State Secrets: An Insider's Chronicle of the Russian Chemical Weapons Program

CHAPTER 13 I’m Quitting the Party

On May 4^th of 1990, I submitted my resignation notice to the Party Committee, officially leaving the C.P.S.U. I wrote that the C.P.S.U. is a criminal organization which doesn’t have the right to be reorganized, so I was officially severing all my ties with it. It was the first statement of this kind in the history of GOSNIIOKhT.

After this the events evolved rapidly. On June 7th of 1990 a decree was issued about transforming the PD ITR Department back into the PD ITR Sector, with fewer employees. I was transferred to the Laboratory for Elemental Analysis, in the capacity of “leading research scientist”. Yuri Skripkin became my immediate supervisor. He had appeared at the institute from time to time, but he was spending most of his time in Geneva at the negotiations. Skripkin was really a narrow-minded sycophant. Petrunin was well aware of my attitude, and he deliberately transferred me to Skripkin’s subdivision as retribution for my political activity.

By that time I had become one of the co-chairmen of the Democratic Russia Movement (DDR) at GOSNIIOKhT. Almost every day we issued our agitation leaflets and posted them in prominent places, so people would know the truth about the events that were taking place in the U.S.S.R. Often GOSNIIOKhT supporters of the DDR were sent, under our leadership, to different meetings and demonstrations, in support of the DDR and Boris Yeltsin, whom everybody loved at that time.

At the same time we started struggling to break up the C.P.S.U.’s power monopoly, and to achieve a majority in the workers’ councils. People were becoming bolder right before our eyes. They were no longer afraid of expressing their opinions. At one of the general party meetings that took place in March of 1990, contrary to the wishes of the Party Committee and the Board of Director, Edward Sarkisyan (another DDR activist), and I were elected co-chairmen. This was the first serious defeat for the backers of Communist power at GOSNIIOKhT. It was incredible for people to see the Director of GOSNIIOKhT and members of the Party Committee sitting in the hall, and not at the presidium as they were accustomed to. This might seem like an insignificant detail now, but at that time it showed that the power of the C.P.S.U. had cracked and you could successfully battle against it. Sarkisyan and I took turns presiding and gave the floor to the DDR supporters. They delivered speeches denouncing the C.P.S.U. and the corrupted authorities. Still, at that time it was still an internal party struggle, and it became increasingly more intolerable for me to keep my membership.

After work I often went to the country in Luzhniki for meetings of the supporters of democratic reforms. You could see anyone there – newly hatched anarchists with their shocking black flags, monarchists of every stripe, and even ultra-revolutionary democrats, as well as those who supported the separation of the Baltic republics from the U.S.S.R.

Investigators T. Gdlyan and V. Ivanov were the most popular figures in the country at that time. The authorities persecuted them for their excessive zeal in investigating the corruption of the party elite in Uzbekistan. At that time we saw those people who would be at the helm of Russia a few years later. Yuri Afansiev and Gleb Yakunin were the most popular leaders of the DDR.

Almost every day, we watched clashes on television between those who backed the power elite and the supporters of democratic reforms in the Supreme Soviet of the U.S.S.R. and in the Congress of People’s Deputies of the U.S.S.R. Everywhere you could feel the excitement. People were getting much more involved in politics, and the country was on the threshold of serious changes. There was change in many people’s internal lives everywhere, even at the secret “Post Office Boxes” like GOSNIIOKhT. However, the management of these establishments was deeply ultra-conservative. They owed far too much to the C.P.S.U. and its functionaries. They had received their unlimited power over scientists and others, thanks only to the party. Not one of GOSNIIOKhT’s bosses could work as a scientist any longer, and that’s why these people feared any changes like the plague. For this reason the supporters of DDR at the institute had become the personal enemies of the management, not just their ideological opponents.

When I began working with the DDR, I clearly understood what the consequences might be. I could be dismissed from my position. Still, my sense of civic responsibility had finally matured and crystallized by that time, and that didn’t allow me any compromise.

Actually, I was pleased when people at GOSNIIOKhT expressed their sympathy towards me, as someone who had sacrificed his position for the sake of progress and democratization of the country.

Little changed after our department broke up. The director of GOSNIIOKhT promised that I would hold onto all the equipment and laboratory rooms, but as a formality I would be moved to a different subdivision. Frankly, I didn’t really believe this, because I knew that Petrunin was a cowardly person, easily changing his mind if something even hypothetically threatened his position. If he received an order from the higher authorities, he did everything to carry it out.

That is exactly how it happened. Back in the autumn of 1989, there were attempts to tear my group apart. A lot of people were willing to have our group transferred to their subdivisions. Most of them were interested in our equipment, because at that time we had the most modern chromatographs, a chromatomass-spectrometer, and other equipment for physical chemical analysis. In order to preserve the group, I even agreed to the Director’s offer to transfer me to a new enterprise with collective ownership, which was set up by Igor Pronin, a former secretary of the Party Committee, under the guidance of GOSNIIOKhT’s top management. At that time these enterprises had just started sprouting up. In spite of my infamous attitude toward Party Committee secretaries, Pronin agreed to cooperate with me, because he was well aware of our capabilities and how we had developed analytical methods for ecological purposes. This was the area he was planning to work in with his new enterprise. Soon we established connections with the Moscow Committee for Ecology, and we received numerous requests for investigations of different ecological problems in the city districts.

At that time some people from my group were working on a topic important in civilian industry. We had finalized some agreements on research work aimed at developing a method to determine the onset of the process in which grain becomes moldy in the granary. The method used chromatomass spectrometry to identify certain key components of gasses produced by molds. After a while, we made good progress in this direction. We developed an experimental technique and identified all the volatile components of a few musty cultures grown on grain, in collaboration with a team of scientists headed by Professor Zakladny from the Institute of Grain.

Unfortunately, we couldn’t finish this work with specific recommendations, because problems arose within my group. Petrunin, following the advice of Skripkin and Deputy Director Polyakov (by that time Guskov retired), refused to transfer our equipment along with us to Pronin’s newly organized enterprise. At first sight, it seemed surprising that the director was unable to settle such a simple question, but on closer inspection, you could see the scheming of the party and executive officials behind the scenes. They couldn’t forgive my “treachery”, and wanted to make an example of me, to teach me a “lesson”.

I made desperate efforts to save my group and the equipment that was so difficult to come by. But my ill-wishers – namely Skripkin, Polyakov, Bogdanov (head of the Research and Technical Department and the son of the odious head of the RP Department), and Vlasov the Chief Engineer – managed to block every one of our suggestions. They had studied together at one department in the Military Academy of Chemical Defense.

I am sure that the notions of honor and decency don’t exist even theoretically for these people, so you had to be very careful when talking with them, especially if you were working on the problem of destroying the stockpiles of chemical weapons. They can do anything to preserve their power. In March of 1994, they “handed over” two of their bosses to the KGB – their patron Petrunin, and General Anatoly Kuntsevich who had organized the delivery of the chemical agent precursors to the Middle East. In return, the grateful KGB didn’t bother their buddies while investigating the case.

At that time I frequently attended city meetings of the DDR activists, but it was becoming increasingly more painful to watch people waste a lot of their time arguing over questions that were insignificant from my point of view. It had become a simple trade off, and the prize was DDR management and leadership positions. Surprisingly, many DDR members were totally out of touch with reality, and they were completely uninformed about the real situation in the plants and science research institutes, those places where people actually worked.

At the end of June of 1990, I spent a whole day at what was supposed to be an organizational conference of DDR supporters, which took place in the District Council of Moscow Oktyabrsky District. A number of people were there including Victor Zaslavsky, Arkady Murashev, and Nikolai Travkin, who were well-known at the time. Such a barefaced and cynical struggle for management places ensued, that I finally decided to leave, after witnessing this disgusting spectacle for six hours.

During a break I tried to speak with Murashev, but he wasn’t available. I was worried that GOSNIIOKhT and other enterprises of the military-chemical complex were still receiving the same governmentally budgeted funds as before, despite a decision by the Supreme Soviet of the U.S.S.R. to significantly cut military expenses. The new allocations were presumably meant for chemical industry, not for defense establishments, but this was a dangerous trick. At that time I wasn’t really sure that even Gorbachev or others in high positions knew anything about this. So, I wrote a brief note to Murashev, explaining the situation and asked him to meet with me. He was a popular People’s Deputy of the Supreme Soviet and a co-chairman of the “Inter-Parliamentary Group”, the first opposition faction in the history of the U.S.S.R.

Unfortunately, Murashev never found the time to meet with me, although I was sitting not far from him. I saw him read my note and look around to see who the author was. When I pointed to the note and to myself, he nodded in response. A few years later the KGB prosecuted me, and my lawyer asked Murashev to testify about my appeal to him as to a People’s Deputy, but he “didn’t remember” my request.

Back in June of 1990, I realized that my relatively independent life at GOSNIIOKhT couldn’t continue forever, and I decided to ask Deputy Director Kurochkin to transfer our group to the Department for Fundamental Research, which he headed. He agreed and started “working on” Petrunin. To his credit, Kurochkin didn’t stipulate any prerequisite conditions regarding my activities with the DDR, even though he remained a loyal C.P.S.U. member until it completely collapsed.

During one of our conversations, I candidly told him that I was going to struggle with the ruling clique of the military-chemical complex, which prevented Russia from pursuing a peaceful policy, in spite of the changes taking place in the country and in the whole world. Kurochkin thought my ideas, regarding the complete termination of research work on the development of chemical weapons, were too radical. I was afraid that it would be very difficult in the future for the CWC to control research, because there was no clear interpretation of this process. Also, according to the draft of the CWC, development was to be prohibited, but in my opinion, the terms were not clearly defined. Kurochkin agreed with me, but he said he thought that the problem couldn’t be settled completely. We had to be ready for dirty tricks, so we had to continue our scientific research. Naturally, I was absolutely sure that the ruling clique of the military-chemical complex would jump at the opportunities opened up by the lack of precise definitions in the wording of the CWC.

I was impatient to share my misgivings with people openly in the press, but the question was – how to do it. There was no doubt that all matters relating to chemical weapons were top secret. I couldn’t just go to the director of GOSNIIOKhT and ask him to let me publish an article that described how he had hindered the process of conversion at the institute. I couldn’t expect him to agree to let me state in the press that the institute continued to develop and test new kinds of chemical weapons. Unfortunately, this is exactly what I was supposed to do, according to the standing instructions, which prohibited any independent correspondence stating a personal opinion, and any independent correspondence that qualified as “a personal opinion”. Only the director of GOSNIIOKhT and his deputies had this right.

The local DDR organization was especially worried about conversion at GOSNIIOKhT. In our leaflets we openly pointed out that a peaceful policy was only formally pursued at GOSNIIOKhT. We presented our suggestions at our workers’ conferences, but it was clear that the director and his confidants were not anxious to move in our direction.

Then several events took place, which became something of a turning point for me. At the end of February of 1991, the director of GOSNIIOKhT signed an order to transfer my group to Kurochkin’s department. But the order wasn’t put into effect! Polyakov and Skripkin openly ignored it. They prohibited the transfer of any people or laboratory equipment. It was strange to see such overt insubordination on the part of the director’s assistants. In this situation all the signs pointed to the fact that the real boss at the institute was Deputy Director Victor Polyakov, not Director Petrunin. The situation was further aggravated by the fact that we had already contracted and started our practical work, conducting ecological evaluations of a number of areas in Moscow.

Two months later the director cancelled his transfer order. I finally realized that my opponents wanted me to give up and be humbled. They acted on the request of Chekist Aleksander Martynov, who had conclusive information about my activities within DDR and my attitude toward chemical weapons.

One day at the end of April 1991, a festive atmosphere set in at GOSNIIOKhT. Tables were decked out with a banquet in the Directorate, and toasts were loudly proposed. It was the same in a number of departments. My friend Victor Dmitriev said that they were celebrating the Lenin Prizes that had been awarded to Director Petrunin, General Kuntsevich, and other “scientists”.

“For what?” I wondered.

“For a binary compound,” he replied.

I was really amazed, because this problem was very far from being solved. I thought that Igor Vasiliev was still “lucky” in spite of his love of adventure. I wasn’t at all surprised that his name wasn’t on the list of award recipients. This was completely in line with Soviet practice, when the real author or inventor was given only the crumbs from the table of the power lords. I thought this was the case again.

However I was mistaken about the cause of all this revelry – which substance this highly touted binary compound was based on.

In his last conversation with me, Kurochkin asked what my objective was. I clearly explained that I saw only one way to solve the problem of chemical weapons – to ban all kinds of work in this area, including scientific research. I thought that GOSNIIOKhT should no longer serve military purposes and I was determined to fight for this with all means available.

My former patron only shook his head in reply. I realized that he disagreed with me completely. “Someone inside this incubator of death should assume the initiative,” I encouraged myself. Unfortunately, I started having problems with my health.