Unfortunately, my dismissal coincided with the beginning of Yegor Gaidar’s reforms in Russia. So, overnight I lost all my savings. These reforms turned my family and me into paupers. I started struggling for survival, which wasn’t easy because I had two sons, 5-year old Sultan and 13-year-old Iskander.
The Gaidar reform wasn’t a “shock therapy” as it was dubbed then. It proved to be just another revolutionary attack in the history of Russia. As always, the top leaders hoped to solve problems that had existed for centuries, in one round. In principle, I have always supported reforms in Russia, but they shouldn’t be so destructive. The authors of the “reform” acted absolutely brutally and inhumanely, even by Russian standards.
Nikita Khrushchev was a cynical and self-confident Bolshevik reformer. However, when he saw that he could no longer extort people by making them sign up for state loans “to restore the national economy,” he abolished those loans. At the same time he suspended annual payments on them, but he promised to resume the payments 15 years later. From the psychological point of view, he was right. The newly hatched reformers were not willing to do even this, and they promised nothing to the people they had robbed.
Was it so difficult to try and develop a long-term plan to compensate people’s savings by selling state property, natural gas, and resources? I am certain it could have been done, but the “reformers” led by Gaidar, were people with the same Bolshevik background. Bolsheviks never thought about people. They have always considered citizens to be “small screws” in the huge wheel of the state machinery. The very fact that they studied in the U.S. doesn’t mean anything. They crossed the ocean, but they came back the same specialists in the economy of developed socialism as they had been before.
Currently, Russia is paying for the great conceit and arrogance of these “specialists”, and the future of the development of democracy in this country remains in question, because of their mistakes.
At that time I couldn’t afford to indulge in similar reflections. I started working in commercial organizations that found practical application for scientific and technological achievements, but these attempts were also fruitless. All those commercial organizations quickly switched over to the simple operations of “buy and sell”, because at that time only those activities allowed them to survive.
CHAPTER 15
Challenging Poisoned Policies
The KGB Arrests Me
Since there was no public reaction to my article “Inversion”, the feeling of dissatisfaction haunted me. From conversations with my colleagues, I realized that they were continuing to test chemical weapons at the Nukus site, even though Uzbekistan had declared independence. This was completely absurd and beyond my comprehension. The leadership of the VPK was wasting money on testing chemical weapons that no one needed, while a lot of military people were being laid off, industrial production was plummeting at a breakneck speed, and people were doomed to struggle for their basic survival.
I was disappointed with the results of my first public statement, so I didn’t write a second one. I thought that times were too tough for people to get interested in the problems of chemical weapons. The country had other business to attend to.
I felt that way until one day when I accidentally stumbled across an article devoted to chemical weapons, in the weekly Sovershenno Sekretno (translates as “Top Secret”) written by Lev Fedorov.[80] The author was a dilettante and there were a lot of mistakes. I immediately realized, judging from the text, that Fedorov had only a vague conception about the fundamental nature of the problem, because he wasn’t a specialist in this field.
In any case, the problem was raised again and people began to call me to ask what I thought about it. As a specialist and a person who had put forth considerable effort to create this evil, I understood that I had no right to keep silent. I asked myself, “If not me, then who would speak as a professional to prevent the next deception?” There were and there are scientists in the VPK who are unquestionably more talented and knowledgeable than I am. However, I knew that none of them would ever risk speaking publicly on the problem of chemical weapons, because they had already become part of the totalitarian system.
I asked for Lev Fedorov’s telephone number in the editor’s office of Sovershenno Sekretno, called him, and we agreed to meet in my apartment. Our meeting took place in the middle of August. Fedorov had graduated from Kostroma Military Chemical School, but he had only a weak notion about the problems of chemical weapons. I also had the impression that he was a bit too curious. Probably I told him too much, for example about the essential difference between the new chemical agents and the ones that were known up until that time. We agreed that each of us would prepare for future publication our own version of an article on the problem of chemical weapons in Russia. Then we would work on an agreeable coordinated text and would try to publish the material in one of the popular papers.
Two days later I wrote an article called “The Chemical Sharashka in Moscow Expects Help from America.” The day after that, I met with my co-author in the subway and handed him my version of the article. However, Fedorov didn’t bring his version, and I wasn’t very happy about that. On the other hand, I realized that he simply had nothing to write about.
At the end of August and in the beginning of September, Fedorov had to participate in a conference in Finland. When he returned, he called and said that he had reached an agreement to publish the article in the weekly paper Moscow News. We met again shortly after that, and I handed him the manuscript of a different article, one about the ecological aspects of chemical weapons production at the Volgograd plant. This plant had been constructed with materials and equipment brought in from Germany after the Second World War.
This factory was created so that we had something to poison our former allies (like the United States) with, because the U.S.S.R. was already preparing for a war with them. Later that plant started producing soman as well. GOSNIIOKhT opened a branch there for experimental industrial production, and at first it produced Substance 33, then “Novichok,” and components of binary weapons. For many years the plant had also been a “training school” for top managers for the VPK. I wrote about this in my article. But this article was never published independently. Later, after I was released from Lefortovo Prison, I was surprised to read it in “The Bulletin of the Social and Ecological Union”. It was published in the form of an interview, which I allegedly gave along with Lev Fedorov. However, no such interview ever took place.
In September, Fedorov called to tell me that he had arranged for me to meet Will Englund, a journalist for the Baltimore Sun. The interpreter was Andrei Mironov, a famous dissident, who had served a prison term for anti-Soviet propaganda. I told Will Englund what I had written about in my article for Moscow News. I had the impression that he had a sharp mind and could quickly grasp the essence of the problem. However, it bothered me a little that Fedorov obstinately tried to impose a discussion of dioxins in Ufa on Englund, and that distracted us from our main issue for a long time.