The laboratory prospered. The “doctor” in charge was given a special degree of Doctor of Medical Science by Moscow University and nominated for a Stalin Prize for his “research.” In October 1953 the Soviet regime announced The Chamber’s closing to a select group of State Security officials, after blaming its existence on the Beria excesses. It has probably not been reactivated; but its researchers continue to be exploited by selected personnel of the State Security.
The Chamber, while it lasted, had been under the Commandant’s Section in the administrative directorate of the State Security apparatus. It was this section which supervised all executions of political prisoners condemned to death, in addition to its normal physical security duties.192
Additional information was published in the former Communist newspaper Izvestiya in an interview with the military prosecutor, Colonel Vladimir Bobryonev,193 who had access to the investigation files on Mairanovsky and Beria, which are still kept at the KGB (FSB) archive. According to the NKVD-MGB-KGB investigation procedure, there were two files for each arrested person. The investigation file contained materials such as transcripts (protocols) of interrogations, and so on. This file was completed before the trial. The prisoner file included documents connected with the life of the arrested person before and after the trial. It contained personal information (the “Anketa”), orders of investigators to move the prisoner within a prison or to another prison, orders to bring the prisoner for interrogations, the trial verdict, the order to transfer the accused prisoner to a labor camp or a prison, and the like. In addition, there was a special file for “operational material” (mainly received from secret informers) on the suspect before the person’s arrest and during his or her imprisonment.194 In his interview, Bobryonev described the laboratory:
A large hall on the first floor of a corner building at Varsonofyevsky Lane [in the central part of Moscow] was provided for the laboratory, which previously had occupied a small room. The hall was divided into five cells with doors facing a large office. The doors had peepholes. During experiments, a member of the laboratory staff was constantly on duty in this office… Almost every day a few prisoners condemned to death were brought to the laboratory. The whole procedure was similar to a medical examination. The “doctor” asked the “patient” about his or her health with concern, gave some advice and medication.195
At first, mustard gas derivatives were used for experiments. Mustard gas was discovered in 1886 and was used for the first time as chemical weapon by the Germans during World War I in their attack on British troops in July 1917 near Ypres, France.196 Mairanovsky’s results were disappointing: The chemicals were immediately detected during autopsies. This contradicted the main goal of the experiments—to find a chemical without any taste that could not be detected in the victim’s body before or after death. Later, various doses of a toxic substance, a protein called ricin, extracted from castor-oil seeds produced by Ricinus communis, were tried unsuccessfully for a year. This toxin was discovered at the end of World War I and was regarded as a potential agent for biological warfare.197 During World War II, in 1942–1943, ricin, under the name Compound W, was considered by British, Canadian, and American experts as a possible biological weapons agent in the war against Japan. By the end of 1943, a pilot project on the production of ricin was developed, and various ricin dispersal methods were tested.198 In 1944, the Japanese experimented with castor-oil seeds, but not pure ricin, on Russian POWs.199 Mairanovsky also tried digitoxin200 on ten prisoners. Eventually a preparation with all the desired properties, called C-2 (carbylomine cholinchloride), was created. Chemicals were given to the victims as “medication,” or they were mixed with a meal or drinking water to disguise the taste. These poisons usually brought on great pain and suffering.
Colonel Bobryonev claimed that Mairanovsky’s file contains testimonies of witnesses who saw experiments: “Mairanovsky brought to the laboratory people of varying physical conditions, decrepit and full of health, fat and slim. Some died in three-four days, others were racked with pain for a week.”201 According to the witnesses’ testimonies, after having taken the preparation C-2, the victim changed physically, seeming to become shorter, quickly weakening and becoming calm and silent. C-2 killed the victim in fifteen minutes.
During the Mairanovsky case investigation in 1954, Mikhail Filimonov testified about the experiments:
Sudoplatov and Eitingon approved special equipment [poisons] only if it had been tested on humans… I witnessed some of the poisoning tests, but I tried not to be present at the experiments because I could not watch the action of poisons on the psyche and body of humans. Some poisons caused extreme suffering. To conceal shouts we even bought a radio set which we turned on [during the experiments].202
Mairanovsky’s assistant, Aleksandr Grigorovich, and a chemist named Shchegolev were in charge of weighing doses of poisons. However, Mairanovsky himself mixed poisons with food. If poison did not cause death, Mairanovsky injected it using a syringe.203
On Eitingon’s order, Mairanovsky also experimented with curare. Curare is a blackish, resin-like substance derived from tropical plants of the genus Strychnos, especially S. toxifera. Also, it can come from the root of the South American vine pareira (Chondodendron tomentosum), used by some South American Indians for poisoning arrowheads. Curare acts by arresting the action of motor nerves. The Soviet secret service had been interested in curare since the time of VCheKa and Yakov Agranov. During the show trial against thirty-four members of the Social Revolutionary Party in Moscow from June 8 to August 7, 1922, the two defendants Grigory Semenov-Vasiliev and Lidiya Konopleva testified that they had provided Faina Kaplan, the unsuccessful assassin of Vladimir Lenin, with bullets poisoned with curare.204
This attempt took place on August 30, 1918. Lenin survived, and Kaplan was shot without trial almost immediately after the attempt. The attempt upon Lenin’s life provoked the beginning of the Red Terror as a formal response to “counterrevolution activity.” The terror was unleashed after two more Bolsheviks, chairman of the Petrograd Bolshevik Committee Moisei Volodarsky and chairman of the Petrograd CheKa Moisei Uritsky, were assassinated on June 20, 1918, and August 30, 1918. After these three assassination attempts, the VCheKa shot approximately 6,185 prisoners and hostages, imprisoned 14,829 persons, put 6,407 into concentration camps, and detained 4,068 as hostages.205
However, the testimonies of 1922 sound like a typical fabrication by Agranov and the OGPU. Both defendants, who “repented” of their crime, served in the VCheKa from 1919 and joined the Bolshevik Party in 1921. Moreover, they were acquitted during the trial. It is also unclear whether the very short-sighted Kaplan had shot at all or whether it had been somebody else. In 1992, Boris Petrovsky, a member of the Medical Academy, evaluated the description of Lenin’s illness after he had been shot: “There was no poisoning allegedly caused by ‘poisoned’ bullets… One should not talk about poisoned bullets. However… the wound was rare and very dangerous for [Lenin’s] life.”206
According to Mairanovsky, after the injection of curare he observed the following symptoms:
Loss of voice and strength, muscular weakness, prostration, labored breathing, cyanosis and death with symptoms of suffocation while retaining complete consciousness. Death was excruciating, but the man was deprived of the ability to shout or move while retaining complete consciousness. Death of the “patient” ensued within 10–15 minutes after a sufficient dosage.207