Mairanovsky, the director of a toxicological laboratory, did not provide guidance to the collective of scientists under him and allowed ongoing work to be disrupted. Having fraudulently obtained his doctoral degree and the title of Professor, Mairanovsky not only hindered the progress of scientific laboratory but due to the incorrect application of special substances because of his ignorance, he personally ruined several important ongoing assignments. In addition, the investigation discovered that the government’s procedures for stocking and inventory of poisons, and dangerous substances were created for abuse. In 1946, Mairanovsky was removed from the directorship of the laboratory. After taking a job as a senior engineer at another laboratory, he illegally kept in his possession a large quantity of poisons and dangerous substances…58
Therefore, the investigation accused Mairanovsky not of experimenting on humans (this issue seems never to have been discussed by the investigators, prosecutors, or during the trial itself) but of not conducting better experiments! Also, the fact that he had urged the Highest Commission to approve his doctorate thesis and professor’s title by sending a personal letter from Commissar Merkulov was deemed by investigators to indicate that the degree and title had been “fraudulently obtained.” Not a word was said about the fact that a group of highly positioned scientists wrote positive reviews of Mairanovsky‘s work. On December 19, 1953, the Highest Attestation Commission deprived Mairanovsky of his doctorate degree.59
Mairanovsky was sent to the most secret political prison in the Soviet Union, which was located in the small town of Vladimir (about 125 miles from Moscow). Ironically, he arrived in Vladimir Prison on March 5, 1953, the day of Stalin’s death. I discovered this bit of information while reading Mairanovsky’s prisoner card at the archive of Vladimir Prison.60 Mairanovsky’s trial and all the events that followed are still a mystery.
It is not clear whether Eitingon was tried before Stalin’s death. In any case, he was released from prison on Beria’s order on March 20, 1953.61 Sverdlov was luckier than Mairanovsky: He had not been tried before Stalin’s death. Beria simply closed the case and on May 18, 1953, signed Sverdlov’s rehabilitation, prepared by Colonel Aleksandr Khvat (discussed in Chapter 4 as the main investigator in charge of the Nikolai Vavilov case) and approved by Beria’s new first deputy, Bogdan Kobulov, and the new head of the OVD Department, Lev Vlodzimersky.62
In Vladimir Prison
Although the history of Vladimir Prison started in the eighteenth century during the rule of Catherine the Great, its main buildings were built later, in the middle of the nineteenth century.63 In 1906, after the 1905 Revolution, it became a special prison for political convicts. From the 1930s on, and increasingly after World War II, Vladimir Prison was used for political prisoners of great state importance. Its official name was “Special MGB Prison No. 2” (Lubyanka Prison was No. 1). In the late 1940s and 1950s, citizens of many countries were kept there. Besides Russians, there were former ministers of the Baltic countries (and their wives, in separate cells without knowledge of the fate of their husbands), Germans, French, Swiss, and others. Among the Baltic prisoners was the former Latvian minister of foreign affairs Wilhelm Munters and his wife Natalia, whom Sudoplatov kidnapped in Riga in June 1940 and secretly transported to Russia.64 At first Munters and his wife were transferred to Voronezh in central Russia, where Munters was appointed a professor at the local university. On June 28, 1941, six days after the beginning of the war with the Nazis, the couple was arrested. After a trial, they, along with some other former Baltic ministers and their family members, were tried and put in the Kirov Internal Prison. Later, in 1952, all of them were retried, received twenty-five years’ imprisonment, and were kept in Vladimir Prison under numbers (Wilhelm and Natalia Munters, under Nos. 7 and 8, correspondingly) from April 1952 until their release in August 1954.65 Most of the foreigners were innocent people like Munters, sentenced to ten to twenty-five years’ imprisonment according to Article 58 of the Russian Criminal Code. But real Soviet criminals like Mairanovsky, Sudoplatov, Eitingon, and some other Beria men (who were not imprisoned for their real crimes),66 as well as German and Austrian war criminals, were also there.
According to the memoirs of a former prisoner, a Finn named Unto Parvilahti, among the Russians was Mairanovsky’s colleague Professor Grigory Liberman, a chemist who had specialized on poison gases and presumably had a general’s rank.67 Liberman was Academician Ipatieff’s pupil at the Artillery Academy laboratory on poison gases and was a specialist on methods of obtaining lewisite.68 This substance, dichloro (2-chlorovinyl) arsine, was developed in the United States during World War I but was never actually used. As Parvilahti recalled, Liberman, whom he met in prison briefly because of a mistake by the guards, told him that he had been arrested after Lenin’s death in 1924 and kept in prisons since then. During some of those years, he was allowed to work in a secret chemical laboratory under NKVD control, but after an accident in the lab, Liberman was put in solitary confinement in Vladimir Prison.
This seems to be true. According to Liberman’s prisoner card in Vladimir Prison, he was arrested in 1935 and sentenced five years later, in 1940, on charges of treason against the Motherland and participation in a terrorist organization (Document 19, Appendix II). However, there is a discrepancy between the charges for the arrest (point 14 in the card) and conviction (the back side of the card). In the first case, the following paragraphs of the Criminal Code are mentioned: 58-1a (treason against the Motherland), 58-7 (counterrevolutionary activity in a state institution), 58-8 (terrorist acts against governmental figures), and 58-11 (organization of terrorist acts or a membership in a counterrevolutionary group). In the second, Articles 58-1b (treason against the Motherland committed by a military person), 58-7, and 58-8 are mentioned. The problem is that persons charged with the paragraph 58-1b were punished by death. On May 26, 1947, a special decree of the Presidium of the USSR Supreme Council replaced the punishment by death with twenty-five-year imprisonment (the death penalty was restored in 1950). According to the prisoner card, on October 13, 1947, Liberman was brought to Vladimir Prison. Therefore, it looks as though he was tried again between May and October 1947, sentenced to imprisonment instead of being shot, and put in Vladimir Prison where he was kept in solitary confinement, probably under a number. For some reason, his term was not increased from fifteen to twenty-five years. In January–February 1949, Liberman was brought to Lefortovo Prison in Moscow, possibly to testify against newly arrested colleagues or German specialists. In March 1950, after the end of his fifteen-year term of imprisonment, Liberman was sent into exile to the Krasnoyarsk Region in Siberia.
Among the German prisoners, there was another Mairanovsky colleague, one of the most infamous medical experimenters in Auschwitz, Dr. Carl Clauberg.69 In 1943, Clauberg reported to Himmler that through the injection of supercooled carbon dioxide into the fallopian tubes, with a staff of ten men he could sterilize as many as 1,000 women per day.70 Several thousand Jews and Gypsies were sterilized at Auschwitz by this method under his supervision.71 In 1945, he continued his experiments in Ravensbruck. On June 24, 1945, Clauberg was arrested by the SMERSH Third Directorate (Military Counterintelligence) and sent to Moscow (Clauberg’s prisoner card; Document 20, Appendix II). I wonder if his specific knowledge regarding women’s sterilization obtained in the medical block of Auschwitz and Ravensbruck, and evidently discussed during interrogations, was later used in Mairanovsky’s or some other MGB laboratory.