Then the time came for the secret voting. According to the Higher Attestation Commission rules, there had to be a quorum (minimum number of the Science Council members present). Although the number of members had exceeded the quorum at the beginning of the session, one person was missing when the voting time came. Deputy Director of Science Guskov, who was also a Science Council member, was urgently called to the Ministry during this session.
Normally, when someone left the Science Council, they signed a register to get a ballot, recorded their vote and put it into the ballot box. And this is exactly how everything was done in this case. But the chairman of the Science Council and director of the institute Patrushev knew what my boss was capable of, so he decided to wait for his deputy to return in order to repeat the whole procedure. When I asked him about it, he dryly reminded me that I knew very well why it was necessary.
After the lunch break, we had to wait three more hours and then repeat everything. Although all the members of the Science Council voted positively, everyone had a nasty aftertaste from this compulsory procedure.
I wrote my doctoral thesis in 1975 with great difficulty, having practically no time for that. In order to do it, I had to stay overtime in a special room of the First Department at GOSNIIOKhT practically every evening and write my thesis. I also understood that I had no chance of breaking through the barricade created by my boss. Still, I always wanted to do my best, and I decided to see it through to the end. I was also inspired by Revelsky’s successful defense of his doctoral thesis in 1974. Revelsky succeeded because of his good relations with military specialists and influential people on the Board of Directors, who had arranged for a preliminary discussion of his thesis in the expanded seminar, in the absence of our boss. At the end of the day, Beresnev just refused to go there, and the defense was a success as expected.
Soon after that Beresnev called me to his room, and he asked me in all seriousness, if he could become a candidate for a doctoral degree in chromatography. I answered that he could not, because he was not a specialist in the field.
In this way, I burned my last bridges behind me. The former “barrage fire detachment” lieutenant informed me that this time he wouldn’t repeat the mistake he had made in Revelsky’s case.
Indeed, he was very inventive. He organized my work in such a way that it yielded only practical results, without any detailed research. I had to do the theoretical part of my work covertly. Like all the other groups, we worked according to approved annual and quarterly plans, so it wasn’t that difficult to conceal additional research. When our boss asked a question “What are you doing?” each of my research assistants answered monotonically: “We are developing this analytical procedure.”
We had a difficult time though with internal publications, that is with writing reports on our additional research. The boss simply turned them down. No secret document was supposed to be published at the institute’s typing bureau without his permission. Sometimes we succeeded in doing that anyway, but our boss did everything he could to correct these “blunders.” He had a strong ally, Leonid Kostikin, the Deputy Director for Science who helped him with that.
Kostikin was a consummate Soviet bureaucrat, who saw everything through the prism of “self-serving”. To the end he was extremely slippery and unscrupulous. Following the principle “birds of feather flock together,” he quickly found a common language with Beresnev and became the next (and the worst) supervisor of the Analytical Department.
One day he called me in with Beresnev and declared that on the recommendation of my boss, he couldn’t approve a large scientific report of mine. The reason was that my work was outside the scope of the laboratory’s annual plan.
At that moment, I was overcome by a bold desire to disgrace this schemer. I put on an innocent face, and asked him if he had any other objections to my report, possibly connected with insufficient research work that had been done. Or could it be that the material was badly presented or carelessly arranged?
“What are you talking about, Vil Sultanovich? There are no remarks like that and there is no way there can be any, because everything is great in that respect,” exclaimed Kostikin. “The only problem is that I can’t let the report, which contains subject matter that is different from that of your department, pass to the scientific and technical library”, he added in an apologizing tone.
“Well, if my report had been stipulated in the annual plan, would you have submitted it?” I asked, pretending to be a babe in the woods.
“Without any doubt,” the deputy stated categorically.
“Can you give me your word on that?” I urged him on.
“If you want to, of course, I can,” he agreed in a patronizing manner.
“Then could you please give the order to have the laboratory’s annual plan brought here from storage in the First Department,” I insisted.
To my astonishment, Kostikin immediately called the Scientific and Technical Department (NTO) at the institute and asked them to send over the plan. A few minutes later, the supervisor of our NTO Department, Antonina Vitchenko, brought the department’s file, with the required documents. Immediately I found a clause in the plan, which spelled out this topic for future work in black and white, with a remark attached that it should be completed by submitting a scientific and technical report.
A profound silence set into the office. A few minutes passed, and Kostikin’s face dissolved into a foolish smile. He was at his wit’s end, and had no idea what to do next.
“Leonid Ivanovich. You know, a few years ago Vil Sultanovich was planning on leaving the party,” the lieutenant of the “barrage fire detachment” said, rushing to his buddy’s aid. Kostikin forgot to wipe the stupid smile from his face and tried to feign indignation, “You don’t say so! Really?”
It is true that I was suffering deeply from discontent, in 1973, both with my “discovery” that people’s money was being squandered on our activities, and with the general situation in the country. Political persecutions were becoming rampant. Once we were celebrating someone’s successful defense of their thesis in a restaurant, and I mentioned that I wanted to drop out of the party. But it went no further than that, as I decided against this desperate move.
Of course, Beresnev’s remark was not by chance, though I was sure that a serious investigation of any charges based on a conversation in a restaurant was not in the best interests of the institute’s top management.
“Exposing” a dissident at an institute like GOSNIIOKhT would damage the reputation of the director and other “responsible” people. That is why I indignantly asked to continue this conversation at a Party Committee meeting. No, Kostikin didn’t want that! Immediately he found a way out, and suggested that my report should be submitted to our secret library, without his or my boss’s signature.
“If you don’t agree to that, I will immediately call Leonid Aleksandrovich Sokolov (Deputy Director for the Security Regime) and ask him to destroy the report,” he added. There was nothing left, but to agree.
Beresnev also invented a fail-proof system for not letting me defend my own thesis. According to the regulations of the Higher Attestation Commission, candidates for both doctoral and master’s of science degrees were required to have positive references, signed by the institute’s power triangle – the director, the chairman of the trade union committee, and the secretary of the Party Committee. Also, in order to receive these recommendations, each candidate had to get signatures of the corresponding people at his or her departmental level. This could only be done when the applicant had no administrative or party reprimands.