Ryumin was arrested on March 17, 1953. The death of Dr. Etinger became a special point of discussion at the Presidium meetings as one of the main accusations against Ryumin during the investigation of his activity.287 In 1952, Ryumin included the case of Etinger in the list of accusations against Abakumov, and Abakumov was interrogated by Prosecutor Mogichev regarding Etinger’s alleged anti-Soviet activity.288 Now Beria personally supervised the investigation of Ryumin. On March 28, 1953, he told Ryumin: “You will never see me again and I’ll never see you again. We will exterminate you.”289 In early July 1954, half a year after the execution of Beria and his cronies and five months before the execution of Abakumov, Ryumin was sentenced to death by the Military Collegium of the USSR Supreme Court. He was shot on July 22, 1954.290 Schwartzman was tried in 1956 separately from Beria’s and Abakumov’s other men and condemned to death.291
MEMORIES
In the 1950s–1980s, the control of science by the KGB was overwhelming. However, the details of their control over daily life in scientific institutes is not widely known. When I joined the scientific community in the 1960s, I was aware that each institution had a so-called First (or Special) Department with a retired KGB officer as head, in charge of maintaining secrecy and political control.292 A good example is Sergei Ogol’tsov, who in 1951 for two months became the MGB acting minister. Later he was expelled from the Communist Party and fired from the KGB, but until his retirement, Ogol’tsov was deputy director of security (another name for a head of the First Department) at the top-secret Scientific Research Institute No. 1.293 Fyodor Popov, a professional MGB/KGB officer who headed the counterintelligence division that supervised Academician Andrei Sakharov in the 1950s, wrote about the goals of the First Department: “The First (secret) Department is a structural secret subdivision of an institution or organization whose task is to prepare, register, and give secret documents to those involved [in the secret work] and to control the movement and treatment of these documents.”294
Possibly, this was the official instruction. But in fact, no manuscript of any scientific paper could be sent to press without a cover document signed by the head of the First Department. These officers had no knowledge or understanding of the scientific matters they guarded. The retired KGB officer Popov even now is convinced that only “some of the theoretical statements of Lysenko were not supported experimentally and did not find industrial application.”295
In addition, every scientist knew that there were so-called curators of every scientific institution at the KGB headquarters in charge of “supervising” the life of the institutions. I am aware of the mention of KGB “curators” in only one book by a Russian scientist, in the very true and honest memoirs of Professor Aleksandrov.296 I was one of those who had an opportunity to verify that “curators” exist (usually only a few persons in the administration of the institution knew about these curators). In 1984, my contract with the Academy of Sciences’ Koltsov Institute of Developmental Biology in Moscow where I had been working was not renewed. At the First Department of my institute, which was located in an office behind an iron door, the retired KGB officer who worked there told me that “there was an order from the organs” (e.g., the KGB). I was not surprised, since almost all my friends were dissidents or refuseniks. Also, I was involved with Amnesty International, an organization that Soviet officials and the KGB considered “anti-Soviet.” Some of my friends were serving terms in labor camps as political prisoners, and I helped their families when I could (which was dangerous during those years).
The “order from the organs” in the metaphoric language of Soviet secret service meant that I would be unemployed and without any opportunity to continue my scientific career (and eventually might be arrested for leading a “parasitic lifestyle,” i.e., for having no job). My first scientific book on the genetics of amphibians, which I had already submitted in manuscript form to the printing house of the Moscow State University, was stopped and never published. The manuscript simply disappeared without a trace. My editor told me in a whisper: “They (i.e., the KGB officers) came to the head of the publishing house and demanded your manuscript.” In these circumstances, the possibility that my second book would be published was very low, since the documents that were necessary for publishing, according to Soviet rules, had mysteriously disappeared from the file attached to the manuscript. The only weapon I had was to write letters about my unemployment and the problems with my manuscripts to all imaginable branches of power in the former Soviet Union: the KGB, the Central Committee of the Communist Party, the Academy Presidium, and so on. It is a long story, and here I want to mention only my experience with the KGB and the Academy Presidium.
A few days after I had sent my letter to the KGB, I received a phone call. A polite voice asked me to come to the KGB Office in Charge of Moscow and the Moscow Region. There, I was greeted by an officer who said that he was the curator of my institute, and, therefore, my curator. (According to the current Russian press, the FSB “curators” are still in existence. Their language, when they try to recruit informers, remains the same: “You have to understand us.”)297 He knew my problems in detail and assured me that the KGB could not have given any order about my employment. He told me that although he was in charge of only my institute, he knew that as a geneticist I would find a job at the Academy Institute of General Genetics.
I followed his recommendation. The first person whom I accidentally ran across at the Institute of Genetics was the same KGB curator! He was carrying documents from the scientific secretary of the institute to a special room of the “First Department” behind an iron door. It was evident that he was determined to look through the documents. He was not happy to see me because I reminded him that he had told me that he was in charge of only one institute. Also I was curious about what he was doing with the documents. I did not get a job in that institute, or in others.
After this, I tried to meet the vice president of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, Academician Yurii Ovchinnikov, who headed the Academy Biology and Chemistry Divisions and who had already sent me a letter. I received it from the Central Committee of the Communist Party, because Academician Ovchinnikov was also a member of the Central Committee. The letter claimed that I would receive a job at any institute of the academy if the director of the institute would send a special inquiry for me to Ovchinnikov himself. The rules of this game were obvious: The KGB curators of all institutes had already been informed of my existence, and no director would write such an inquiry. After many phone calls to Ovchinnikov’s secretary, she told me that Yurii Anatol’evich was too busy to see me and that he had asked her to arrange my appointment with Dr. Vladimir Sokolov, secretary academician of the Academy Biology Branch. Biologists who knew details of Academician Sokolov’s career referred to him as “the volleyball player.” The Biology Department of Moscow State University accepted him as a student because he was a talented sportsman. Later he married a daughter of a Politburo member, and this “family connection” guaranteed him a career at the academy. Ovchinnikov’s secretary told me that the meeting would take place at the Biology Department of Moscow State University.