Vadim Birstein - The Perversion of Knowledge

Before continuing Timofeev’s story, however, it is necessary to review briefly the organization of the Soviet A-bomb program. 239The Special Committee on the Atomic Bomb was established on August 20, 1945, under the chairmanship of Lavrentii Beria, who was no longer the NKVD head but, as a Politburo member, continued to be in charge of security services. This committee consisted of two high-ranking Party functionaries, three industrial managers, and two physicists. Georgii Malenkov and Nikolai Voznesensky represented the Politburo. Voznesensky held many posts: From 1938, he headed the Gosplan (State Planning Committee); in 1941, he became first deputy chairman of the Sovnarkom/Sovmin; in 1943, he was elected academician; and in 1947, he was promoted to Politburo member. However, in 1949 he was arrested and tried and was shot in 1950. 240Boris Vannikov (1897–1962, at the time commissar of armaments), Avraamii Zavenyagin (one of the highest NKVD/MVD functionaries), and Mikhail Pervukhin (1904–1978, at the time commissar/minister for chemical industry and Politburo member, 1952–1957) were the three industrial managers. Later, in 1957–1958, Pervukhin became minister of medium machine building (i.e., of atomic industry). At first, two physicists, Igor Kurchatov (1903–1960) and Pyotr Kapitsa, headed the scientific part of the project. Kurchatov had cooperated with the NKVD on the A-bomb project since 1943. As for Kapitsa, as I have already described, in August 1946 he was dismissed and put under house arrest. After this, Kurchatov became the leading physicist of the project. The committee’s secretariat was headed by NKVD major general V. Makhnev.

The First Main Directorate of the Sovnarkom/Sovmin was put in charge of managing mines, industrial plants, and research establishments (including sharashki ) necessary for the project. Vannikov was dismissed from his commissar position and appointed head of this directorate; Zavenyagin was appointed his first deputy; and Pavel Meshik, one of Beria’s main men, became one of his four deputies. Also, the Scientific-Technical (or simply Technical) Council was created under the First Directorate. It was chaired by Vannikov with Pervukhin, Zavenyagin, and Kurchatov as deputies and included industrial managers (commissars/ministers) and scientists. Among the first members were physicists Isaak Kikoin (1908–1984), Abram Alikhanov (1904–1971), and Abram Ioffe. 241Sudoplatov’s Department S (S meant “Sudoplatov”) within the NKVD (on January 10, 1946, it was transferred to the NKGB) was in charge of intelligence on the development of the atomic weapon abroad. 242Eitingon, Nikolai Sazykin, and Amayak Kobulov were appointed deputy heads of this department. 243Later it was renamed the Second Bureau of the Council. The project was a merger of Party, state, and scientific efforts, with the involvement of slave labor in the USSR, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, and East Germany.

As Timofeev recalled, after the Soviet troops occupied Berlin, he negotiated with Academician Leon Orbeli, at the time secretary academician of the Academy Biology Division, about his possible work in Russia: “[Avraamii] Zavenyagin and [Igor] Kurchatov wanted to include me, together with my German co-workers, the physicist [Karl] Zimmer, radiochemist [Hans] Born, and radiobiologist [Alexander] Katsch, into the atomic project. Zavenyagin prepared a special installation in the Ural Mountains.” 244Despite the negotiations, on September 13, 1945, Timofeev-Ressovsky was arrested in Berlin. 245Later he said: “But some other NKVD department [not Zavenyagin’s] arrested me.” 246Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn described how Timofeev was arrested. General Ivan Serov, at the time deputy head of the Soviet Military Administration in Germany and a future KGB chairman, asked Timofeev at the Buch Institute in Berlin: “‘Who are you?’ offensively using the familiar form of address. And the scientist… replied, using the same familiar form: ‘And who are you?’ Serov corrected himself, this time using the formal address: ‘Are you a scientist?’” 247In fact, Timofeev was arrested on NKGB order and the sinister Pavel Sudoplatov was in charge of his arrest.

On August 20, 1945, the deputy head of the NKGB Second Directorate (Counterintelligence), Major General I. Ilyushin, sent a note to the head of the NKGB Fourth Directorate (Organization of Terrorist Acts on the Occupied Territories), Lieutenant General Sudoplatov, regarding Timofeev. 248General Ilyushin claimed that Timofeev had been “tightly… associated with the Gestapo [and] actively worked against the USSR.” The note also mentioned that two of Timofeev’s brothers, Dmitrii and Vladimir, “had been arrested by the NKGB several times for their anti-Soviet activity.” In the end, Ilyushin asked for the urgent arrest of Timofeev. Evidently, Sudoplatov did not hesitate. On October 10, 1945, Warrant No. 2567 for Timofeev’s arrest was signed by first deputy NKGB commissar Bogdan Kobulov and approved by USSR deputy prosecutor Vavilov. 249A month later, on September 13, Timofeev was arrested by a group of NKVD operatives, and on October 8, 1945, he was brought to Moscow for investigation. 250

Timofeev was interrogated by investigators of the Eleventh (Interrogation) Department of the NKGB Second Directorate. 251He was accused of not returning to the Soviet Union from Germany in 1937 (the accusation that appeared during Vavilov’s interrogations), contacts with Russian emigrants (including the philosopher Semyon Frank), and “help to the German [Military] intelligence.” On March 5, 1946, Timifeev’s case was merged with the case of his colleague Sergei Tsarapkin. Tsarapkin had joined Timofeev in Berlin in 1926 and worked with him until both were arrested in 1945. While being kept in Lubyanka and Butyrka Prisons, Timofeev involved his cell mates in lectures:

…In Lubyanka, I organized a colloquium. There [Vadim] Vasyutinsky, a professor, gave a course of talks on ancient history [he was a specialist in the history of England and Scotland]…. Then it [the colloquium] was in Butyrka, where I was a cell mate of Solzhenitsyn. 252He also took part in our colloquium. And then [the colloquium] was in the camp. In Butyrka Prison, there were seventeen participants [in Cell 75]. There were three priests, two of them were the Orthodox, and one a Uniate…. I was the only biologist. There were four physicists, four engineers, and an economist. I gave presentations on the biophysics of ionizing radiation, on the chromosome theory of inheritance, on the Copenhagen general methodology principles, on the importance of these principles for the philosophy…. Then the physicists lectured on their issues. Of seventeen prisoners only [the physicist Viktor] Kagan and I remained alive. 253

However, Zavenyagin did not forgot Timofeev. On February 4, 1946, he wrote a letter to NKGB commissar Merkulov asking to transfer Timofeev to the NKVD Ninth Directorate. This Directorate of Special Institutes was established within the NKVD on January 26, 1946. Lieutenant General and Deputy Commissar Avraamii Zavenyagin was appointed its head, and Major General Valentin Kravchenko, the former supervisor of Maironovsky’s laboratory, became its deputy head. 254Merkulov ordered the head of the Second Directorate, Pyotr Fedotov, to speed up the investigation, and Fedotov, in turn, ordered his subordinates to do so. 255In the meantime, Timofeev’s German colleagues—Zimmer, Born, Katsch, and Wilhelm Pütz (a former head of the Personnel Department and a representative of the Abwehr at the Kaizer Wilhelm Institute)—were intensively interrogated from November 1945 until May 1946 about Timofeev’s work in Berlin. 256Timofeev himself was interrogated in detail about his work in Germany, especially in April 1946.

On May 25, 1946, the head of the Second NKGB Directorate, Lieutenant General Fedotov, approved the accusation against Timofeev (and Tsarapkin) of treason against the Motherland (Article 58-1a of the Russian Criminal Code). On July 4, 1946, the Military Collegium of the USSR Supreme Court sentenced Timofeev as a traitor to ten years’ imprisonment in labor camps, an additional five years of disenfranchisement, and property confiscation. He was sent to the Karlag group of labor camps in Kazakhstan, where he was kept from August to November 1946. The conditions of life and work there were inhuman—the political convicts were constantly terrorized by the criminal convicts. 257Like Timofeev, Tsarapkin was sentenced to ten years in labor camps.