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

CHAPTER 14 I Break the Silence

With great difficulty, I got permission to take my regular vacation at the end of July in 1991. I went to Baranovskoe, a settlement near Moscow, where I had a little plot of land. I was planning to build a dacha (summer house) there. There was a lot of work and that helped me to recover a bit.

On August 21^st, the truck driver who brought us concrete for the foundation said that a lot of tanks were moving along the highway towards Moscow. We ran over to our neighbors’ house, where there was a radio and a TV, and that’s how we found out that there was a coup in progress against the government in Moscow. The weather was overcast, dull and rainy, but we decided to finish our work. My assistants talked me out of going back to Moscow, and we followed the events in the capital without switching off the radio for a minute.

By that time I was becoming less enthusiastic about the leaders in the DDR. Nobody there was willing to address the pressing problems that were developing. Their main idea was to seize power. Then, they said, they would decide about everything else.

I still sympathized with Boris Yeltsin, but I felt that there were no selfless people around him, no scientists or prominent specialists who had any programs or plans which ordinary people could understand. The nomenklatura in control at the time saw this, and they knew their power was unshakeable. The DDR leaders were mostly dilettantes, former instructors of Marxism-Leninism, representatives of the Soviet press, or just plain rascals. All these people combined presented little danger to the Communist regime. These demagogues couldn’t attract sharp young minds and train them to be intelligent and honest politicians. Experts, erudite and otherwise competent people also had no illusions about the economists surrounding Boris Yeltsin. There never was any real science of economics in the U.S.S.R. The primary objective of the Soviet “economists” was to explain the basics of socialism and Communism, from the point of view of Marxist-Leninist “philosophy.” If anyone has any doubts about this, let them read the dissertations by these scientists in the Russian State Library.

These were the kind of people who were at the helm of the DDR movement. Many progressive people in Russia pinned their hopes on them, but unfortunately the DDR’s leaders let them down, and they compromised themselves entirely in the eyes of the public. Certainly the common members of the DDR like me were responsible, to some extent, for the shattering disappointment people experienced, because we allowed a small group of scoundrels, yesterday’s fiery Communists, to abuse the people’s trust in democratic ideals.

The defeat of the August of 1991 putsch attempt gave some impetus to the democratic movement in Russia, and it also gave rise to a lot of illusions.

While Boris Yeltsin celebrated his victory and was drinking “like a fish” in the Caucasus Region of Russia, the real power structure which remained in the same hands, had just enough time to shed its old skin. First, the president issued a decree that prohibited political activity in institutions and businesses. This was done under the pretext of banning the activities of the C.P.S.U. However, this document wasn’t simply a farce. The decree betrayed the ordinary DDR members who actually helped the people who issued this decree to reach their current positions. They certainly realized that the C.P.S.U. was strong, even without its formal organization. What was the point of prohibiting the activity of these party committees, if the directors and all the top managers still controlled all aspects of the life and work of their employees? After all, how could Sergei Shakhrai, a Komsomol leader at Moscow State University, who became one of the DDR leaders and an assistant to Yeltsin, know anything if he still knew nothing about the life of ordinary people in the country?

At GOSNIIOKhT, we employees were deprived of our last chance to come forward and struggle with the opponents of the reforms and democratization.

Overall, it wasn’t all that bad. The mass media became even bolder and the newspapers could write concretely about specific problems. I read through the democratic press attentively, but I couldn’t find any serious publications about the military-chemical complex. So, I decided I was ready to speak openly about the problems of the military-chemical complex myself.

I never wanted anyone to think that I did it on the sly, in a cowardly way, hiding behind the back of some journalist. I was suffering from the agonizing burden I carried, feeling personal responsibility for participating in the criminal arms race of chemical weapons. Those thoughts which had been constantly torturing me finally pushed me forward to make a resolute decision to pick up my pen.

However, even before I wrote my first article, I was able to succinctly sum up my concerns in a note to Gavriil Popov, who was then Mayor of Moscow and one of the leaders of the “Democratic Russia” movement. Early in September of 1991, at a meeting of the activists of this organization, I passed him a brief note describing how dangerous the reckless activities of the ruling elite of the VPK were to the life and the safety of Muscovites. I asked Popov to meet with me. He agreed and promised to call me.

Alas, I never received his call. Later, at the urgent request of my lawyer, Popov was asked to come to court as a witness on my behalf. He said that he had difficulty remembering the facts – that we had met or that he had received a note from me. He also didn’t remember that he had promised to meet with me.

It took me just one evening to write an article. I quickly typed it and took it to the office of the editor of the popular Moscow newspaper Kuranty. There I met Constantine Katanyan, a young and quite well known journalist. The article seemed interesting to him and he promised to publish it without any changes. It was published in Kuranty on October 10th, 1991.[78] When I was writing the article I knew that according to the Wyoming Memorandum (an accord which the U.S. and the USSR signed in 1989), the parties had to give each other information about all the compounds that could be classified as chemical weapons. It was clear to me that the U.S.S.R. had no intention of honestly meeting its commitments. This is why I concluded my article with an analogy which compared the actions of the leadership of the military-chemical complex with the behavior of a chemical compound capable of inversion, when it changes from one form to another, without changing its chemical composition.

When the article was published, I was still on vacation. According to witnesses, my article made a stunning impression on the directors of the institute. The Science Council of GOSNIIOKhT was urgently called together to discuss it, but they failed to pass the necessary resolution that would condemn the article. That was not because many people objected to it, but because they had no idea how the decision should be worded. Also, it was a little awkward to make a decision about my article in my absence.

The institute’s top leaders wrote to the KGB of course, demanding that I should be immediately arrested for my impertinence. Although I don’t know why, criminal proceedings were not brought against me at that time. Many people, including me, supposed that this was connected with the shock that the KGB experienced after the failure of the August coup, which ended with the arrest of its bosses, including Vladimir Kryuchkov, chief of the Chekists. It seemed that in our country, the era of Democracy and Glasnost had finally started to take root.

Later it was proven that we had been sorely mistaken. At that time, there were no formal grounds for prosecution and exemplary punishment. Back in November of 1989, the U.S.S.R. Committee of Constitutional Supervision at the Congress of People’s Deputies, chaired by Sergei Alekseev, issued a decree that declared all normative acts relating to human rights to be null and void unless they were published openly in the press within three months. Naturally, nobody decided to publish such acts openly. So, all the lists of state secrets simply ceased to exist legally. The Belovezhskaya Decision on the dissolution of the U.S.S.R. confirmed the legality of the acts adopted by the U.S.S.R. Supreme Soviet and, consequently, this resolution of the Committee of Constitutional Supervision.

My article was the first of its kind, and it threw out a challenge to the powerful military-industrial complex (VPK). But, unfortunately, it didn’t reverberate either in our country or abroad. Maybe people didn’t pay much attention to it because of the dramatic events at that time connected with the break-up of the U.S.S.R. Everything faded to insignificance against this backdrop. It’s a pity my warning call went unanswered. I hoped to hear something about the VPK and my article in the programs of “The Voice of America”, the BBC, and “Liberty,” but there was nothing.

Still, my article pushed the KGB to issue a new decree about the protection of state secrets, which President Boris Yeltsin signed on January 14, 1992. The decree was secretly adopted and it wasn’t published, so the general public knew nothing about it. I only learned about it a year later when I was already sitting in jail. This decree reinstated all the invalidated normative acts and lists of state secrets. In this way, the president illegally cancelled the resolution of the Committee of Constitutional Supervision.

Once again the Chekists had their hands on one of the major instruments of total control over everyone whose profession was connected with the VPK clan.

When I returned to work after my vacation in October of 1991, I faced a vindictive reaction from the bosses on account of my article. I wasn’t given a pass, so I couldn’t enter the institute grounds. The guards on duty showed me an empty space on the rack for passes. Then I called the Department for the Security Regime, which was responsible for this system. They explained that my pass had been removed by order of Aleksander Martynov, Deputy Director for Security. When I called him, he gave no explanation, and said that my pass would be returned immediately. I entered the institute grounds and went to my room. It was open but people from a different department were working there. I realized they had taken away my workplace and my equipment. It was very unpleasant, but to be honest, I didn’t expect anything else.

I told myself that this was just my first reward. The second one would be my dismissal. However, I had no regrets.

Soon my friends from the former Coordination Committee of the DDR movement came to see me and started suggesting different ways to regain what I had lost. I refused because I realized that it would be a nerve-wracking waste of time. So I went to the institute library to read scientific journals. I ran into several people I knew on my way there, and everybody behaved differently. Some people turned away and pretended they didn’t notice me. But there were people who silently came up to me, shook my hand, and quickly left. And I felt very good about that. I realized that many people who I respected and appreciated approved of my article. Certainly they were afraid, but that was only natural. If I had already spent years of serious consideration, agonizing over my role in this criminal enterprise, working on the development of chemical agents, then how could I expect people who read my article to immediately re-evaluate their lives and their careers?

Someone should be the first and bear his cross, even if he were threatened. I was even more certain of this after I ran into Victor Zhakov, the former chief engineer at GOSNIIOKhT, who literally hissed at me, “What are you doing? You’ll leave people without bread and butter! Be assured, they’ll run you through the meat grinder and dump you into the sewer!”

I knew that if they decided to do away with me, there was hardly any way to avoid it. However, I chose to make no changes in my daily routine. In the evening I went for walks outside with my kids, and I went to different meetings of the city DDR organization. I also continued jogging in a park that was not far from my house. By that time I was already an avid jogger with more than fifteen years of experience. Running always calmed me down and helped me remain optimistic, although it was becoming more difficult to be optimistic when there was a general depression in the country, and a scientist couldn’t count on normal work. My uncertain situation without a workplace and equipment couldn’t stay that way forever. The only thing that saved me at that time was a little work in the evenings and on my days off. I analyzed environmental tests at one of the cooperative societies and was paid a little for that. However, soon I lost this work too, because the cooperative had no more work orders.

The DDR activists from GOSNIIOKhT still hoped that they could change the situation. According to a provision in effect at that time, the director was supposed to be elected at a conference of employees, and the council of this group had to work out a contract with him. Only after that, could the contract be approved by the ministry. Petrunin, however, decided not to tempt his fate by trusting it to a meeting of the employees’ collective. So he just ordered each subdivision to elect a representative from their ranks. Then he would convene a meeting of these representatives and finish his business there. However, the elections of the representatives showed that Petrunin had slim chances. He then called upon the members of the old council who were mostly “his people” and they obediently reappointed Petrunin the director.

Outraged by this trick, DDR activists and many other people asked me to intercede and inform the Ministry of Russian Industry about Petrunin’s fraud. I couldn’t refuse and agreed to go there with Vyacheslav Agureev, another chemist.

Our trip couldn’t possibly have had a positive outcome, because the people from the former Ministry of Chemical Industry, who were working there, needed Petrunin more than anyone else, to survive.

The aides of our makeshift director and his deputy, who were closely watching my every step, decided to take advantage of our trip and had our absence classified as truancy. They immediately called a meeting of the employees’ collective, from the department to which I was formally assigned.

I went to the meeting purely out of curiosity. I wanted to know how people under the new conditions would react to their own blatant manipulation. In the past I had read in books and had heard a little from witnesses, that in the 1930s the “common people” made decisions at the workers’ meetings to savagely punish those with whom they had worked and been friends only the day before. As I expected, everything at the meeting evolved as it had in those earlier years.

On November 13, 1991, a meeting took place in Subdivision 45 that resolved to “abolish the position of the leading research scientist and to leave the question of the employment of Vil S. Mirzayanov, Doctor of Chemical Sciences, who occupied this position, to the directorate.” One more step was made towards getting rid of dissenters.

Members of the former Coordination Committee of the DDR issued a leaflet in my support for the occasion.[79]

The leaflet was a bold document for that time. Of course, everybody knew the members of the Coordination Committee, so they were taking a bold risk. The administration could start persecuting them, and could punish them in an exemplary manner along with me.

And this is exactly what happened. First a computer was taken away from Valery Morgunov, a research assistant at the Analytical Department, because he used it to type the text of the leaflet. Then the persecution of other former members of the Coordination Committee began. Many of them were quickly dismissed from their jobs because of “staff reductions.” This form of punishing disagreeable people was convenient, and it hardly ever failed.

I kept a copy of that leaflet. Every time I read this simple text, I feel a thrill and unbounded gratitude to my colleagues, who dared to perform a real civic feat when times got tough for me.

At that time, I was still hopeful that the leaders of the Democratic Russia movement would pay attention to the situation I described in my article “Inversion,” especially since I soon had a good chance to talk with them about it.

On November 8 of 1991, I was in the staff headquarters of the Democratic Russia movement. All day I was compiling packets of papers for the delegates to the second congress, which was to take place a few days later. I managed to meet with Lev Ponomarev and Gleb Yakunin there.

Unfortunately, they hadn’t read my article in Kuranty. Then I briefly summed up the publication for them and asked them to take steps to eliminate the danger created by GRNIIOKhT (GOSNIIOKhT was renamed when the USSR broke up), which threatened the lives of Muscovites.

In response, Ponomarev recommended I take a sample of air near GRNIIOKhT and analyze it somewhere. Then the documentary proof that GRNIIOKhT was really dangerous would make it possible to expose the evil chemists.

I don’t know what kind of dreadful advice this was – whether it was downright stupidity or just an ordinary provocation. If I had followed Ponomarev’s “advice”, I could have legally been arrested immediately on suspicion of espionage. I was reeling from the shock of such a crazy recommendation by one of our “leaders,” with whom I had sympathized until then. Truly, he had advised a stranger to commit a crime! This is why I never tried to talk with Ponomarev about it again.

However, at the urgent request of my lawyer, I met with Ponomarev again in January of 1993. By that time he was a deputy of the Russian Supreme Soviet. We hoped he would be a witness for the defense, and confirm that I had met with him in the “Democratic Russia” headquarters and tried to draw his attention to this imminent danger. At that time my lawyer, Aleksander Asnis, was looking at all the different options for defending me in court, and it was very difficult. He hoped that he would be able to prove that I had repeatedly tried to draw the attention of public figures, deputies, and representatives of power to the imminent danger, though in vain. It would mean, according to the Criminal Code of Russia, that I had exhausted all legal means of raising my concerns through the proper channels, and had a legitimate right to take steps, even if my actions violated the current law. My article “Poisoned Policies” could be qualified as one such action.

Asnis and I were received with hospitality when we came to see Lev Ponomarev in his office in Room 1609 in the White House on the Krasnopresnenskaya Embankment. By that time, my “case” was widely known throughout the world and people recognized me everywhere, even in the subway. Many passers-by greeted me and thanked me for what I had done.

However, when Asnis briefly explained what we wanted, a thick silence fell over the room. It was clear that Ponomarev was dumbfounded and couldn’t find the words that would help extricate him from the situation. The deputy’s consultant Maximov saved him. According to him, Lev Aleksandrovich was a public figure, and his authority could be seriously damaged if he took part in the proceedings as a witness. “The investigator will certainly ask why there was no feedback and what actions Lev Ponomarev took regarding this issue” he continued. “Probably you, Vil Sultanovich, were not persistent enough and didn’t repeat your request,” Maximov the lawyer, insisted.

“Indeed, Vil Sultanovich, why didn’t you appeal to me again? I always try to help people when they appeal to me, if they can’t get an apartment or have problems with their pension, and with many other issues. I most certainly would have tried to help you, too,” said the DDR “leader”, happily grasping the idea put forth by his aide.

This time my lawyer Asnis and I were the astonished ones. Despite his constant imperturbability and incredible self-control, Asnis was deeply disappointed and couldn’t hide his feelings. There at the Krasnopresnenskaya Embankment, I realized for the first time why people had long ago dubbed such politicians “Dermocrats.” (This translates literally as “Shitcrats”.) Still somehow I found the composure to blurt out that I didn’t want to distract him anymore from his great work.

I was really ashamed in front of Asnis about what was going on. I didn’t believe that politics was always such a dirty business, or that politicians were necessarily dishonorable people. I don’t think so now, either. It seems to me that almost any business can be pure and noble if you do it honestly and professionally. Can the profession of a sanitation worker be “dirty”, only because he is dealing with sewage? On the other hand, chemists, surgeons, and people from many other professions have to put up with a lot of unpleasant things too.

Back in 1991, all my bridges were burned behind me, and it was clear that I would soon be fired from GRNIIOKhT.

On January 5^th 1992, I was sent to the Personnel Department, where they handed me an order about my termination, of course for “staff reduction” reasons. The Deputy Chief of the Department for the Security Regime, German Mosyakin, also came to see me. He was a short man, amazingly unpleasant and slippery. He asked me to sign an agreement about the non-disclosure of state secrets, which was already familiar to me from my first days at GOSNIIOKhT.

I said that I would be happy to do this if they showed me a Russian law or governmental decree with a clear definition of what the state secrets in our profession were. I explained to Mosyakin that after my dismissal from the institute I had no intention of living by rules invented by people like him. Of course he couldn’t show me any document that would explain all the subtle aspects regarding state secrets. He just obsequiously begged me to do him a favor because it was his job. We parted at that.

Unfortunately, my dismissal coincided with the beginning of Yegor Gaidar’s reforms in Russia. So, overnight I lost all my savings. These reforms turned my family and me into paupers. I started struggling for survival, which wasn’t easy because I had two sons, 5-year old Sultan and 13-year-old Iskander.

The Gaidar reform wasn’t a “shock therapy” as it was dubbed then. It proved to be just another revolutionary attack in the history of Russia. As always, the top leaders hoped to solve problems that had existed for centuries, in one round. In principle, I have always supported reforms in Russia, but they shouldn’t be so destructive. The authors of the “reform” acted absolutely brutally and inhumanely, even by Russian standards.

Nikita Khrushchev was a cynical and self-confident Bolshevik reformer. However, when he saw that he could no longer extort people by making them sign up for state loans “to restore the national economy,” he abolished those loans. At the same time he suspended annual payments on them, but he promised to resume the payments 15 years later. From the psychological point of view, he was right. The newly hatched reformers were not willing to do even this, and they promised nothing to the people they had robbed.

Was it so difficult to try and develop a long-term plan to compensate people’s savings by selling state property, natural gas, and resources? I am certain it could have been done, but the “reformers” led by Gaidar, were people with the same Bolshevik background. Bolsheviks never thought about people. They have always considered citizens to be “small screws” in the huge wheel of the state machinery. The very fact that they studied in the U.S. doesn’t mean anything. They crossed the ocean, but they came back the same specialists in the economy of developed socialism as they had been before.

Currently, Russia is paying for the great conceit and arrogance of these “specialists”, and the future of the development of democracy in this country remains in question, because of their mistakes.

At that time I couldn’t afford to indulge in similar reflections. I started working in commercial organizations that found practical application for scientific and technological achievements, but these attempts were also fruitless. All those commercial organizations quickly switched over to the simple operations of “buy and sell”, because at that time only those activities allowed them to survive.