The Radiobiology Department was created within the Kurchatov Institute in 1958. At first it included only two laboratories, Microorganisms Genetics and Selection, headed by Sos Alikhanyan (I will describe his career in Chapter 4), and the Biochemical Laboratory, headed by a well-known molecular biologist and geneticist, Roman Khesin (1922–1986). At the beginning of the 1960s, seven more DNA and genetics laboratories were established within the department. I was accepted at Dr. Khesin’s laboratory, at the time the only laboratory in the USSR that worked on the biochemical genetics of eukaryotes. Much later, on January 1, 1978, the Biology Department was renamed the Institute of Molecular Genetics and transferred from the Ministry of Medium Engineering (i.e., the Atomic Ministry), under which Kurchatov Institute existed, to the system of the Academy of Sciences.
In the 1970s, VNII Syntez Belka became one of the basic institutes working on biological weapons.300 Later, in 1985, the Glavmikrobioprom was merged with the USSR Ministry of Medical Industry into the Ministry of the Medical and Microbiological Industries (Minmedbioprom).301 The former head of Glavmikrobioprom, Valery Bykov, was appointed to head the new ministry. He was also appointed chairman of the Inter-Agency Scientific and Technical Council, which coordinated the Biopreparat program on new types of biological weapons.302
Concerning both of these jobs, I could reject the work that I considered immoral only because I was a Muscovite and had Moscow’s propiska (police permission to live in Moscow, a system that still exists despite being declared unconstitutional in the early 1990s). I could be finicky and wait until a position in academic science came through. Other talented scientists mentioned in this book, for example, Drs. Vil Mirzayanov and Ken Alibek, did not have the same privilege. They were born in small towns far from Moscow. Working on chemical and biological weapons was their only chance to have a serious professional career and gain the propiska required to live in Moscow.
In 1985, I appealed to my former “boss” Khesin, who became a corresponding member of the academy, for help regarding my job after I had been interrogated by the KGB counterintelligence (Second Main Directorate) concerning Khesin’s closest friend, David Goldfarb. Dr. Goldfarb was the father of my old friend Alex, who had emigrated first to Israel and then to the United States. Dr. Golfarb was also trying to emigrate to Israel but was not allowed to go by the Soviet officials and, therefore, was a long-term “refusenik.”303 I visited Dr. Goldfarb from time to time simply as his son’s friend. During my interrogation, the KGB counterintelligence officers became furious. They did not get any information from me about Dr. Goldfarb and his friends (and I honestly did not know anything regarding their questions), but I managed to get information from them: that the KGB had been trying to create a political case against a “plot” of Jewish scientists who allegedly tried to smuggle scientific secrets to Israel and the United States. After this interrogation, my professional future looked very grim. Khesin, with whom I had an uneasy relationship but who had the reputation of being courageous both as a scientist and a person,304 was at the peak of his career at this time. He was very upset to hear about Dr. Goldfarb’s problems with the KGB. However, he told me that he could not take me into his lab or provide me with any other support. He evidently did not want to or could not afford to have a problem with the “organs” after providing me with help.
In 1986, I escaped the further interest of the KGB by moving from Moscow to the northern part of Russia, above the Arctic Circle. I signed a three-year contract with the academy’s small Murmansk Marine Biology Institute, located in the Dalnie Zelentsy inlet about 300 miles from Murmansk on the Kola Peninsula (later, after I left it, the institute was transferred to Murmansk). This was the same institute where two anti-Lysenkoists, Yurii Polyansky and Mikhail Kamshilov, found jobs after they had been expelled from their institutes after the August 1948 session of the Agricultural Academy, or VASKhNIL.305 However, during my time in Murmansk, the professional level of most of the scientists working at that institute was very low. The head of the laboratory in which I was placed (and the Party secretary of the institute), a histologist by training, immediately told me after my arrival that he did not know what terms such as “genes” and “chromosomes” meant. The director of the institute was a Party appointee who had succeeded in defending his doctoral dissertation at Moscow University only after a special request of the Murmansk Regional Party Committee to the Moscow University Party Committee (in the 1990s, he became an academician). However, this director was not aware of my problems with the KGB. Work above the Arctic Circle gave me a legal opportunity to retain my Moscow propiska and to later return to Moscow without a problem. After I left for Murmansk, my wife, who had stayed in Moscow, suddenly started to receive phone calls from the Moscow City police, who desperately requested information about my whereabouts. Of course, very soon the local KGB curator of the Murmansk Institute found out exactly where I was.
While I worked above the Arctic Circle, I managed to publish my second scientific book on genetics (Cytogenetic and Molecular Aspects of Vertebrate Evolution) at the Academy Publishing House, Nauka.306 There was a separate struggle with the KGB concerning publishing this book. I had several special meetings with KGB officers at their headquarters regarding the documents necessary for publishing it, which had been confiscated by a KGB agent. Finally, the intervention of Academician Aleksandr Yanshin, who was vice president of the academy (in the Earth Sciences Division) and president of the Moscow Society of Naturalists and who supported my book, saved the situation and the book was finally published in 1987. I defended it at my institute in Moscow as a Doctor of Biological Sciences thesis. The book was also given an award by the Moscow Society of Naturalists.
In three years, I was back in Moscow, and after 1990, I was able to work at the Koltsov Institute of Developmental Biology. Despite all the talk about perestroika and glasnost in the press (Mikhail Gorbachev’s new Party line of openness and partial freedom of the mass media), nothing had changed in terms of KGB control of the academy institutes in Moscow. The same officer worked at the First Department of the institute, and to attend a conference or work abroad, a scientist still needed permission from the same “mysterious” organs, alias the KGB.
I saw the institute’s First Department officer for the last time when I visited Moscow in 1997. I had been working in the United States for six years already and had been listed at my institute in Moscow all that time as being on leave of absence. The officer told me: “It’s really unfortunate that the Institute’s best guys like you are working abroad now.” It seemed that he had completely forgotten that several years before, his organization—the KGB—almost turned me into a political prisoner with his help. In 2000, he was still at the institute.
In 1990, after my return to Moscow, I joined the Moscow human rights group Memorial, which is dedicated to the memory of the victims of the Soviet regime. Memorial collects documentary materials and helps survivors of Stalin’s camps. I was interested in the history of the control of science, especially biology, and in the fate of foreign prisoners in the Gulag. Soon I realized that there was an early unknown area of Soviet-controlled science—like in Nazi Germany, a special secret laboratory that used human subjects for biomedical experiments. The fact that some members of the scientific elite not only knew about these experiments but supported them was especially shocking.