I will always remember the case of the late chief of the Department “D” laboratory, Nikolai Ostapchuk. He was very fond of drinking, even at work. Thanks to the alcohol, or perhaps out of an excessive desire to work with secret documents, Nikolai handled them as ordinary papers and carried them home in his briefcase. The KGB didn’t take any measures, even though he fell down drunk several times and slept somewhere in the street, once in a “perehod” (pedestrian underpass) not far from GOSNIIOKhT. One day Ostapchuk suddenly died, and his wife came to GOSNIIOKhT, bearing the top-secret papers safely back to the Department for the Security Regime. Many people in the management of this department were not pleased at all. It seems it would have been better for them if those papers had just disappeared without a trace. Then it would have been possible to hush up the incident without any consequences, but Ostapchuk’s widow didn’t ask for the help of his friends from the directorate, to make up for her late husband’s blunder. This was the way she took revenge on his drinking buddies.
The control over the safety of chemical agents was organized absolutely perfunctorily. First, it was carried out by employees of the Department for the Security Regime, who didn’t have even a primitive notion about chemistry. Usually part of the staff of this department was composed of representatives of the working class, like Boris Churkov and Vyacheslav Malashkin, who in this way or otherwise became involved as KGB informers.
Secondly, control was maintained by judging the difference between how much of a substance was received and what was used up. The daily expenditure of chemicals was recorded only by the person who actually did the work. Generally speaking, he could use up nothing and later dispose of the chemicals at his own discretion. It was only important to log an entry in the registrar journal. In order to get extra compensation for working with hazardous materials, an employee had to submit a report, accounting for the number of days he or she worked with chemical agents. Often scientific assistants, who hadn’t accumulated enough hazard days, simply made false entries in their registers about the work they presumably conducted. To protect this fraud, they just destroyed the chemicals for the experiments in one go, according to procedures described in special manuals.
Controllers from the Department for the Security Regime could force the scientific assistants to weigh the ampoules with chemical agents in their presence, but it was all the same to them what was in those ampoules. So a potential plotter could do anything he or she wanted with the chemicals. Unfortunately, control at the institute is the same today as it was before.
Probably there were very few workers at GOSNIIOKhT, to whom the ensigns from the militarized security guard hadn’t offered their services. I personally knew a few of these lads, who would offer to take anything you wanted out from the territory of GOSNIIOKhT, for a few hundred milliliters of alcohol. They were very conscientious about keeping their word, carrying out different construction materials, paint, iron rods, and other items for building country houses near Moscow. These guys didn’t care what was taken out with their direct participation, although they knew that the stuff they took out had been stolen. Actually, the theft of state or collective farm property wasn’t considered a criminal offense in those days in the U.S.S.R. Only those who had nothing to steal at work didn’t do it. It was very difficult to qualify this as theft, because the Bolshevik state had been constantly robbing and plundering people for several generations, to the extent that the state made it practically impossible for people to survive without theft. So theft didn’t cause indignation, and almost no one reported it to the authorities. In this sense, the Soviet people were really united because they were entirely linked by a collective cover-up.
Even in the prewar years, people were dying at GOSNIIOKhT from chemical agents. Healthy young men left home from the villages which were subject to total collectivization, escaping for the cities, including Moscow. According to one veteran, these poor devils were ready for any work, even at the chemical “sharashka”. The strongest and healthiest ones were urged to participate in testing the effects of chemical agents. For a few dozen rubles, some careless sturdy youngsters agreed to become guinea pigs. They didn’t suspect what kind of torture they would have to endure, before they went to a better world or became hopeless lifelong cripples, for the sake of the crazy reckless plots of the bosses of the military-chemical complex.
After my presentations about the dangerous concentrations of chemical agents in Volgograd to Victor Petrunin in October 1988, the Council on Technical Counterintelligence of the Ministry of Chemical Industry invited me to a meeting. Sergei Golubkov was the chairman of this council. I presented my report there, with all the data collected in the Volgograd NPO “Khimprom” about my findings of the unacceptable concentrations of sarin and soman in the nearby “White Sea” and in the air. After that there was a profound silence. No questions and no comments. Only GOSNIIOKhT’s Deputy Director Konstantin Guskov replied, “Vil Sultanovich did this entire job without the endorsement of GOSNIIOKhT, and his presentation is purely an unfinished scientific experiment, which should be checked and verified.” After that Golubkov gave a long speech about the importance of technical counterintelligence work, and then he lectured the audience about how to determinate traces of our newly developed substances in waste water and air, with the help of advice given by Academician Nikolai Enikolopov who had never worked a single day in this area in his life.
Some people tried to comfort me after that meeting, saying “Be happy, Vil Sultanovich! Ten years ago, they would have sent you to the camps for that, not quietly home.” It was true, but I understood entirely that my work with foreign technical counterintelligence was fiction. It was just one of a variety of Soviet deceptions, because you could easily find soman near the plant in Volgograd. That is, if you were not too lazy to look for it. Moreover, it made me feel like I was sitting at same table with ne’er-do-wells, who were incapable of doing any scientific work. I felt like I was there just to provide them with cover for their crimes against innocent people.
It was a well known fact that these people were really corrupted criminals. Even though Arvid Pelshe was a member of the Politbureau of the Central Committee of the CPSU, he published a report in the party magazine “Party Life” in December of 1987 about the investigation of the criminal actions of these people.[75]
At the same time, these people were continuing with their deceptive games, pretending that they were the real protectors of secrets of Soviet military complex. I already wrote about how they ordered me to develop super-sensitive methods for the determination of Novichok agents in waste water and air. Meanwhile, all the wastes from the destruction of chemical agents (including A-230 and A-232) that were used in laboratory experiments, were packaged in steel barrels, which were shipped by railway to Shikhany. There they were dumped into a hole in an open area next to the forest, where people gathered berries and mushrooms. Wasn’t it ironic that my department was ordered to determinate traces of these substances at the level of 1 ppt (part per trillion) within two months?
75
Director of Volgograd NPO Khimprom V.V. Pozdnev along with his accomplices Sergei Golubkov, Igor Gabov and Konstantin Guskov organized a lucrative underground business which produced civilian wares that were sold in stores. Cash from this scheme was flowing directly into a huge safe installed in the office of Director Pozdnev. They spent part of this money for providing “a good time” to selected people from Moscow in a special resort built for these purposes. An investigation was started, but only the head bookkeeper was sentenced to prison, and Pozdnev died of a heart attack.