They started hanging these reprimands on me for every possible reason. For example, my junior assistant Boris Dubin once went to join the civilian militia squad after work. He got drunk, and got into a fight with someone.
“Vil Mirzayanov is to blame,” they decided at the departmental party meeting, on the recommendation of its head, Beresnev. I received a party reprimand “for poor emphasis on personal upbringing”. Consequently, I could receive no positive character references during the half year period after that.
The reprimands continued for the next five years, until one day I publicly announced that I never, under any circumstances, intended to defend any thesis. It seemed to me that this slightly placated my tormenter. However, just to make sure that I had given up on this idea completely, he decided to deprive me of my group and all my equipment.
This is when I unexpectedly received support from two people who had long sympathized with me, Professor Semeyon Dubov, the head of the Physical Chemistry Department, and Professor Vladimir Kurochkin, the head of the laboratory within Dubov’s department.
Dubov graduated from Moscow State University, and before the war began he was sent to one of defense plants producing tetraethyl lead, a highly poisonous compound which increases the quality of gasoline. Professor Dubov didn’t like to talk about that terrible plant. People often died there from poisoning, and the number of deaths was comparable to casualties on the battlefront.
Thanks to his good health and more than a bit of luck, Dubov survived in that Hell. When he returned to Moscow, he started working in the military-chemical complex. In the early 1950s, when Jews were persecuted in the USSR, Dubov had to go to Dzerzhinsk and work at the branch there of Post Office Box 702 (GOSNIIOKhT).
In the early 1960s, he was allowed to return to work at the headquarters in Moscow, where he soon became head of the Physical Chemistry Department.
I believe that Professor Dubov, like no one else, was the right person for his job –the head of a scientific division. Amazingly lively and in good shape with handsome features, he was always polite and attentive. He quickly won the sympathy of anyone he was talking with. Although sometimes Dubov could get carried away by some unrealistic ideas, he was very pragmatic for the most part, and always very careful.
Once he confessed to me that sometimes he was mainly concerned with running the trade union, party, and numerous other meetings for our team. These meetings were considered important elements of the so called “personal upbringing work”, which was used as a tool to dupe the entire population of our country, in the spirit of totalitarianism.
“While I’ve been working at GOSNIIOKhT,” Dubov continued, “I’ve never heard that anyone was punished for negligence or any shortcomings in scientific research, but a lot of people were punished for underestimating personal upbringing within the team.”
Since Dubov was a good organizer, he quickly attracted many talented young scientists, and made sure his department was supplied with modern scientific equipment. He created a notable team of scientists with the widest possible variety of interests, given the situation at that time. There was not one area of physical-chemical research that did not fall within the domain of his department’s development. They conducted fundamental research on the newly synthesized compounds, using methods of nuclear magnetic resonance and electromagnetic resonance, infrared and ultra-violet spectroscopy, X-ray structural analysis, mass spectroscopy, and chromatomass-spectroscopy. They studied the kinetics of reactions between physiologically active compounds and biochemical substrates, and the methods of quantum chemistry were applied to develop the preliminary forecasting of perspective chemical compounds. The results of these studies were applied to different works, on a modern level. Since there was such a wide range of research, they had to divide up the responsibilities of the team leaders and more than 160 people who worked under them.
Professor Dubov asked Vladimir Kurochkin to be his aide. Kurochkin came to GOSNIIOKhT from the Science Research Institute at the General Intelligence Directorate (GRU) of the Soviet Army. In early 1960s, this institute was reorganized and many employees from there came to work at GOSNIIOKhT.
When the war began, Kurochkin volunteered to go to the front, where he was badly wounded. I accidentally learned that he had received a lot of awards, which were evidence of his bravery on the battlefront. Kurochkin was gentle by nature, always friendly and quite talented. When he was talking with someone, he quickly grasped the essence of any problem, and did everything he could to make sure that person he was conversing with felt comfortable, and did not fear being misunderstood. He had excellent skills as an organizer but, he was also a man of his times. He didn’t mind wasting his time and energy at the endless meetings of the Party Committee, the trade union committee, and the board of directors of the institute. Kurochkin understood that if he avoided these meetings, he wouldn’t be able to provide his team with state-of-the-art equipment, to raise their wages, or to promote talented young people. Dubov and Kurochkin made a good partnership, campaigning for the development of the Physical Chemistry Department.
At first Director Patrushev ignored my requests and wouldn’t let me move to another laboratory. However, Kurochkin’s diplomatic talents worked wonders and the issue of my transfer was settled quickly. Of course, there were good reasons for that. Shortly before my arrival at the Physical Chemistry Department, a senior staff scientist there, Yevgeny Bogomazov, began research aimed at identifying chemical agents which could break through the filter of a gas-mask.
Bogomazov was a graduate of and then a candidate for a master’s degree at the Military Academy of Chemical Defense (MACD).[47] He had just completed his dissertation work in General Mikhael Dubinin’s department, and his topic was developing GC methods for evaluating gas-mask reliability. Yevgeny was a typical product of his military educational establishment.
I hope that many of my good friends will forgive me for saying this, but I think that the majority of the MACD graduates are notable for their adventurous and easy approach to all types of problem solving. However, when they use this approach for solving scientific problems, the matter often goes belly-up. Most of them force their way into key positions using all their efforts, and they have no scruples, using people, using bootlicking, hypocrisy and betrayal of their former friends, to achieve their goals. My words may seem harsh and judgmental, but my encounters with people from the MACD have brought me to this sad conclusion. I would advise everyone who has anything to do with MACD graduates (with a few exceptions) to check all of their proposals and research results ten times over, before accepting them as truth.
I don’t mean to imply by this description that Yevgeny Bogomazov did not have any talent. Mostly he excelled in his self-aggrandizement, which tainted everything he did. After Bogomazov received his master’s degree, he got a job in Englin’s laboratory, but he saw no career prospects there, so he quickly moved on to the Physical Chemistry Department.
In a short time, Bogomazov managed to captivate the head of the department with his ideas. Very soon, Bogomazov and two of his junior colleagues, Dmitri Zalepugin and Aleksander Dmitriev[48] (both MACD graduates), made a discovery that all the military chemists of the world could only dream of.
They discovered that the thionic analogs of soman and sarin, CH3P=S(F)-OR, where R is the alcoxy radical – could break through an army gas-mask filter. Then these compounds, which have a comparatively low toxicity, would turn back into their oxygen analogs, CH3P=O(F)-OR (chemical agents) once they had passed through the filter.
48
Later he was transferred to the KGB and even participated in the search of the apartment of Lev Fedorov, my co-author of the article “A Poisoned Policy”.