It took me just one evening to write an article. I quickly typed it and took it to the office of the editor of the popular Moscow newspaper Kuranty. There I met Constantine Katanyan, a young and quite well known journalist. The article seemed interesting to him and he promised to publish it without any changes. It was published in Kuranty on October 10th, 1991.[78] When I was writing the article I knew that according to the Wyoming Memorandum (an accord which the U.S. and the USSR signed in 1989), the parties had to give each other information about all the compounds that could be classified as chemical weapons. It was clear to me that the U.S.S.R. had no intention of honestly meeting its commitments. This is why I concluded my article with an analogy which compared the actions of the leadership of the military-chemical complex with the behavior of a chemical compound capable of inversion, when it changes from one form to another, without changing its chemical composition.
When the article was published, I was still on vacation. According to witnesses, my article made a stunning impression on the directors of the institute. The Science Council of GOSNIIOKhT was urgently called together to discuss it, but they failed to pass the necessary resolution that would condemn the article. That was not because many people objected to it, but because they had no idea how the decision should be worded. Also, it was a little awkward to make a decision about my article in my absence.
The institute’s top leaders wrote to the KGB of course, demanding that I should be immediately arrested for my impertinence. Although I don’t know why, criminal proceedings were not brought against me at that time. Many people, including me, supposed that this was connected with the shock that the KGB experienced after the failure of the August coup, which ended with the arrest of its bosses, including Vladimir Kryuchkov, chief of the Chekists. It seemed that in our country, the era of Democracy and Glasnost had finally started to take root.
Later it was proven that we had been sorely mistaken. At that time, there were no formal grounds for prosecution and exemplary punishment. Back in November of 1989, the U.S.S.R. Committee of Constitutional Supervision at the Congress of People’s Deputies, chaired by Sergei Alekseev, issued a decree that declared all normative acts relating to human rights to be null and void unless they were published openly in the press within three months. Naturally, nobody decided to publish such acts openly. So, all the lists of state secrets simply ceased to exist legally. The Belovezhskaya Decision on the dissolution of the U.S.S.R. confirmed the legality of the acts adopted by the U.S.S.R. Supreme Soviet and, consequently, this resolution of the Committee of Constitutional Supervision.
My article was the first of its kind, and it threw out a challenge to the powerful military-industrial complex (VPK). But, unfortunately, it didn’t reverberate either in our country or abroad. Maybe people didn’t pay much attention to it because of the dramatic events at that time connected with the break-up of the U.S.S.R. Everything faded to insignificance against this backdrop. It’s a pity my warning call went unanswered. I hoped to hear something about the VPK and my article in the programs of “The Voice of America”, the BBC, and “Liberty,” but there was nothing.
Still, my article pushed the KGB to issue a new decree about the protection of state secrets, which President Boris Yeltsin signed on January 14, 1992. The decree was secretly adopted and it wasn’t published, so the general public knew nothing about it. I only learned about it a year later when I was already sitting in jail. This decree reinstated all the invalidated normative acts and lists of state secrets. In this way, the president illegally cancelled the resolution of the Committee of Constitutional Supervision.
Once again the Chekists had their hands on one of the major instruments of total control over everyone whose profession was connected with the VPK clan.
When I returned to work after my vacation in October of 1991, I faced a vindictive reaction from the bosses on account of my article. I wasn’t given a pass, so I couldn’t enter the institute grounds. The guards on duty showed me an empty space on the rack for passes. Then I called the Department for the Security Regime, which was responsible for this system. They explained that my pass had been removed by order of Aleksander Martynov, Deputy Director for Security. When I called him, he gave no explanation, and said that my pass would be returned immediately. I entered the institute grounds and went to my room. It was open but people from a different department were working there. I realized they had taken away my workplace and my equipment. It was very unpleasant, but to be honest, I didn’t expect anything else.
I told myself that this was just my first reward. The second one would be my dismissal. However, I had no regrets.
Soon my friends from the former Coordination Committee of the DDR movement came to see me and started suggesting different ways to regain what I had lost. I refused because I realized that it would be a nerve-wracking waste of time. So I went to the institute library to read scientific journals. I ran into several people I knew on my way there, and everybody behaved differently. Some people turned away and pretended they didn’t notice me. But there were people who silently came up to me, shook my hand, and quickly left. And I felt very good about that. I realized that many people who I respected and appreciated approved of my article. Certainly they were afraid, but that was only natural. If I had already spent years of serious consideration, agonizing over my role in this criminal enterprise, working on the development of chemical agents, then how could I expect people who read my article to immediately re-evaluate their lives and their careers?
Someone should be the first and bear his cross, even if he were threatened. I was even more certain of this after I ran into Victor Zhakov, the former chief engineer at GOSNIIOKhT, who literally hissed at me, “What are you doing? You’ll leave people without bread and butter! Be assured, they’ll run you through the meat grinder and dump you into the sewer!”
I knew that if they decided to do away with me, there was hardly any way to avoid it. However, I chose to make no changes in my daily routine. In the evening I went for walks outside with my kids, and I went to different meetings of the city DDR organization. I also continued jogging in a park that was not far from my house. By that time I was already an avid jogger with more than fifteen years of experience. Running always calmed me down and helped me remain optimistic, although it was becoming more difficult to be optimistic when there was a general depression in the country, and a scientist couldn’t count on normal work. My uncertain situation without a workplace and equipment couldn’t stay that way forever. The only thing that saved me at that time was a little work in the evenings and on my days off. I analyzed environmental tests at one of the cooperative societies and was paid a little for that. However, soon I lost this work too, because the cooperative had no more work orders.
The DDR activists from GOSNIIOKhT still hoped that they could change the situation. According to a provision in effect at that time, the director was supposed to be elected at a conference of employees, and the council of this group had to work out a contract with him. Only after that, could the contract be approved by the ministry. Petrunin, however, decided not to tempt his fate by trusting it to a meeting of the employees’ collective. So he just ordered each subdivision to elect a representative from their ranks. Then he would convene a meeting of these representatives and finish his business there. However, the elections of the representatives showed that Petrunin had slim chances. He then called upon the members of the old council who were mostly “his people” and they obediently reappointed Petrunin the director.