Vladimir was a courageous person, and he didn’t hesitate in the face of impending danger. He was driven by his adamant belief that it was necessary to take such actions for the good of the people.
In the middle of January 1993, a hearing was held at the RF Supreme Soviet on the problem of destroying the stockpiles of chemical weapons. It took place in the While House on the Krasnopresnenskaya Embankment, which less than a year later would be shot up by tanks, driving out coup supporters headed up by adventurous Russian Vice President Aleksander Rutskoi, and the Chairman of the Supreme Soviet and specialist in Marxist political economy, Ruslan Khasbulatov.
I went to this hearing at the invitation of Valeri Menshikov, Deputy Chairman of the Committee for Ecology, with whom I had established good relations. There I met many active participants in the ecological movement who were worried that chemical weapons would be destroyed without the necessary safety precautions.
Vladimir Petrenko stood out among this group because of his picturesque beard. It turned out that he had served in Military Unit 61469 in Shikhany. There the young officer, along with others, was recruited as a guinea pig for the testing of chemical weapons. These experiments were very cheap for the military unit. The officers participating in the experiment each received an insignificant bonus. However, Petrenko almost totally lost his health due to his patriotic impulse, so he was transferred to the reserve. His attempts to receive some kind of compensation resulted in his being charged with slandering the chiefs of the military unit. For a long time he couldn’t even receive his small disability allowance. Attempts to address the public were even more costly. His wife was fired from her job at the same military unit, and they started to evict the Petrenko family from their apartment in Shikhany. Later Petrenko’s “case” became widely known,[155] and he devoted the rest of his life to struggling against the barbaric destruction of chemical weapons at the military test site.
All of the official speakers at the meeting appeared completely insipid and couldn’t bring any arguments in support of their projects, other than promising “we will do it.” Critical statements by activists from the ecological movement, who arrived from the regions where chemical weapons were stockpiled, added fuel to the fire. They were talking about inadequate storage conditions and barbaric methods of destruction that threatened the safety and health of the surrounding populations.
For example, activists from Novocheboksarsk criticized the military-chemical complex’s project for destroying stockpiles of chemical weapons at the chemical plant that used to produce chemical agents. The plant’s proximity to the city’s densely populated districts was already the reason for the deterioration of the health of the local people, and the generals wanted to keep poisoning people, while destroying the stores of chemical weapons. Even from a purely psychological standpoint, people didn’t want to hear that chemical weapons would be destroyed near their homes. However, this never occurred to the functionaries from the Committee for Conventional Problems.
Despite the ongoing investigation and endless interrogations, I tried to participate in various public events as much as possible. In particular, I went to the conference “The KGB Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow” organized by Sergei Grigoriyants. The conference participants, including many former dissidents who had endured all the horrors of the Soviet concentration camps, greeted me warmly, saying that they supported me in my struggle against the KGB. Of course I was very glad that these people considered me an insider.
How the Tatars Became the “Enemies of Democracy”
In 1992 a ruthless and bitter campaign unfolded in the Russian press and television against the Republic of Tatarstan, when it announced its intention of conducting a referendum on the independence of the republic. At this time the Tatar Nation saw the prospect of freedom somewhere on the horizon for the first time in many centuries of slavery. Many representatives of our nation were optimistic about it, but by the end of the 20th century, the Tatar Nation found itself in a very thorny situation. Lenin’s national policy wasn’t the only reason for the degradation of my people as these “democrats” were saying. They claimed that 70 years of the sins of Communism were to blame for everything. Mostly the problems of the Tatar Nation were the result of imperial policy aimed at forced Russification of their colonies and the ruthless plunder of the Tatar national resources – namely oil.
Oddly enough, the U.S.S.R. Communist leaders managed to use the UN to protect the integrity of their colonial empire, while they were demagogically struggling to deprive their Western partners (England, France, Belgium, etc.) of their own colonies. A certain peculiar but interesting thesis was invented and circulated stating that colonies were only those (conquered) territories that were located across the ocean. When even the “Slavic brothers” (Belarus, Ukraine) bordering on the Motherland managed to escape from it, the partial break-up in 1991 of the Russian Empire (called the U.S.S.R.) ended all the demagogic arguments in the international arena overnight. However, this collapse didn’t solve the major problem of Russia – the decolonization of the colonies that in their time weren’t able to receive the official status of “union republics.” I should note that the absence of this legal status – and the preservation of the colonial regime – doesn’t make any more legal sense than it makes sense to think that colonies are only to be found across the ocean. The US Congress approved Public Law 86-90 “Captive Nations Week” on July 17, 1959, which pointed out that among the captured nations of Russia were the people of Idel-Ural who are mostly Tatars and Bashkirs. The awakening of the Tatar national identity after the collapse of the totalitarian regime pushed the Tatars to struggle for basic freedom, which mainly came down to the right to decide independently how they should live in their own republic.
Some leaders from the All-Tatar Public Center supported full independence for Tatarstan, up to its full separation from Russia. However, the geopolitical situation of Tatarstan, which is surrounded by regions mostly inhabited by Russians, didn’t leave room for any illusions. At the same time, the status of independence could become the basis for building new relations with Russia, to try along with other newly liberated nations of the former empire, to find a fundamental solution to the problem of economic and political integrity of the country, based on a federation or confederation built from the bottom-up.
In my opinion the referendum about independence was largely symbolic, but it was an extremely important step towards real independence. I know for a fact that no one in Tatarstan thought about organizing any military groups to try to solve the problem by force. However, such a ruckus broke out in the press on this account! All the newspapers, both democratic and pro-Communist, were stirring up supercharged anti-Tatar hysteria. I couldn’t get rid of the impression that all these actions were well coordinated, especially considering who controlled the so-called free press in Russia. My friends, who were quite well educated and democratically minded people, were surprised at the “impertinence” and “black ingratitude” of the Tatars.
It took a lot of effort to explain the simple truth to these people. Nevertheless, the referendum took place, and its results caused jubilation among the Tatar people. But, everything ended at that.
Although, later the governments of Tatarstan and Russia conducted negotiations on concluding some kind of agreement, it couldn’t change anything, except one thing. Before that Tatarstan was the only single colony conquered by the Russians which didn’t have a formal agreement confirming that it had voluntarily joined the Russian Empire. Probably even the Tsarist high officials found it extremely hypocritical to pretend that Tatarstan voluntarily joined the empire like the other colonies. The collective psychic wound inflicted on the Tatars by the massive slaughter of mostly innocent women and children after the siege of Kazan in 1552, was carried out by Russian troops led by Ivan the Terrible, and it remains unhealed to this day.
155
Gordeyev, Alexander, “Chemical Arms: Russia’s Human Guinea Pig”,