Vadim Birstein - The Perversion of Knowledge

On the whole, the A-bomb and H-bomb projects completely depended on the work of prisoners. The whole uranium industry was controlled by the Gulag system. I think that the involvement of physicists in work based on slave labor seriously influenced the moral atmosphere at the academy after many of the physicists who participated in secret projects became its members. And those scientists who went through the camps and sharashki never recovered from their horrifying experiences. Analyzing the memoirs of survivors of the Soviet and Nazi camps, the historian Mikhail Heller concluded: “ Even those who [physically] survive in a camp, die [emotionally and morally]. Only few of them manage to resurrect again later.” 508

However, partly due to all these negative aspects and as a moral response to them, the main critic of the Soviet regime, the physicist Academician Sakharov, emerged within the Academy of Sciences. I would like to remind the reader what “completely altered” Academician Sakharov’s thinking. 509

After the successful test of the thermonuclear bomb on November 22, 1955, Marshal Mitrofan Nedelin (military director of the test and deputy minister of defense from 1955–1960) gave a banquet for selected scientists, technicians, ministry, and military officials. Sakharov recalled:

The brandy was poured. The bodyguards stood along the wall. Nedelin nodded to me, inviting me to propose the first toast. Glass in hand, I rose, and said something like: “May all our devices explode as successfully as today’s, but always over test sites and never over cities.”

The table fell silent, as if I had said something indecent. Nedelin grinned a bit crookedly. Then he rose, glass in hand, and said: “Let me tell a parable…” The point of his story (half lewd, half blasphemous, which added to its unpleasant effect) was clear enough. We, the inventors, scientists, engineers, and craftsmen, had created a terrible weapon, the most terrible weapon in human history; but its use would lie entirely outside our control. The people at the top of the Party and military hierarchy would make the decisions. Of course, I knew this already—I wasn’t that naive. But understanding something in an abstract way is different from feeling it with your whole being, like the reality of life and death. 510

Marshal Nedelin did not want to offend Sakharov. For him, there was simply no question about moral issues: The Party and its military and KGB naturally should have used scientists and products of their work for its own purposes without the scientists’ consent. Sakharov had never forgotten this lesson: “Many years have passed, but I still feel as if I had been lashed by a whip…. [Nedelin] wanted to squelch my pacifist sentiment, and to put me and anyone who might share these ideas in our place.” 511

After World War II, many of the Nazi doctors and pseudo-geneticists continued their careers without any problem or remorse about the victims of their experiments during their Nazi past. 1In the Soviet Union and Russia, the details of these secrets of the past are still kept in closed archives. It is interesting that many of the former NKVD/MGB/KGB officers who survived Stalin ended up in the fields of science and law. The Soviet regime did even more for their former servants. During the last days of the Soviet Union, such killers as Mairanovsky’s colleagues Sudoplatov and Eitingon were rehabilitated as if they were as innocent as their victims.

But I cannot forget. I imagine. Almost every day trucks with innocent signs—“Bread,” “Provisions,” or “Toys”—left Lubyanka or Lefortovo. After a short trip, they stopped in the center of Moscow in front of an ordinary old house. The “cargo” of these trucks were individuals on the edge of sanity. After many months of abuse, torture, and a five- to ten-minute parody of a trial ending with the words “condemned to death,” after being held for an indeterminate time in special death-row cells, they were brought to a place with medical personnel. The “doctors” asked questions about their health. The condemned did not know that they were only the “birdies,” and it was the final act of a brutal play that would end with terrible suffering and death at the hands of these “doctors.”

A second scenario comes to mind. The highly educated, multilingual Naum Eitingon invites a person (usually a foreigner) to visit his friend, whose apartment is in the center of Moscow. It appears that Eitingon’s friend is a doctor, and his name is Mairanovsky. Doctor Mairanovsky insists that he must make a medical examination of the guest (of course, for free). Then he insists that the guest urgently needs a shot. The rest we already know.

It happened in the Moscow of my childhood. It happened when anyone could be arrested, day or night. And my parents could have been among the victims.

In 1987, the investigative journalist Yevgeniya Albats interviewed an old family man, a loving father of four children. The only unusual detail was that this man was the former NKVD investigator Aleksandr Khvat, who tortured Academician Nikolai Vavilov and created the Vavilov case in 1940. The journalist asked Khvat: “Didn’t you feel any compassion for Vavilov? After all, he was facing the death penalty. Didn’t you feel pity for him, as a human being?” “Khvat laughed out loud,” Albats writes in her book. “What do you mean, compassion?… It wasn’t like he [Vavilov] was the only one, or anything.” 2No wonder that Khvat made a good career within the NKVD/MGB and before Stalin’s death headed MGB Department “T,” charged with combating “persons expressing threats to the Party and Soviet leaders.” 3

This was not the opinion of just one old person. As I have already described, the NKVD arrested Vavilov after Trofim Lysenko had signed a secret report to the NKVD. In 1989, Lysenko’s son, Yurii, wrote to the editors of the popular Russian magazine Ogonyok: “I… am against having even a kopek of my money go to the construction of a ‘memorial to the victims of Stalinism.’ I think fanning hatred for Stalin is harmful and unfair.” 4

There is an unusual logic in the attitude of the current Russian officials to the ghosts of the past. Mairanovsky and many of the OGPU/MGB leaders mentioned in this study and eliminated by Stalin (Abakumov, Agranov, Beria, Amayak and Bogdan Kobulov, Komarov, Likhachev, Merkulov, Meshik, Prokofiev, Ryumin, Schwartzman, Stepanov, Tsanava, Vlodzimersky, Yagoda, Yezhov, Zhupakhin) were not rehabilitated by the Soviet/Russian Chief Military Prosecutor’s Office. As for Abakumov and the persons who were tried with him (including Likhachev and Komarov), in 1994 the Military Collegium of the Russian Supreme Court changed the old verdict that qualified them as persons who committed crimes against the state to those who committed crimes “using their positions in the military.” 5In December 1997, the Russian Supreme Court revised the verdicts again and changed the death penalty of Abakumov, as well as Likhachev, Makarov, and their supervisor Aleksandr Leonov, to a twenty-five-year term of imprisonment. This is really an Orwellian situation: to change the punishment of persons who were shot forty-four years ago! At the same time, Sudoplatov and Eitingon were rehabilitated, despite their evident involvement in the deaths of numerous victims. Sudoplatov wrote in his memoirs that his and Eitingon’s rehabilitation was based on the fact that they “did not fabricate false cases against the ‘enemies of people.’” 6The appeal of Beria’s relatives in 2000 for his political rehabilitation was rejected by the Military Collegium of the Russian Supreme Court. 7