Vadim Birstein - The Perversion of Knowledge

I have already discussed the possible motivations of Mairanovsky and his colleagues who worked in the secret system of NKVD/MGB installations. No doubt such scientists as Tarusov and Frank and the others from Mairanovsky’s list of thesis opponents rationalized their collaboration with the KGB just as did their colleagues in 1930s Germany who did not hesitate to follow Nazi orders. Usually these people were motivated by moral weakness and fear and would have reasoned something along the following lines: I could not refuse. My refusal would be dangerous for my family and people who depend on me. A scoundrel could replace me and my colleagues would suffer, and so on.

Only the KGB successors know how many “scientists” with the same “excellent service” in the past are still working at or are affiliated with the Russian Academy, and with other scientific institutions. At present, there are numerous secret services in Russia instead of one KGB: the Federal Security Service (FSB), Federal Government Communications and Information Agency (FAPSI), the Foreign (or External) Intelligence Service (SVR), Federal Border Service, State Tax Police, and Federal Guard Service. All of them represent different branches of the former KGB. 287

The FSB, FAPSI, and SVR are tightly connected with scientific research. In 1997–1998, the FSB had 76,500 employees. Its power became even wider than that of the KGB in the past. This agency has the authority to search homes and businesses without a prosecutor’s warrant and to gather intelligence on political groups deemed a threat to the state. It can run its own prison system, infiltrate foreign organizations or organized crime, create front enterprises, and demand information from private companies. It controls all state secrets and provides security for the armed forces and the federal government. 288

Another domestic agency, FAPSI, has a staff of 54,000. It is responsible for electronic communication security and surveillance and controls the most crucial Russian computer and communication networks. 289There is growing public concern that the FSB and FAPSI are working on the development of monitoring e-mail messages by linking their offices with all Internet providers in Russia. 290

The involvement of the KGB First Main Directorate, now SVR, in “dirty tricks,” including assassinations, has already been described in previous chapters. Ken Alibek claims in his recent book Biohazard that assassinations using bacteriological agents were planned by the KGB even in 1989–1990, during Gorbachev’s tenure. 291

Today, the three systems, the Russian Secret Service (FSB and FSK), the Academy of Sciences, and the military (Ministry of Defense), are still interrelated. In 1992–1994, Kuntsevich, an academician and a general, testified as an expert on chemical weapons against Dr. Mirzayanov during the investigation performed by the FSB, which is the former KGB. Dr. Mirzayanov was released from the FSB’s Lefortovo Prison only because of international pressure applied by human rights activists. 292Like the former KGB high official Sudoplatov, Russian military experimenters such as Kuntsevich, who was in charge of chemical warfare tests on unprotected servicemen in the 1980s, 293have no regrets about their experiments on humans.

Many of the facts I uncovered while researching this book were a personal shock to me. For instance, I knew several scientists who worked with Academician Shirshov. Did they know that Shirshov had been in charge of the transportation of prisoners, including those sent to Magadan, Kolyma, and the other death camps of the Dalstroi? Possibly they did not, because this part of his life and activity was top secret. But if they knew, what would be their reaction to this knowledge and would their attitude toward him change? Would they think that the goal of Soviet dominance of world affairs justified the means? I do not know. But I suspect that most of them would think so.

Recent Russian publications on the history of the Soviet atomic project show that Russian historians and scientists think that the creation (by all means) of the Soviet A-bomb was crucial to the existence of the Soviet Union because of the American threat in the late 1940s. One author, Yurii Smirnov, wrote: “The A-bomb was created during that dangerous USSR and USA confrontation period which began in the summer of 1946, when the war between the former allies could have started at any moment.” 294

I found a more typical and old Soviet-style point of view in the memoirs written in 1977 by the former deputy minister of health, A. Burnazyan:

…An atomic blackmail, heated by the [bombing of] Hiroshima and Nagasaki, was a threat to the world. Harry Truman amused himself by the idea that during at least his presidency the United States would have an absolute monopoly on the atomic bomb… On the appeal of the government, Soviet scientists and engineers ought to create in a short period of time their atomic bomb to defend their Motherland from the new threat and not allow the “Cold War,” which had just started, to turn into a “hot” atomic war. 295

A young historian, N. Kuznetsova, concluded:

I cannot reproach those [Soviet scientists] who in the 1940s created the atomic weapon… And one cannot apply moral evaluation to the atomic espionage. It was not possible to buy these secrets in Los Alamos for any money. But the anxiety about the future of mankind, i.e., pure idealistic ideas, forced some to risk their lives and to organize transfer of the top secret information to Moscow [from Los Alamos]. 296

I can only add to this phrase that the names of these “idealists” who “cared about mankind’s future” are very well known: Stalin and Beria. The latter supervised most of the atomic espionage in the United States and was put in charge of the Soviet atomic project in 1945.

What the Russian historians are not saying is that the Soviet A-bomb project and the first steps of the H-bomb project were under complete NKVD-MGB control. This meant that the laboratory work of scientists was based on the work of an army of prisoners who built the laboratories, mined the uranium without any protection, and so on. In 1945, Stalin himself decided that the atomic project should be under the NKVD:

The NKVD has substantial building and construction organizations, an army of construction workers [i.e., Gulag prisoners], good qualified specialists and managers. The NKVD has also a branched network of local posts, as well as a network of organizations at railroads and waterways [i.e., the labor camps again]. 297

After this pronouncement, the system of labor camps located throughout the country and slave labor became the basis of both the A-bomb and the H-bomb projects.

I believe that one must not have two moral standards in one’s attitude toward or evaluation of the crimes committed by Nazi or Soviet scientists and their NKVD-MGB managers. There was no difference in what Mairanovsky and his colleagues and the Nazi doctors in camps did or in how the Nazi V-rockets and Soviet H-bomb were created. There was no difference for prisoners if they were sent into slave labor in the German military industry or to the Soviet gold mines of Kolyma. For me, the only difference is that the Nazi regime has been dead for a long time and scientists who helped it to flourish were condemned by the international community, whereas what was going in the Soviet Union is poorly known. I feel that there is very little understanding by the international community of the profound extent of the penetration of Soviet (and now Russian) science by the secret services and the involvement of Soviet/Russian academic science in the work of these secret services.

Each time when I read about the achievements of Soviet physics in the late 1940s–1950s, I recall materials from the Memorial Archive. Old, poor-quality photos show women prisoners somewhere in the Dalstroi labor camps. These prisoners are sitting at tables on which there are heaps of ore. It is uranium ore, and the women are working with the ore with their bare hands. It is difficult even to imagine how short the life of these women was and how terrible their death was after the radiation they had been exposed to.