system.

The example of Mairanovsky’s colleague Muromtsev, who became acting director of the Academy Gamaleya Institute of Epidemiology and Microbiology, has already been discussed. Another good example is Iosif (Joseph) Romual’dovich Grigulevich, who had been involved in many assassination cases, including that of Leon Trotsky and a plan to assassinate the Yugoslavian leader Tito. In 1960, after his deportation from Latin America, the experienced killer Grigulevich received another assignment: He was appointed to work as a “scientist” at the Academy Ethnography Institute in Moscow. 251Without any special education, he “worked” there until his death in 1988. In 1979, he even became a corresponding member of the academy, which was unquestionably due to his KGB connections and not to his scientific knowledge. 252Another former “diplomat,” Semyon Gonionsky, who during World War II was living (and spying) in the United States, was a “scientist”—and a party secretary—at the same institute in the 1960s–1970s. But the case of Vladimir Boyarsky is perhaps the most famous.

Until recently, this former NKVD-MGB investigator worked as a scientist at the Academy Institute of Problems of Complex Exploitation of Natural Resources. In 1958, Boyarsky was made a senior editor of the Academy of Sciences Press (Nauka) and a year later became editor in chief. Very few people knew that he had never been trained in chemistry and that his “scientific” career had been organized by an old friend, Academician Mikhail Agoshkov. 253In 1933–1941, Agoshkov, a mining expert, worked at the North Caucasus Mining Metallurgical Institute 254and became friends with Boyarsky. In 1941, Agoshkov moved to the academy’s Moscow Institute of Mining and in 1952 became its deputy director. He was head of the Academy Foreign Section (which was completely controlled by the KGB) until 1960. In 1961, he became deputy and in 1962 acting chief scientific secretary of the academy. It is interesting that during all of his “brilliant” career in academy administration, Agoshkov was only a corresponding (elected in 1953) and never a full member (he became an academician only in 1981). He had to have very powerful connections (evidently, with the KGB) in order to hold such high positions within the academy without being an academician. Agoshkov was Boyarsky’s coauthor of the textbook Development of Ore and Loose Deposits, which was the basis of Boyarsky’s doctoral dissertation. 255

In the 1980s, the “chemist” Dr. Boyarsky was still a member of the Nauka Publishing House Editorial Council and made decisions on which scientists’ books should be published. In 1989, he was finally exposed in the mass media. 256

It was revealed that Boyarsky had left a bloody trail in Czechoslovakia in 1950–1951 during the preparation of the anti-Semitic Rudolf Slansky trial. 257Boyarsky was senior adviser within a group of thirty MGB officers who in 1950 supervised the organization of the Czechoslovak Security Service, the StB. 258The first task of the StB was the Slansky trial. Boyarsky’s instruction was simple: “Our greatest enemy is international Zionism, [which has at its disposal] the most elaborate espionage organizations.” 259It is not surprising that for this purpose the fanatical Czech anti-Semite Andre Keppert was appointed director of the StB’s Department for the Search for Enemies of the State. Keppert had a primitive method of identifying his enemies: “[W]henever he saw a hooked nose he either opened a file on the owner or put him in jail.” 260According to both Nazi propaganda and Soviet anti-Semites, a hooked nose is a characteristic feature of the Jews (the Jews as an ethnic, not religious, group).

Ironically, Boyarsky’s career in Czechoslovakia ended because his deputy, Yesikov, started to suspect that Boyarsky was a Jew himself! Yesikov informed Moscow that Boyarsky “had behaved improperly in connection with the materials… regarding the hostile activity of Jewish bourgeois nationalists.” 261MGB deputy minister Yevgenii Pitovranov himself looked into the matter: “According to the allegations of a number of USSR MGB workers, Comrade Boyarsky has incorrectly reported his ethnic background as Ukrainian, although his manner and appearance show him to be a Jew… Verification of Boyarsky’s biographical data did not confirm these allegations.” 262

Despite this, Stalin’s decision was negative for Boyarsky: “Experience with Boyarsky’s work in Czechoslovakia has shown that he is not well qualified enough to discharge responsibly the obligations of an adviser.” 263

But Boyarsky’s previous actions in Russia were more impressive and showed that in fact he was very experienced in NKVD-MGB work. In 1939, as a NKVD lieutenant, he falsified a case against 103 persons, fifty-one of whom were shot to death on the basis of his work. During his interrogations he used sophisticated torture on both men and women. His former NKVD colleague, Investigator Sheshikov, testified about Boyarsky’s methods of interrogation: