These ideas became really clear to me when I saw the formula of a new pesticide, which was similar to the formula of agent A-232 on a poster, which was hanging on the wall opposite the Directorate. Boris Martynov who was standing nearby boasted that he was “covering his product” in this way. The poster with the formulas of pesticides developed at GOSNIIOKhT and other institutes was meant as a widespread advertisement of the institute’s products. At the same time, the idea was for specialists to “become accustomed” to them as to civilian products.
Quite accidentally, I also soon learned about a strange but significant incident, the meaning of which became clear to me later on.
The typing bureau where secret materials were printed or taped didn’t accept a report prepared by our department on the problems of the PD ITR. The explanation was that the bureau was urgently retyping all technical documentation of the Novocheboksary plant that produced the chemical agent known as Substance 33. It turned out that the report was altered to pretend that they were producing VX gas. This was funny and sad, and I had no idea how they could possibly play the international inspectors for such fools. They were supposed to come to the plant and make sure that a specific chemical agent was being destroyed, not some theoretical agent. Apparently there was something in the strategy of negotiations that allowed them to hope that this trick might work.
At that time I didn’t understand the main idea behind this whole undertaking. Later on when I was released from the KGB’s Lefortovo prison after my first arrest, I called my friend, the late Leonid Lipasov, and he told me about a mistake that I had made in my article “A Poisoned Policy” (Moscow News from September 16, 1992). Only then did I realize how far-sighted the masters of the military-chemical complex had been. In my article I said that General Kuntsevich and others had received the Lenin prize in 1991 for the development of binary weapons based on a new substance. Actually, that turned out not to be the case. Instead, they got the prize for binary weapons based on the well-known Novocheboksary agent Substance 33! The tricky juggling and revision of documents from the Novocheboksary plant was a part of that whole operation.
It would be naive to assume that the generals from the military industrial complex (VPK) did all this just to receive prizes. Everything was done according to a plan that had been elaborated beforehand, a plan that was coordinated with the strategy for conducting negotiations on the framework of the CWC. In the summer of 1995, I met with Amy Smithson a Senior Fellow and now PhD, who was working at the Henry L. Stimson Center in Washington, D.C. I was preparing an article for a collection to be published. In my article, I alleged that, according to the Wyoming Memorandum, the parties were supposed to exchange the formulas of their chemical agents, subject to destruction at the second stage of the implementation of this accord. The well known American, Professor Matthew Messelson rebuked me for an inaccuracy. Actually, the parties were supposed to exchange this information three months before signing the CWC, but Russia didn’t come forth with this information.
The main task of the PD ITR Department was made very specific then. It was necessary to keep all new projects a secret. In order to accomplish this, we had to quickly develop more sensitive techniques for the determination of traces quantities of chemical agents in the waste water and air.
In 1989 this work was accelerated because American specialists were soon supposed to visit a number of chemical establishments connected with the development and production of chemical agents. A committee headed by Guskov was formed to prepare for this, and I became a member of this committee.
The necessary techniques were to be developed on an emergency schedule, over the course of about two months. I asserted that it was impossible to develop techniques that were a hundred times more sensitive than the current ones, in such a short period of time. I was puzzled why there should be such a rush before the arrival of specialists, if they were not going to take samples of the water and air. With quite a serious air, Guskov explained that when the foreign specialists came into the room they could take a “swab” from the surface of the wall or floor with their handkerchiefs and then “decipher” the new compounds at home. I made an effort not to burst out laughing. That was how our heads imaged the work of foreign technical intelligence! Science couldn’t and still can’t disclose secrets in such a fantastic way.
According to the “wise” plan of our bosses, all imported equipment had to be removed from the rooms where the Americans were supposed to visit. But that was all that could be done to prepare for the meeting.
Additionally, Guskov explained that Americans were also supposed to visit Workshop 34 of the Volgograd scientific industrial company “Khimprom” that had produced soman and sarin before 1987. I didn’t understand why I had to take care that there was no agent A-230 in the air around this workshop. The deputy director said that behind the fence of Workshop 34 there was a unit of the experimental plant of the Volgograd subsidiary of GOSNIIOKhT, which produced this chemical agent…
CHAPTER 12
The Torment of Insight
Our operations for protecting the new developments of GOSNIIOKhT didn’t correspond with the changes that were taking place in our country at that time, or with the foreign policy directed at making the world a safer place. It turned out that along with hundreds of other scientists, I had participated in a vast conspiracy against the future Chemical Weapons Convention, repeating the role played by the captive scientist from the Stalinist era.
In September of 1994, the management of GOSNIIOKhT filed a lawsuit against me and demanded 33 million rubles, claiming that my public speeches and articles in the press had caused moral and material damages to the institute. The management of the institute accused me of calling GOSNIIOKhT a “sharashka”, which is the term coined by Aleksander Solzhenitsyn to mean a jail/science-research institute. This was blatant hypocrisy on their part, as they knew quite well that during the war and even for a long time after that, there was a jail for political prisoners who were chemists at the institute. The prisoner/scientists were escorted to their work in the laboratories and experimental units from their jail cells. Often these people were selfless and very talented.[71] Isn’t it the pinnacle of cynicism or even a sin of some sort to call these people “employees of GOSNIIOKhT”? Petrunin did exactly that when he included the victims of this Stalinist labor camp in the list of employees of his institute, in an article he wrote about the 80th Anniversary of GOSNIIOKhT.[72]
Later on, scientists at GOSNIIOKhT continued the sad tradition established by these selfless researchers, in working conditions that were very far from safe. Speaking of “sharashka”, I have always been talking about the conditions of labor and “the regime” at that institute, and not the scientists, as among them there were and still are outstanding specialists, such as Professor Andrei Tomilov.
At the same time, it was inexplicable from the point of view of the most basic human rights, that people who were working in the field of chemical weapons in the U.S.S.R. were working outside of the law. It’s as though they didn’t exist. For example, when someone started talking about raising scientists’ salaries or pensions at least up to the level of miners or other people working in dangerous professions, the administration literally replied as follows: “You see. We don’t exist for the state. It has never admitted and it never will acknowledge that our country develops and produces chemical weapons.” As a result, the bosses concluded it was impossible to raise these questions at all.
72
Victor Petrunin, “To the 80th anniversary of GNTC NII Organic Chemistry and Technology – GOSNIIOKhT”,