At every level, normal business slowed down. To outsiders, the Soviet Leviathan retained its usual appearance: all-knowing, authoritative, under the command of a single will. On the inside, Leviathan dithered, its limbs paralyzed by indecision.
The next sections of this chapter discuss the origins of the intensified secrecy regime, and then its implications for one particular—and most important—secret: the identification and location of the labor camps of the Gulag. Thereafter I tell the story that is central to this chapter as it transpired in 1949. The concluding sections discuss how fear worked in the Soviet economy and whether the effects of fear show that Stalin went too far.
The seeds of the chaos that spread through the Soviet bureaucracy during 1948 are to be found in the global search for a cure for cancer. At the end of the 1920s a Soviet scientist, Grigorii Roskin, embarked on a long-term project of research on biological cancer therapies. Reasoning that cancer growth involved a failure of the immune system, Roskin’s idea was to find a naturally occurring agent that would boost the capacity of the immune system to combat tumors. He chose the tropical parasite that causes Chagas disease, an inflammatory syndrome. After a few years his wife Nina Kliueva joined the project. Their research was not classified, and the work in progress gave rise to several open publications. Despite wartime disruption, by 1946 Kliueva and Roskin had developed what they believed to be a promising if still experimental anticancer drug, which they called “KR.”[171]
In the prewar years, Stalin’s terror had broken Soviet scientific contacts and exchanges with Western Europe and the United States. During the war these contacts were resumed with official support on both sides. There were limits, however: the Soviet Union was excluded from Anglo-American atomic research, for example, and gained access to its results only by espionage.[172]
At the war’s end, there were widespread hopes among Soviet people that they would be rewarded for the Soviet victory by relaxation, allowing a more open or even “normal” political and cultural atmosphere.[173] KR became a vehicle of these hopes. In July 1946, an article by Roskin describing his research appeared in the American journal Cancer Research; the paper had been solicited, approved, and submitted through official channels in the autumn of 1945.[174] This and other scientific contacts fed public interest in the United States. In Moscow, the US ambassador was able to meet Kliueva and Roskin. Subsequently, he put forward an American-funded program of joint research to Georgii Miterev, the Soviet health minister. Visiting the United States in October, Vasilii Parin, secretary of the Soviet Academy of Medical Sciences, carried samples of KR and a book, newly published in the Soviet Union by Kliueva and Roskin, that described their work. After some hesitation, he shared the book and the samples with interested American researchers.
Disaster followed. The scientists had misread the direction from which the wind was blowing. High officials of the USSR Health Ministry and Politburo members such as Andrei Zhdanov and Viacheslav Molotov were aware of what was going on and even encouraged it, but they failed to secure the approval of the Politburo itself—in other words, of Stalin. Instead, there were delays and miscommunications while the visits and exchanges went ahead. In January 1947, when the matter came to Stalin’s attention, Zhdanov turned abruptly from the promotion of Soviet science in the West to a new posture: the need to protect valuable Soviet secrets. Angered, Stalin sacked Miterev and had Parin arrested. Over a few weeks, however, his crosshairs shifted away from the officials to the scientists. Stalin feared that, by sharing their work in progress on KR, Kliueva and Roskin had put at risk Soviet claims to priority in an important field of health science and to the potential revenues from its commercial exploitation. The scientists were now accused of violating secrecy and of betraying the interests of the Soviet state to American intelligence for the sake of “personal fame.”
All that the outside world knew was that the exchanges and visits came to a sudden stop, while Kliueva and Roskin disappeared along with their work. In fact, they remained at liberty and their research continued, although in secret. They were not charged with spying or arrested, a sign of how times had changed since the Great Terror. Behind closed doors, however, they were subjected to severe condemnation. Zhdanov had them brought before an “honor court” held on 5-7 June 1947, where they were denounced and censured before hundreds of spectators. In the second half of 1947, party organizations and government ministries held hundreds of closed meetings across the country to condemn them.[175]
The KR affair had lasting consequences. One was the secrecy law of 9 June 1947.[176] The new law took the regime of secrecy to a new degree of intensity. The law was not aimed at espionage or treason, for which the most severe penalties were already available under the infamous Article 58 of the RSFSR Criminal Code. Rather, it set out severe penalties for the lesser offenses of unintentional or negligent disclosure of state secrets, which were potentially far more numerous and everyday than cases of deliberate spying.[177]
In Soviet history, new laws were often accompanied by stringent enforcement campaigns based on exemplary punishment of offenders.[178] Discussing the new law in a draft for Pravda (subsequently published on 27 September 1947), the USSR state prosecutor Konstantin Gorshenin outlined recent cases in which the defendants were sentenced to four or more years of forced labor, not because they were traitors, but because they lost secret documents through negligence. There were spies in Gorshenin’s narrative, but the spies were foreign rather than home grown. Foreign intelligence agencies, Gorshenin suggested, were predators in search of a “habitat” that could supply “willing or unwilling prey.” He claimed that they found their victims especially among those citizens “in whose consciousness such relics of the past as a self-centered attitude to social causes, nonideological, narrow-minded interests, an egotistical drive toward cheap personal fame, adulatory self-abasement before bourgeois culture, and so forth, are still strong.” Also open to foreign manipulation were “those who, out of their own generosity, trust everyone and anyone, and fail to reckon the cost of their generosity to the interests of the state.” Only increased vigilance could frustrate the imperialists’ designs.[179]
If the KR affair triggered the sudden clampdown, it is natural ask what wider considerations were also at work. The historian Nikolai Krementsov places weight on the international context of the late 1940s. He suggests that Stalin, having observed how the United States had exploited secrecy to gain a monopoly on the new technology of atomic weapons, may have concluded that the Soviet Union should seek a parallel monopoly in the new medical technology of cancer treatment. He quotes a telling phrase found in a secret report of the time, where the author, a Soviet journalist, described the KR treatment as “a kind of biological ‘atomic bomb.’”[180] The analogy might be weakened by the fact that the Americans had made public the most important ideas behind the atomic bomb and its manufacturing technology in August 1945, within days of the first use of atomic weapons against Japan. The Smyth Report withheld some details, but still it gave away enough for the Soviet atomic engineer Nikolai Sinev to call it “an original compass, making it possible to orient oneself in the taiga [i.e., wilderness], so as not to get lost and to have confidence in success.” Although it was public information in the rest of the world, the Soviet authorities did not allow the Smyth Report to circulate freely and provided it only to specialists based on need to know.[181] These reasons make it hard to see the Soviet secrecy law of June 1947 as a symmetrical or proportional response to American measures. But there is no doubt that Stalin saw American interest in Soviet-American scientific exchanges as predatory.
171
On the background, history, and outcomes of the KR project, see Kre- mentsov, Stalinist Science, 131-43; Gorlizki and Khlevniuk, Cold Peace, 36-38.
175
Ironically, it was the nationwide coordination of the secret meetings that caused news of the affair to leak abroad. Correspondence about the KR affair between Komsomol officials in Moscow and Frunze, Uzbekistan, was intercepted and shared in British-American signals intelligence transcripts. TNA, UKUSA Agreement Files, S/ARU-E/T54, “Party Action on the Anti-state Activities of Two Soviet Professors” (Codeword—Glint), September 25,1947, HW 75/167, https://discovery.nationalarchives.gov.Uk/details/r/C11538964.
176
Gorlizki, “Ordinary Stalinism,” 721. Other consequences included complete bans on the publication of scientific reports of work in progress (Medvedev, Soviet Science, 121), and of economic statistics of any kind (Kaser, “Publication of Soviet Statistics,” 50).
177
As described in Chapter 3, the downfall of Nikolai Voznesenskii, the wartime economic chief and once Stalin’s favorite, was triggered in March 1949 by a scandal over the negligent loss of secret papers in Gosplan, but his subsequent execution in August was for treason and undermining the economy under Article 58, which dealt with counterrevolutionary crimes. Gorlizki and Khlevniuk, Cold Peace, 83-89.
178
Gorlizki, “Rules, Incentives and Soviet Campaign Justice”; Heinzen, ‘“Campaign Spasm’.”
181
Lebina, “Defence-Industry Complex in Leningrad,” 187. See also Smyth, Atomic Energy for Military Purposes.