Eitingon testified in 1954:
I was present during experiments at [Mairanovsky’s] laboratory. Four Germans, who were condemned to death as active Gestapo men that had taken part in the execution of Soviet people, were the test objects. An injection of curare into blood was used for testing. The poison acted almost immediately, and the men were dead approximately in two minutes…208
Those in charge of Mairanovsky’s work had no doubt about the necessity of experiments on humans. During his interrogation in September 1953, while facing the death penalty, Merkulov testified:
I believed that since these experiments were being performed on people sentenced by execution as enemies of the Soviet government, and since, in the interests of the Soviet government, these people were turned over to Soviet intelligence in order to provide a reliable means of eliminating enemies through sabotage, then the experiments were not illegal. Furthermore, these experiments were sanctioned by [Commissar] Beria and consequently were considered necessary to the work of the NKVD.209
It is worthwhile to add that Merkulov visited Mairanovsky’s laboratory once and watched the administration of a poison to a prisoner and the resulting behavior of the prisoner through a peephole in the cell’s door. Bogdan Kobulov, who also supervised Mairanovsky’s laboratory in the 1940s, had a similar opinion. During his interrogation in 1953, the interrogator, Lieutenant Colonel Bazenko, asked him: “Don’t you think that such experiments are crimes against humanity?” Kobulov answered:
I do not think so, since the end purpose of the experiments was the war against enemies of the Soviet government. The NKVD is an agency that can use such experiments on convicted enemies of Soviet authority in the interests of the Soviet government. As an NKVD employee, I obeyed the orders to perform the experiment, but as a person I believed they were undesirable.210
Finally, Beria himself testified about the experiment on August 28, 1953: “I gave orders to Mairanovsky to conduct experiments on people sentenced to the highest measure of punishment, but it was not my idea.”211 The USSR chief prosecutor, Rodion Rudenko, who headed the interrogation, ignored this statement, fearing that Beria would say that these orders came from Stalin and the Politburo. Four days later, in the next interrogation, Beria tried to diminish his role in the experiments:
I do not know, perhaps experiments were done on 100 people, but I gave the sanction for only three. Merkulov was more involved with it… Mairanovsky reported to me the methods used to poison people. He informed me of the possibility of using the toxic substance ricin to poison people through inhaled air. I proposed that he work on researching this means of poisoning. I was interested in these poisons in connection with an operation that was being planned against Hitler. Then the potency of action of these poisons was tested in experiments on low [sic!] people—convicts… I state categorically that I know nothing about this [the results of experiments on subjects].212
Later it was not possible to find out the truth. On December 18–23, 1953, Beria, Merkulov, Kobulov, and four others of Beria’s closest NKVD-KGB men were tried by a closed session of the Special Session of the USSR Supreme Court chaired by Marshal Ivan Konev.213 All defendants were found guilty and were shot to death immediately after the trial.214
In 1942, Mairanovsky discovered that under certain conditions, ricin had a special effect on subjects, compelling them to become trusting and open. This provoked a two-year series of experiments on obtaining “truthful testimonies” under the administration of chloral scopolamine and phenamine benzedrine. The CIA, which was created in July 1947, started experiments with the same idea ten years later, in 1950–1952.215 Mairanovsky’s series of experiments with “truth drugs” were approved by Merkulov and the head of the NKGB/NKVD Second Main Directorate (Counterespionage), Pyotr Fedotov. Also, Mairanovsky mentioned the involvement of Fedotov’s deputy, Lieutenant General Leonid Raikhman.216 In 1940, Raikhman (alias “Zaitsev”), as head of the NKVD Polish Office, was one of the main organizers of the murder of Polish POWs.217 In September 1941, as Fedotov’s deputy, Raikhman was involved in the deportation of the Volga Germans of the Saratov Region to Kazakhstan and Siberia.218 After World War II, he worked with Sudoplatov in Lvov (western Ukraine) on “cleansing” the area of Ukrainian and Polish partisans.219 Raikhman was arrested after Abakumov’s arrest and released after Stalin’s death. In 1953, during Beria’s investigation, Raikhman denied his involvement in the affairs of Mairanovsky. Instead, he named the head of the MGB Investigation Department at the time, Zimenkov, as a source of information about Mairanovsky’s experiments.220
Mairanovsky’s colleague, Vasilii Naumov, an assistant professor at the Pharmacy Department of the Moscow First Medical Institute, who had been mobilized by the NKVD through the Party Central Committee, considered Mairanovsky’s attempts to find a truth drug to be useless and without serious results.221 Nevertheless, in 1946, Soviet MGB “advisers” in Hungary tried actedron pentothal, scopolamine, and morphine on political prisoners.222
It is possible that Mairanovsky also worked with narcotics, since some narcotics were used in the 1940s during interrogations to force prisoners to sign falsified interrogation transcripts. In the late 1980s, the minister and marshal of aviation, Aleksandr Novikov, recalled that during his arrest in 1945, “I was given a kind of a cigarette and I lost completely the understanding of where I was and what was going on.”223 In this state Novikov signed papers given to him by the MGB interrogator Mikhail Likhachev in the presence of Minister Abakumov.
In 1966, Sudoplatov claimed that a very narrow circle of people knew about the results of experiments on humans.224 These reports were kept in a concealed envelope that could be opened only on the special order of the MGB minister or his first deputy. The reports were signed by those who conducted the experiments and persons who knew about the experiments. All these documents supposedly disappeared during Sudoplatov’s arrest in August 1953, and their whereabouts are not known. Bobryonev and Ryazentsev mentioned also that the executioner Vasilii Blokhin had his own list of names of all people brought for Mairanovsky’s experiments. Before he retired, Blokhin ordered that the notebook be destroyed.225
Sudoplatov also mentioned that Arkady Gertsovsky, head of the Department “A” (Archive) from 1943 to 1953, provided prisoners for experiments. Gertsovsky had the responsibility of carrying out death sentences and, therefore, could send some prisoners condemned to death to Mairanovsky’s laboratory. In fact, the list of the First Special (later “A”) Department’s officers who selected and brought prisoners to Mairanovsky’s laboratory was much longer. Besides Gertsovsky, it included Petrov, Leonid Bashtakov (in 1940, head of the NKVD First Special Department), A. M. Kalinin (in 1940, first deputy head of the same department), I. N. Balishansky, and Vladimir Podobedov.226
Later, in 1942–1947, Bashtakov became Head of the special High NKVD/NKGB/MGB School. Ilya Dzhirkvelov, a former pupil of this school, recalled: “General Bashtakov [was] an unusually short man for whom a special chair had been made with legs longer than normal so that when he was sitting at a table his small stature was less noticeable. General Bashtakov always delivered his lectures sitting down and when he congratulated us on being accepted for the course he shook our hands without moving from behind the table.”227 As for Kalinin, his signature appeared under many reports on executions and cremation of sentenced victims.228 In other words, he was present at executions carried out by the main NKVD/MGB executioner, Vasilii Blokhin.