Another serious problem that the American soldiers who have been to the Middle East may have been subjected to is the possibility of a deferred effect of low level exposure of chemical agents. When concentrations are low, the effect of these substances won’t be discovered during immediate exposure, as there are no immediate symptoms consistent with exposure to large concentrations.
The bosses of the military-chemical complex in Soviet Union were constantly pushing their scientists, aggressively giving the impression that chemical war could break out any day. The more successful were the negotiations in Geneva, the more intensive became the testing of new weapons carried out at the test site near Nukus. As a result, the Soviet army officially accepted “Novichok” as a weapon. This means that for the first time in the history of the chemical arms race, the Soviet Union took possession of its own chemical weapon, instead of borrowing one from a probable opponent. By that time the major parameters of the CWC had already been determined, and naturally “Novichok” wasn’t on the list of prohibited and controlled substances. If we consider those circumstances, we can better understand Director Petrunin’s boastful statement of about the “epoch-making success”.
Those were the circumstances under which I finally had to make a decision regarding my future.
And I made a resolute step…
CHAPTER 13
I’m Quitting the Party
On May 4th of 1990, I submitted my resignation notice to the Party Committee, officially leaving the C.P.S.U. I wrote that the C.P.S.U. is a criminal organization which doesn’t have the right to be reorganized, so I was officially severing all my ties with it. It was the first statement of this kind in the history of GOSNIIOKhT.
After this the events evolved rapidly. On June 7th of 1990 a decree was issued about transforming the PD ITR Department back into the PD ITR Sector, with fewer employees. I was transferred to the Laboratory for Elemental Analysis, in the capacity of “leading research scientist”. Yuri Skripkin became my immediate supervisor. He had appeared at the institute from time to time, but he was spending most of his time in Geneva at the negotiations. Skripkin was really a narrow-minded sycophant. Petrunin was well aware of my attitude, and he deliberately transferred me to Skripkin’s subdivision as retribution for my political activity.
By that time I had become one of the co-chairmen of the Democratic Russia Movement (DDR) at GOSNIIOKhT. Almost every day we issued our agitation leaflets and posted them in prominent places, so people would know the truth about the events that were taking place in the U.S.S.R. Often GOSNIIOKhT supporters of the DDR were sent, under our leadership, to different meetings and demonstrations, in support of the DDR and Boris Yeltsin, whom everybody loved at that time.
At the same time we started struggling to break up the C.P.S.U.’s power monopoly, and to achieve a majority in the workers’ councils. People were becoming bolder right before our eyes. They were no longer afraid of expressing their opinions. At one of the general party meetings that took place in March of 1990, contrary to the wishes of the Party Committee and the Board of Director, Edward Sarkisyan (another DDR activist), and I were elected co-chairmen. This was the first serious defeat for the backers of Communist power at GOSNIIOKhT. It was incredible for people to see the Director of GOSNIIOKhT and members of the Party Committee sitting in the hall, and not at the presidium as they were accustomed to. This might seem like an insignificant detail now, but at that time it showed that the power of the C.P.S.U. had cracked and you could successfully battle against it. Sarkisyan and I took turns presiding and gave the floor to the DDR supporters. They delivered speeches denouncing the C.P.S.U. and the corrupted authorities. Still, at that time it was still an internal party struggle, and it became increasingly more intolerable for me to keep my membership.
After work I often went to the country in Luzhniki for meetings of the supporters of democratic reforms. You could see anyone there – newly hatched anarchists with their shocking black flags, monarchists of every stripe, and even ultra-revolutionary democrats, as well as those who supported the separation of the Baltic republics from the U.S.S.R.
Investigators T. Gdlyan and V. Ivanov were the most popular figures in the country at that time. The authorities persecuted them for their excessive zeal in investigating the corruption of the party elite in Uzbekistan. At that time we saw those people who would be at the helm of Russia a few years later. Yuri Afansiev and Gleb Yakunin were the most popular leaders of the DDR.
Almost every day, we watched clashes on television between those who backed the power elite and the supporters of democratic reforms in the Supreme Soviet of the U.S.S.R. and in the Congress of People’s Deputies of the U.S.S.R. Everywhere you could feel the excitement. People were getting much more involved in politics, and the country was on the threshold of serious changes. There was change in many people’s internal lives everywhere, even at the secret “Post Office Boxes” like GOSNIIOKhT. However, the management of these establishments was deeply ultra-conservative. They owed far too much to the C.P.S.U. and its functionaries. They had received their unlimited power over scientists and others, thanks only to the party. Not one of GOSNIIOKhT’s bosses could work as a scientist any longer, and that’s why these people feared any changes like the plague. For this reason the supporters of DDR at the institute had become the personal enemies of the management, not just their ideological opponents.
When I began working with the DDR, I clearly understood what the consequences might be. I could be dismissed from my position. Still, my sense of civic responsibility had finally matured and crystallized by that time, and that didn’t allow me any compromise.
Actually, I was pleased when people at GOSNIIOKhT expressed their sympathy towards me, as someone who had sacrificed his position for the sake of progress and democratization of the country.
Little changed after our department broke up. The director of GOSNIIOKhT promised that I would hold onto all the equipment and laboratory rooms, but as a formality I would be moved to a different subdivision. Frankly, I didn’t really believe this, because I knew that Petrunin was a cowardly person, easily changing his mind if something even hypothetically threatened his position. If he received an order from the higher authorities, he did everything to carry it out.
That is exactly how it happened. Back in the autumn of 1989, there were attempts to tear my group apart. A lot of people were willing to have our group transferred to their subdivisions. Most of them were interested in our equipment, because at that time we had the most modern chromatographs, a chromatomass-spectrometer, and other equipment for physical chemical analysis. In order to preserve the group, I even agreed to the Director’s offer to transfer me to a new enterprise with collective ownership, which was set up by Igor Pronin, a former secretary of the Party Committee, under the guidance of GOSNIIOKhT’s top management. At that time these enterprises had just started sprouting up. In spite of my infamous attitude toward Party Committee secretaries, Pronin agreed to cooperate with me, because he was well aware of our capabilities and how we had developed analytical methods for ecological purposes. This was the area he was planning to work in with his new enterprise. Soon we established connections with the Moscow Committee for Ecology, and we received numerous requests for investigations of different ecological problems in the city districts.