Vadim Birstein - The Perversion of Knowledge

Finally, Zavenyagin personally ordered Timofeev to be found in the Gulag and brought to the sharashka built on the shore of Sungul Lake near the town of Kasli in the Chelyabinsk Region (the southern Ural Mountains). This special sharashka, “Object B,” was created in 1946 within the MVD Ninth Directorate. In November 1947, Object B became Laboratory B, and in official documents it was mentioned as P.O. Box 0215, with a mailing address of Kasli, P.O. Box 33/6.

When Timofeev was found and brought to Butyrka Prison in Moscow, he was dying of pellagra. The trip was awful. Later, Solzhenitsyn wrote down what Timofeev told him:

…Timofeev-Ressovsky traveled from Petropavlovsk to Moscow in a compartment [for six prisoners] that had thirty-six people in it! For several days he hung suspended between other human beings and his legs did not touch the floor. Then they started to die off and the guards hauled the corpses out from under their feet (Not right away, true; only on the second day). That way things became less crowded. The whole trip to Moscow continued in this fashion for three weeks . 258

As Solzhenitsyn continued, “in Moscow… a miracle took place…. Officers carried out Timofeev-Ressovsky from the prisoner transport in their arms, and he was driven away in an ordinary automobile.” However, he was still a convict and was brought to the MVD hospital. Timofeev recalled that “I remembered only that the name of my wife was Lyol’ka [a nickname], but I forgot her full name. I forgot the names of my sons. I forgot everything. I forgot my last name. I remembered only that Nikolai was my first name.” 259Timofeev suffered the consequences of pellagra for the rest of his life: He could not read any more, and his wife had to read scientific articles to him. The German scientists Zimmer, Born, and Katsch “were brought to Moscow and for a year and a half were waiting in [the town of] Elektrostal [near Moscow] for me [i.e., Timofeev] to be found and treated for pellagra.” 260Also, “while I [Timofeev] was improving, physicists and biologists were found among imprisoned intelligentsia through all [camps of] the Soviet Union. They were brought to Butyrka Prison in Moscow and shown to me.” 261

Despite the treatment, Timofeev was very weak when he was brought to the sharashka . “I could hardly climb a stair. When I put a foot on the next step, I had no strength to pull the second foot,” Timofeev recalled. 262His wife, Yelena, joined him in the Sungul. Tsarapkin was also transferred to Laboratory B.

In January 1948, the work of Laboratory B was discussed for the first time at a meeting of the Special Committee in Moscow. 263In August 1948, the whole MVD Ninth Directorate, including Laboratory B, was transferred from the MVD to the First Main Directorate. 264Later the lab became Institute B, and then the secret “Object No. 0211.” On the whole, the installation operated from 1946 until 1955. In 1955, construction of the new research nuclear physics institute was started at the same location, and the secret town of Chelyabinsk-70, or Snezhinsk, was built near the institute. In 1992, the institute was renamed the Russian Federation Nuclear Center (RFYaTs-VNIITF).

In May 1946, MVD colonel Aleksandr Uralets-Ketov was appointed director of Object B. Before that he was deputy head of the Tagil Labor Camp, and then the Chelyabinsk Metallurgic Construction Labor Camp, two huge Gulag industrial centers. 265In December 1952, Uralets was transferred to Moscow and a candidate of chemical sciences, Gleb Sereda, was appointed director of Laboratory/Institute B. Timofeev headed the Radiobiological Department, and Professor Sergei Voznesenksy (1892–1958) headed the Chemical Department. 266The staff consisted of imprisoned biologists and physicists, as well as approximately thirty free scientists brought from Germany, including Zimmer, Born, Katsch, and the radiochemist Nikolaus Riehl, who later wrote memoirs about his experience in the Soviet Union. 267This was an unusual sharashka : It was located in a very picturesque place and even imprisoned scientists lived in houses and not in barracks or a prison.

Timofeev’s laboratory studied the effect of radiation on different organisms and on groups of different species (usually called natural cenozis), as well as the effect of radioactive pollution on the biosphere and the geo-chemical behavior of radioisotopes. 268Timofeev was forced to focus his experiments on the investigation of “the influence of the emissions of radioactive materials on the growth of useful plants.” 269Timofeev’s longterm colleague Tsarapkin refused to leave genetics even in imprisonment. At Laboratory B, “he closed himself off and worked exclusively on theoretical problems of genetics.” Members of the German group experimented in their previous fields: Zimmer worked in radiation dosimetry, Born dealt with radiochemistry, Katsch “focused primarily on the problems of developing methods to extract radionucleotides that had been incorporated in various organs.” 270

Timofeev was formally released from imprisonment only in 1951. In March 1955, he received a document with a resolution from the Supreme Soviet that he had been mistakenly charged and tried. However, Timofeev and Tsarapkin were fully rehabilitated only in 1991, after their deaths, and Timofeev was never allowed to live in Moscow. In 1955, he was appointed head of a laboratory and then of the Department of Biophysics of the academy’s Ural Division in Sverdlovsk. In 1957, Timofeev formally defended his doctorate thesis at the Botanical Institute in Leningrad, but it was not approved by the Highest Attestation Commission! He became a doctor of biological sciences only in 1964, after the second defense.

In 1964, the Timofeevs moved to the town of Obninsk (about 100 miles from Moscow), and Timofeev organized the Department of Genetics and Radiology at the newly created Institute of Medical Radiology within the Medical Academy. In 1971, this department was closed on the order of the KGB. From 1972 until his death in 1981, Timofeev was professor-consultant at the Institute of Medical-Biological Problems in Moscow. His last years were difficult. His wife, with whom he worked in Berlin and in the Sungul sharashka , predeceased him, in 1973.

Those who met Timofeev (his nickname was “the Bison”) never forgot him. Here is how the Russian writer Daniil Granin saw Timofeev when he met him at the Fourteenth International Congress of Genetics in Moscow in 1978:

In that far corner the Bison sat in a chair. His powerful head was pulled into his shoulders, and his small eyes glittered sharply…. His lower lip protruding, he snorted, roared either in approval or in outrage. His thick mane of gray hair was shaggy. He was old, of course, but his years had not worn him out; on the contrary. He was as heavy and solid as a petrified oak. 271

Lysenko’s destruction of genetics and geneticists would not have been complete without the destruction of the evolutionary theory that is based upon genetics. After World War II, Lysenko and his ideologist, Prezent, started a crusade against this theory. On June 28, 1946, Lysenko published an article in Pravda entitled, “Do Not Sit in the Sledge Which Does Not Belong to You,” 272in which he attacked a famous botanist, Academician Pyotr Zhukovsky, who “dared” not to accept Lysenko’s new theory: his denial of intraspecies competition, the basis of Darwin’s evolutionary theory. Lysenko repeated his position in another popular newspaper, Literaturnaya Gazeta , on October 18, 1947. As usual, Lysenko did not bother to give any scientific proof to confirm his thesis:

There is no intraspecies competition in nature. There is only competition between species: the wolf eats the hare; it [the hare] eats the grass. Wheat does not hamper wheat. But couchgrass, goose-foot, pastor’s lettuce are all members of other species, and when they appear among wheat or kok-saghyz [Russian dandelion], they take away the latter’s food, and struggle against them.