PSYCHOLOGICAL UNDERPINNINGS
No doubt the interventions of the Party and secret services in scientific issues, including the rise of Lysenko, had an ideological and psychological origin. Stalin and the other Party leaders had no formal education or training (Bukharin was an unusual exception from this rule). No doubt on some level this made them feel insecure, especially around educated scientists. This goes a long way toward explaining their desire to dominate and control scientists, even when the destruction of these talented people severely damaged the fortunes of the Soviet Union (for example, declining crop yields because of the Lysenko nonsense).
The personal attitude of Stalin to scientists was very cynical. In the early 1930s, the dictator said to Academician Axel Berg, a well-known radiophysicist and specialist in the theory of information: “Scientists work well only when some of their colleagues are imprisoned.”307 Security commissar Lavrentii Beria’s rudeness toward scientists after he had been appointed head of the Special Committee (the Soviet atomic project) in 1945308 was well known. The outstanding physicist, Academician Pyotr Kapitsa, refused to work under Beria’s supervision (which was almost suicidal). He wrote to Stalin stating his reasons: “Comrades Beria, Malenkov, and Voznesensky behave as superhumans at the Special Committee. Especially Comrade Beria.”309 After this communication was received, Kapitsa was dismissed from the committee, and in 1946, he was deprived of all his positions and put under house arrest until Stalin’s death.310 Stalin personally ordered Beria not to arrest Kapitsa. At a meeting in the Kremlin, Stalin told Beria: “I’ll dismiss him [Kapitsa] if you like, but you mustn’t touch him.”311 According to some sources, later, in 1953, Beria planned an assassination of Kapitsa, evidently as an act of revenge.312
Kapitsa was the only prominent Soviet physicist who refused to participate in the A-bomb project under the supervision of Beria and other Party functionaries. He consciously decided to follow Pavlov’s example of resistance. Pavlov told him: “…Only I am saying here aloud what I am thinking about, and when I die, you should do the same because this is so necessary for our Motherland.”313 And Kapitsa answered: “I will not be afraid to say what I am really thinking.” It is not surprising, however, that other scientists who were not so prominent did not resist. They knew exactly what would happen to them if they did not succeed in their work. Beria kept in his desk a list of names of all scientists with notes on what kind of punishment, from the death penalty to a certain number of years of imprisonment in labor camps, each scientist would receive if the bomb project was not completed on time.314 Later, in 1980–1981, Kapitsa actively defended Sakharov. He wrote two strong letters to KGB chairman Yurii Andropov demanding the return of Sakharov from exile in Gorky.315
Academician Kapitsa was right. Like Nazi leaders, the Soviet Communist and NKVD-MGB elite fancied themselves to be superhuman. According to the writer Kirill Stolyarov, the following testimony of MGB colonel Savitsky is in Beria’s MGB investigation file:
Once in Germany B[ogdan] Kobulov [at the time deputy head of the Soviet Military Administration] said in the presence of my wife and Adjutant Mikitenko that people and their descendants are divided by inheritance into the “chosen” and “unchosen.” The “chosen” should be leaders and have key positions in society, and the “unchosen” are only fit to work. When I tried to object to this, Kobulov screamed: “Do not speak drivel, you don’t understand anything!”316
For the entire time I dealt with the security service officers within the academy, at Moscow University, and especially in the Lubyanka headquarters, I perceived the same attitude: The officers of all ranks tried to show me that they were special and in some way superior to others. The “unchosen” were expected simply to obey the orders from the “chosen” and accept their understanding of life and values, which definitely were opposite to mine. In the current Russian political situation, such officers have become leaders of the government and economy. The control of science has merely shifted: Control according to the ideological Party line has morphed into control through financial support. It is too early to expect that in this climate, moral and ethical issues of science such as choosing whether to participate in the development of new types of biological or chemical weapons (despite all international agreements) will become a serious matter.
According to the writer Leonid Mlechin, Academician Yevgenii Varga (1879–1964), who directed the Academy Institute of World Economy and World Politics from 1927 to 1947 and in the 1920s–1940s was the main economist within the Comintern,317 had a very low opinion of the secret services. In 1947, he stated: “A decent person won’t work as an interrogator or at the secret police. Only the scum of society works there and, naturally, such elements do not follow the issue but they are interested in their own careers. They are suspicious of everyone they observe. They put suspects in prisons until such an atmosphere is created [in the society] when everyone suspects everybody.”318 No wonder that Academician Varga did not enjoy Stalin’s favor. In 1948, he was condemned for his professional economic views and in 1949, the institute he directed was closed down.319
It becomes clear from reading the reports of independent journalists in Chechnya in 2001 that the methods and mentality of FSB officers have remained unchanged to the present day. Without any hesitation, twenty-year-old FSB lieutenants attach electrodes to the hands of a sixty-year-old Chechen woman and increase the current step by step because she does not “dance” enthusiastically; that is, in their opinion, her convulsions are not strong enough.320 Her only “guilt” is that she is a Chechen civilian who has been kidnapped by the Russian military for ransom. Someday these young officers will return to Moscow and other Russian cities. They have acquired good practical knowledge of how to control people.
2 DEADLY SCIENCE
We do not have and cannot have old foundations of moral and “humanism,” invented by the bourgeoisie… We are allowed to do anything…
FOR THIRTY YEARS FROM the early 1920s until the death of Stalin, biochemists, chemists, and toxicologists working for the security services researched deadly chemicals used in executions and assassinations and conducted deadly poison tests on humans. This wags in addition to and allied with military research on biological and chemical weapons. The most disturbing aspect of this research was that this group was not isolated from regular scientific circles. A group of well-known scientists, professors, and academicians knew about these experiments and approved them.
In this chapter, I have used some documents from the 1953 investigation files of the Beria and Grigory Mairanovsky cases published by military prosecutor Vladimir Bobryonev and journalist Valery Ryazentsev, who had special access to the files. These documents were published in Russian in Bobryonev’s roman à clef “Doktor Smert,” ili Varsonofievskie prizraki (“Doctor Death,” or the Ghosts of Varsonofyevsky Lane), which I will cite as “Doktor Smert.” In this book, Mairanovsky becomes “Mogilevsky” and his laboratory is named Laboratory “X,” but the real names of most of the other people are retained. Transcripts of the 1953 interrogations are cited with the real dates and names of the interrogators, but the questions and answers are not preceded by speakers’ names. However, excerpts from the transcripts with the speakers indicated, as well as Maironvsky’s letters, are given in the English translation of the main part of the unpublished version of this book by Bobryonev and Ryazentsev, entitled The Ghosts of Varsonofyevsky Lane: Laboratory of Death—How The Soviet Secret Police Experimented on People and Poisoned Their Enemies. To avoid misinterpretation, I have used the English translation of the documents cited in this version.2