There can only be hope for absolute openness and the absence of any secrecy in science. Only under these conditions can we hope that only those scientists who do not confuse human individuals with experimental animals will succeed.
In the summer of 1990, as part of the International Commission to Investigate the Fate of Raoul Wallenberg, I came to Vladimir to get acquainted with the file cabinet of the infamous Vladimir Prison, formerly Prison No. 2 of the NKVD-NKGB-MGB. Wallenberg was a Swedish diplomat who in 1944 saved thousands of Jews in Budapest from extermination by the German Nazis. He was arrested by SMERSH ("Death to Spies" - a special department in the army) at the beginning of 1945 and later disappeared without a trace in the Lubyanka. There is no real information about him since 1947.
In the late 1940s and early 1950s, the Vladimir prison was the place of detention of many convicted high-ranking Nazis who, after being released and returning to Germany in 1954-1956, testified to the Swedish authorities about Wallenberg's stay in Moscow's Lubyanka and Lefortovo prisons. For many years, vague rumors circulated about Wallenberg's possible stay in the Vladimir prison. The international commission received personal permission from the Minister of Internal Affairs of the USSR Vadim Bakatin to check this information against the prison file. The card was started on each arrested person. It recorded brief biographical data, the composition of the crime, the articles under which the arrested person was convicted, details of the movement in custody, etc. Before leaving for Vladimir, my colleagues at the Moscow “Memorial” advised me to also take an interest in the cards of several well-known employees of the once all-powerful People's Commissar for Security Lavrenty Beria, who were sentenced after the death of Stalin and the fall of Beria not to be shot (like Beria), but to imprisonment . So I first learned the name of Grigory Moiseevich Mairanovsky.
The international commission did not find traces of Wallenberg's stay in the Vladimir prison, but the identity of Mairanovsky and his colleagues from the NKVD-MGB interested me. Mairanovsky's card contained the following: profession - pharmacologist; senior engineer of Laboratory No. 1 of the OOT of the Ministry of State Security of the USSR; convicted on February 14, 1953 under articles 193-17f and 179 for "abuse of official position" and "illegal possession of potent substances." What was hidden behind these words? It was striking that the prisoner Mairanovsky was repeatedly taken back to the Internal Prison of the MGB-KGB (the official name of the Lubyanka) in 1953, 1956-1958 - probably for interrogations. What was so special about this man?
In the archives of "Memorial" I got acquainted with several documents that shed light on Mairanovsky's activities. Later, publications about Mairanovsky in the press followed, including those of my "memorial" colleagues. Additional information was made public by Justice Colonel Vladimir Bobrenev, who had access to the investigation files of Mairanovsky and Beria. Gradually, a clear picture began to emerge: in the late 1930s and early 1950s, the NKVD-MGB had a laboratory that developed poisons that killed victims without identifiable traces, and also looked for drugs that could stimulate the “candor” of interrogated victims. All poisons and drugs were tested on people - prisoners sentenced to death. The experiments were supervised and carried out by the "doctor" and biochemist Mairanovsky. In the late 1940s, the "doctor" also acted as an executioner: he administered lethal doses of poisons to victims - real or imagined political opponents. Soviet power, kidnapped by the team of Pavel Sudoplatov (about him below) on the streets of different cities of the Soviet Union. Mairanovsky's "achievements" were also used by KGB agents abroad for political assassinations. Until recently, one of Mairanovsky's worst poisons, ricin, was industrially produced in Russia as a chemical-biological weapon.
"Death Lab" - "Chamber"
Brief background
For the first time, work on the use of poisons and drugs began to be carried out in the OGPU since 1926 at the direction of the People's Commissar for Security Vyacheslav Menzhinsky. The special laboratory was part of a secret group led by former SR militant Yakov Serebryansky. The "Yashina group" was created to carry out terrorist acts abroad, subordinated directly to the people's commissar and existed until 1938.
Under the new people's commissar, Nikolai Yezhov, the methods of the "Yashin group" began to be used for "cleansing" even in the Lubyanka. On February 17, 1938, the head of the Foreign Department of the NKVD, Abram Slutsky, was found dead in the office of Mikhail Frinovsky, deputy to the new people's commissar. Next to Slutsky's clumsily slid down from the chair stood empty glass from under the tea. Frinovsky confidentially announced to the NKVD officers that the doctor had already established the cause of death: heart failure. Several officers who knew the symptoms of potassium cyanide poisoning noticed specific bluish spots on Slutsky's face.
Yezhov's short bloody reign ended at the end of 1938, when he was accused of "political unreliability", convicted and shot. Under the new people's commissar, Lavrenty Beria, the secret laboratory was reorganized. Since 1938, it was included in the 4th special department of the NKVD, and since March 1939 it was headed by Mikhail Filimonov, a pharmacist by training, who had a Ph.D. From that moment, Mairanovsky was enlisted as head of the 7th department of the 2nd special department of the NKVD, one of the two laboratories of this special department. Sergei Muromtsev became the head of the second laboratory (more on him below). The special department reported directly to People's Commissar Lavrenty Beria and his deputy Vsevolod Merkulov. The "Death Laboratory" existed until 1946, when it was included in the Department of Operational Equipment (OOT) and became Laboratory No. 1 of the OOT already under the new Minister of State Security Viktor Abakumov.
Under the direction of Mairanovsky
Some details of the work of the laboratory became known only recently. Colonel Bobrenev, who had access to the investigation files of Mairanovsky and Beria, describes the "death laboratory" as follows:
“For the laboratory ... they allocated a large room on the first floor of a corner building in Varsanofevsky Lane. The room was divided into five cells, the doors of which, with slightly enlarged peepholes, opened onto a spacious reception room. Here, during the experiments, one of the laboratory staff was constantly on duty ...
... Almost daily, prisoners sentenced to death were delivered to the laboratory. The procedure looked like a normal medical examination. The “doctor” sympathetically asked the “patient” about his health, gave advice and immediately offered a medicine ... "
According to eyewitnesses, “Mairanovsky brought decrepit and flourishing people for health reasons, full and thin to the laboratory ... Some died in three or four days, others suffered for a week.”
The main goal of the laboratory was to look for poisons that could not be identified at autopsy. At first Mairanovsky tried tasteless derivatives of mustard gas. He appears to have begun experimenting with these substances even earlier than his colleagues in Nazi Germany, where mustard gas experiments were first performed on Sachsenhausen prisoners in 1939. The results of Mairanovsky's experiments with mustard gas derivatives ended unsuccessfully: the poison was found in the corpses of the victims. It was easier for Mayranovsky's Nazi colleagues: the mustard gas derivative Zyklon B worked effectively in the death camps, and there was no need to hide its use.
It took Mairanovsky more than a year to “work” with ricin, a vegetable protein found in castor bean seeds. Since different doses of ricin have been tried, one can only guess how many victims died in these experiments. The action of each of the other poisons - digitoxin, thallium, colchicine - was tested on 10 "guinea pigs". For the torment of the victims who did not die immediately, the experimenters observed for 10-14 days, after which the "experimental" were killed.
In the end, a poison with the required properties was found - "K-2" (carbylaminecholine chloride). He killed the victim quickly and left no traces. According to the testimony of eyewitnesses, after taking K-2, the “experimental” became “as if smaller in stature, weakened, became quieter. And 15 minutes later he was dead.
In 1942, Mairanovsky discovered that under the influence of certain doses of ricin, the “experimental” begins to speak extremely frankly. Mairanovsky received the approval of the leadership of the NKVD-NKGB to work on a new topic - the "problem of frankness" during interrogations. Two years were spent on the experiments of Mairanovsky's laboratory to obtain "frank" and "truthful" testimony under the influence of medications. Chloralscopolamine and phenaminebenzedrine have been tried to no avail. Interrogations with the use of medicines were carried out not only in the laboratory, but also in both prisons of Lubyanka, No. 1 and 2. One of the main employees of the laboratory (as well as an assistant in the Department of Pharmacology of the 1st Moscow Medical Institute), Vladimir Naumov, openly considered these experiments a profanation. However, it is known that after the war, in 1946, Soviet “advisers” from the MGB used drugs during interrogations of political prisoners arrested in Eastern Europe.”
In addition to the poisons themselves, the method of introducing them into the victim's body was also a problem. At first, poisons were mixed with food or water, given under the guise of "drugs" before and after meals, or administered by injection. The introduction of poison through the skin was also tried - it was sprayed or moistened with a poisonous solution. Then came the ideas of a cane-peg and a shooting fountain pen. A lot of time and effort has been spent developing poisoned small bullets for these devices to effectively kill the victim. Again, one can only guess about the number of victims.
The head of the 4th special department, Pavel Filimonov, was mainly engaged in shooting with poisoned bullets into the backs of the victims' heads. The bullets were light, with a cavity for poison, so the kills did not always go smoothly. There were cases when the bullet got under the skin and the victim removed it, begging Filimonov not to shoot again. Filimonov fired again. According to Bobrenev, in 1953, during interrogations in the Beria case, Mairanovsky recalled a case when he himself shot the victim three times: according to the rules of the laboratory, if the victim did not die from the poison contained in the first bullet, another poison should be tried on the same victim. In 1954, during interrogation, VASKhNIL academician Sergei Muromtsev, who himself killed 15 prisoners (data from Bobrenev), claimed that he was struck by Mairanovsky's sadistic attitude towards the victims.
After the dismissal of Mayranovsky from the post of head in 1946, Laboratory No. 1 was divided into two, pharmacological and chemical. They were headed by the above-mentioned V. Naumov and A. Grigorovich. The laboratories were moved from the center of Moscow to a new building built in Kuchino. Apparently, work on poisons ended in 1949. In 1951, the question of the complete disbandment of these laboratories was discussed. It seems that at that time the leadership of the USSR preferred bacteriological methods of political assassinations: in 1946, the head of the bacteriological group, Professor Sergei Muromtsev, was awarded the Stalin Prize. In any case, in 1952, one of the most successful MGB agents abroad, Iosif Grigulevich, was training to use special equipment to kill the leader of Yugoslavia, Josip Tito, using sprayed plague bacilli.
Who are the victims? How many?
The 1st Special (later Accounting and Archival or "A") Directorate of the NKVD-MGB was responsible for the supply of "guinea pigs" to Mairanovsky's laboratory. The selection for experiments among those sentenced to death in Butyrka prison was carried out by the head (1941-1953) of this department Arkady Gertsovsky and several other employees of the MGB (I. Balishansky, L. Bashtakov, Kalinin, Petrov, V. Podobedov), in the Lubyanka prison - commandant General Vasily Blokhin and his special assistant P. Yakovlev. The selection and delivery of the “test subjects” to the laboratory took place in accordance with the prescription developed and signed by Petrov, Bashtakov, Blokhin, Mairanovsky and Shchegolev and sanctioned by Beria and Merkulov. Later, this document was kept in Sudoplatov's personal safe.
It is difficult to indicate the total number of deaths during the experiments: different sources give numbers from 150 to 250. According to Colonel Bobrenev, some of the victims were criminals, but they were undoubted according to the notorious article 58 of the Criminal Code of the RSFSR. It is known that among the victims were German and Japanese prisoners of war, Polish citizens, Koreans, Chinese. Colonel Bobrenev points out that at least four German prisoners of war in 1944, and at the end of 1945 three more German citizens were provided for experiments. The last three were anti-fascist political émigrés who had fled Nazi Germany; they died 15 seconds after the lethal injections. The bodies of two victims were cremated, the body of the third was brought to the Research Institute of Emergency Medicine. N.V. Sklifosovsky. A post-mortem autopsy showed that the deceased died of heart failure; pathologists did not find traces of poison. Japanese prisoners of war, officers and privates, and arrested Japanese diplomats were used in experiments on the "problem of candor".
To these victims must be added at least four more who became targets of political assassinations. In his address to the XXIII Congress of the Communist Party, Sudoplatov wrote: “Inside the country, during the second half of 1946 and in 1947, 4 operations were carried out:
1. At the direction of a member of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks of Ukraine Khrushchev, according to a plan developed by the Ministry of State Security of the Ukrainian SSR and approved by Khrushchev, in the city. Mukachevo was destroyed by Romzha - the head of the Greek Catholic Church, who actively resisted the accession of Greek Catholics to Orthodoxy.
2. At the direction of Stalin, the Polish citizen Samet was destroyed in Ulyanovsk, who, while working in the USSR as an engineer, got owls. secret information about Soviet submarines, intending to leave the Soviet Union and pass this information on to the Americans.
3. In Saratov, the well-known enemy of the party, Shumsky, was destroyed, whose name - Shumkism - was called one of the trends among Ukrainian nationalists. Abakumov, giving the order for this operation, referred to the instructions of Stalin and Kaganovich.
4. In Moscow, at the direction of Stalin and Molotov, an American citizen Oggins was destroyed, who, while serving a sentence in a camp during the war, contacted the US Embassy in the USSR, and the Americans repeatedly sent notes asking for his release and issuance of permission for him to travel to the United States .
In accordance with the Regulations on the work of Spec. Services approved by the government, orders to carry out the listed operations were given by the then Minister of State Security of the USSR Abakumov. Eitingon and I are well aware that Abakumov, for all these operations, is Spets. Services of the Ministry of State Security of the USSR, reported to the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks.
In his memoirs, Sudoplatov is even more candid and proudly describes these murders in detail. The Sudoplatov-Eitingon team was engaged in the kidnapping of the victim, while the murder was Mairanovsky's "work". Since Archbishop Romzha was in the hospital after a car accident organized by the local leadership of the MGB, Mairanovsky supplied curare poison to the nurse on duty near the archbishop, an employee of the MGB. In Saratov, under the guise of a doctor, he also personally administered curare poison to A. Shumsky, who was lying in the hospital. Abducted on the streets of Ulyanovsk, interned since 1939, the Polish citizen Samet also died in the hands of Mairanovsky from injections of curare. Isaac Oggins, an American communist and veteran of the Comintern, worked as an NKVD agent in China and other countries of the Far East in the mid-1930s. In 1938, he arrived in the USSR with a fake Czech passport and was immediately arrested by the NKVD. After World War II, his wife turned to the American embassy in Moscow with a request to facilitate her husband's release and departure to the United States. Oggins was "released" with the help of Eitingon and a Mairanovsky injection. Sudoplatov also mentions other cases when Eitingon (who was fluent in several languages) invited foreigners to special apartments of the MGB in Moscow, where "doctor" Mairanovsky was waiting for them for an "examination". Sudoplatov did not tire of repeating that all this happened on the direct orders of the top leadership of the CPSU (b) and members of the government.
executioner career
Start
The autobiography, a copy of which is stored in the Memorial archive, helps to reconstruct the stages of Mairanovsky's career.
Grigory Moiseevich Mairanovsky was born in 1899, a Jew, studied at the University of Tiflis and then at the 2nd Moscow Medical Institute, from which he graduated in 1923. Since 1928, he was a graduate student, scientific and then senior researcher at the Biochemical Institute. A.N. Bach, and in 1933-1935 he headed the toxicological department of the same institute; in addition, in 1934 he was appointed deputy director of this institute. In 1935 Mairanovsky moved to the All-Union Institute of Experimental Medicine (VIEM), where until 1937 he was in charge of a secret toxicological special laboratory. In 1938-1940, he was a senior researcher at the department of pathology for the treatment of agents (poisonous substances) and at the same time began working in the NKVD system. From 1940 until the moment of his arrest (December 13, 1951), Mairanovsky devoted himself entirely to work in the "death laboratory".
Judging by this biography, by the beginning of experiments on humans with the use of mustard gas derivatives in Laboratory No. 1, Mairanovsky was a professional in working with toxic substances. In the late 1920s and early 1930s, the Soviet leadership was obsessed with the idea of chemical weapons and research on poison gases was carried out jointly with German experts on Soviet territory, near Samara. The head of the special school "Tomka" was a German specialist in OV Ludwig von Sicherer, and the first Soviet plant for the production of chemical weapons "Bersol" was built by German firms. In 1933, this collaboration ended, and Mairanovsky probably belonged to that generation of secret scientists who continued this work without German specialists.
In July 1940, at a closed meeting of the VIEM Academic Council, Mairanovsky defended his dissertation for the degree of Doctor of Biological Sciences. The dissertation was called "Biological activity of the products of the interaction of mustard gas with skin tissues during surface applications." Opponents - A.D. Speransky, G.M. Frank, N.I. Gavrilov and B.N. Tarusov - gave positive reviews. It is curious that the object of the study - the skin (whose?) - was not mentioned in the dissertation and did not raise questions from opponents. Later, during interrogations after his arrest, Mairanovsky was more outspoken. According to Colonel Bobrenev, Mairanovsky showed that he did not study the effect of mustard gas on the skin, but included in his dissertation data on the action of mustard gas derivatives taken by the "experimental" in Laboratory No. 1 with food.
In 1964, in a letter addressed to the President of the USSR Academy of Medical Sciences, Academician Nikolai Blokhin, Mairanovsky described the essence of his dissertation as follows: “Some aspects of the mechanism of toxic effects on the body (pathophysiology and mustard gas clinic) were revealed in the dissertation. Based on the study of the question of the mechanism of action of mustard gas, I proposed rational methods for the treatment of mustard gas lesions. The toxic effect of mustard gas (slowness of action, some "incubation" period and latent nature of the action), extensive and general damage to the body (such as "chain" reactions) from relatively small amounts of the damaging substance have much in common with the damaging effect on the body of malignant neoplasms. These principles can also be applied to the therapy of certain malignant neoplasms.
When reading these lines of a “humanist doctor” thinking about the treatment of cancer, and knowing how the information about the “pathophysiology and clinic of mustard gas” was obtained, I personally feel uneasy. After all, these are several years of “experiments”, during which Mairanovsky and his employees watched through a peephole in the cell door the torment of the victims, whom they poisoned with mustard gas compounds. It is curious that Academician Blokhin did not have such emotions and questions about how and on whom the data on the action of mustard gas were obtained. He highly appreciated Mairanovsky's work.
There was a hitch with the approval of Mairanovsky's dissertation, the Plenum of the Higher Attestation Commission proposed to finalize it. The dissertation was submitted for the second time to the Higher Attestation Commission in 1943. It remains to be seen what new data Mairanovsky included in it and how many victims this data cost their lives. It seems that the approval this time also took place only with the active intervention of the director of VIEM, Professor N.I. Grashchenkov and Academician A.D. Speransky, as well as under the "pressure" of the Deputy People's Commissar for Security Merkulov. These minor difficulties did not prevent the Academic Council of VIEM at a meeting on October 2, 1943, from conferring the title of professor of pathophysiology on Mairanovsky. It is noteworthy that the vote was not unanimous, but with one vote against and two abstentions.
After the end of the war, Mairanovsky and two other members of the laboratory were sent to Germany to search for German poison experts who experimented on humans. Mairanovsky returned to Moscow convinced that the achievements of the Nazi experts in this field were much less than the Soviet ones.
In 1946, Mairanovsky was removed from the post of head of the laboratory and, under the leadership of Sudoplatov and Eitingon, became actively involved in the activities of the DR Service as a killer.
The British Academy of Medical Scientists, also concerned about this issue, reported that the number of experiments in which human tissues or genes are transplanted into animals is constantly growing. Yes, in 2010. More than 1 million experiments were conducted, during which mice and fish were transplanted with human DNA. Scientists need these laboratory mutants to create new drugs for cancer, hepatitis, stroke, Alzheimer's disease and other ailments, as well as to understand the role of individual genes in the development of the body.
Moreover, individual experiments with animals should be banned altogether, M. Bobrow believes. For example, the transplantation of human stem cells into the brain of a primate should be banned, as this can lead to the humanization of a monkey: its brain can become human-like, the animal can acquire the rudiments of reason or even speak. And although it may seem to people that scientists were simply inspired by the new science fiction film Rise of the Planet of the Apes, in fact, the possibility of the appearance of too intelligent primates should be taken seriously, says Professor Thomas Baldwin.
EXPERIMENT "MILLER - Uri" - the first, except for the work of alchemists who tried to bring an artificial living being in a test tube, a truly scientific experiment in this area, conducted in the 1950s by an American chemistry student Stanley Miller. He suggested that life originated in the atmosphere of the ancient Earth due to the synthesis of complex molecules during lightning discharges. Stanley filled a large glass ball with water, methane, hydrogen, ammonia, and began to pass electrical discharges through this medium. Soon, the "primordial ocean" splashing at the bottom of the ball turned dark red from emerging biomolecules and amino acids, which are building blocks for proteins.
The Miller-Urey experiment is considered one of the most important experiments in the study of the origin of life on Earth. Opportunity Conclusions chemical evolution made on the basis of this experiment are criticized. According to critics, although the synthesis of the most important organic substances has been clearly demonstrated, the far-reaching conclusion about the possibility of chemical evolution, drawn directly from this experience, is not fully justified.
- the alleged code name for a secret committee of scientists, military leaders and government officials, allegedly formed in 1947 by order of US President Harry S. Truman.
The committee's intended purpose is to investigate UFO activity in the aftermath of the Roswell Incident, the alleged crash of an alien craft near Roswell, New Mexico, in July 1947. Majestic 12 is an important part of the UFO conspiracy theory of the current government to cover up information about UFOs. The Federal Bureau of Investigation has said documents related to Majestic 12 are "completely fictitious...
EXPERIMENT "PHOENIX" - time travel research that allegedly took place in the United States. In 1992, American engineer Al Bilek told reporters that at one time he was a participant in a unique experiment that received the code name "Phoenix". Bilek was placed inside a magnetron (a device that creates a powerful electromagnetic field) and moved in time to the past...
What is most surprising about the story of the "time traveler" is that before this experiment, his name was not Al Bilek at all, but Edward Cameron. But returning from the past, Cameron discovered that his last name was unknown to anyone, disappeared from all lists and documents, replaced by another. Yes, and friends claimed that from childhood they knew him as Bilek. Other facts confirming the existence of the Phoenix project (except for the story of Bilek himself) have not been found.
EXPERIMENT "PHILADELPHIA" - one of the most interesting riddles XX century, which gave rise to many conflicting rumors. According to legend, in 1943 in Philadelphia, the US military allegedly tried to create a ship invisible to enemy radars. Using calculations made by Albert Einstein, special generators were installed on the destroyer Eldridge. But during the test, the unexpected happened - the ship, surrounded by a cocoon of powerful electromagnetic field, disappeared not only from the radar screens, but literally evaporated in the truest sense of the word. After some time, the Eldridge materialized again, but in a completely different place and with a distraught crew on board. How reliable is this story?
The Philadelphia Experiment first became widely known thanks to astrophysicist Maurice Jessup, a scientist and writer from Iowa. In 1956, as a response to one of his books, which touched upon the problem of the unusual properties of space and time, he received a letter from a certain C. Allende, who reported that the military had already learned how to practically move objects "outside the usual space and time." The author of the letter served in 1943 on the ship "Andrew Fureset". From the board of this ship, which was part of the control group of the Philadelphia experiment, Allende (as he himself claims) perfectly saw how the Eldridge melted in the greenish glow, heard the buzz of the force field surrounding the destroyer ...
The most interesting thing in Allende's story is the description of the consequences of the experiment. Incredible things began to happen to people who returned "out of nowhere": they seemed to fall out of the real course of time (the term "freeze" was used). There were cases of spontaneous combustion (the term "ignited"). Once, two "frozen" people suddenly "ignited" and burned for eighteen days (?!), and the rescuers could not stop the burning of the bodies with any effort. There were other oddities as well. One of the sailors of the Eldridge, for example, disappeared forever, passing through the wall of his own apartment in front of his wife and child.
Jessup began investigating: rummaging through the archives, talking with the military and found a lot of evidence that gave him the opportunity to express his opinion about the reality of these events as follows: “The experiment is very interesting, but terribly dangerous. It affects the people participating in it too much. In the experiment, magnetic generators, the so-called "degaussers", were used, which worked at resonant frequencies and created a monstrous field around the ship. In practice, this gave a temporary withdrawal from our dimension and could mean a spatial breakthrough, if only it were possible to keep the process under control!" Perhaps Jessup learned too much, at least in 1959 he died under very mysterious circumstances - he was found in his own car, suffocated by exhaust gases.
The leadership of the US Navy denied the Philadelphia experiment, saying that nothing like this happened in 1943. "But many researchers did not believe the government. They continued to search for Jessup and got some results .. For example, there were documents confirming that from 1943 to 1944 Einstein was in the Navy in Washington D.C. Witnesses came forward, some of whom personally saw the Eldridge disappear, others were holding sheets of calculations made by Einstein's hand, which had a very characteristic handwriting. , telling about the sailors who descended from the ship and melted before the eyes of eyewitnesses.
Attempts to find out the truth about the Philadelphia experiment do not stop until now. And from time to time new interesting facts appear. Here are excerpts from the story of the American electronics engineer Edom Skilling (recorded on tape): "In 1990, my friend Margaret Sandys, who lives in Palm Beach, Florida, invited me and my friends to visit Dr. Carl Leisler, her neighbor, to discuss some details of the Philadelphia experiment Carl Leisler, physicist, one of the scientists who worked on this project in 1943.
They wanted to make a warship invisible to radar. On board was installed a powerful electronic device such as a huge magnetron (a magnetron is a generator of ultrashort waves, classified during World War II). This device received energy from electrical machines installed on the ship, the power of which was enough to supply electricity to a small city. The idea of the experiment was that a very strong electromagnetic field around the ship would serve as a shield for the radar beams. Carl Leisler was on the shore to observe and supervise the experiment.
When the magnetron started working, the ship disappeared. After a while, he reappeared, but all the sailors on board were dead. Moreover, part of their corpses turned into steel - the material from which the ship was made. During our conversation, Karl Leisler was very upset, it was clear that this old sick man still feels remorse and guilt for the death of the sailors who were on board the Eldridge, Laisler and his colleagues in the experiment believe that they sent the ship at another time, while the ship disintegrated into molecules, and when the reverse process occurred, a partial replacement of the organic molecules of human bodies with metal atoms took place. "And here is another curious fact that the Russian researcher V. Adamenko came across: and Berlitz, who were investigating the Philadelphia events, it is said that for many years after the incident, the destroyer "Eldridge" was in the reserve of the US Navy, and then the ship was given the name "Lion" and sold to Greece. Meanwhile, Adamenko visited a Greek family in 1993, where he met a retired Greek admiral who proved to be well aware of the Philadelphia Experiment and the fate of the Eldridge, confirming that the destroyer is one of the ships of the Greek Navy, but is not called "Lion", as Moure and Berlitz write, but "Tiger".
The unequivocal truth about the Philadelphia experiment has not yet been established. The researchers of this mysterious story did not find the main thing - documents. The logbooks of the Eldridge could explain a lot, but they have strangely disappeared. At least, all inquiries to the government and the US military department received an official answer: "... It is not possible to find, and therefore put at your disposal." And the logbooks of the escort ship "Fyureset" were completely destroyed on orders from above, although this is contrary to all existing rules.
EXPERIMENT "COMPUTER MOWGLI "- a unique project allegedly carried out by American scientists. "Computer Mowgli", according to reports that appeared in the press, is a virtual personality created in a secret laboratory. The son of a man and a woman, this baby is still not a man.
Pregnancy in 33-year-old Nadine M was difficult. When the baby was born (the parents had previously named him Sid), the doctors came to the conclusion that he was doomed. For several days in the intensive care unit, it was possible to maintain life in a tiny body. Meanwhile, with the help of special equipment, a mental scan of his brain was carried out. The father and mother were not informed about this unusual procedure, since the scientists themselves assessed the chances of success as vanishingly small. But to the surprise of everyone, the electrical potentials of Sid's brain neurons recorded by the equipment, transferred to the computer, began to live their unreal (superreal?) life there.
The fact that the baby died physically, but the potentials of his brain were brought into the machine and continue to develop there, was first reported only to Nadine. She took it quite calmly. The father, since he literally raved about the future first-born, for a whole month was shown Sid only on the computer screen, explaining this by the fact that the baby needs special survival conditions. When he found out about the essence of what was happening, he was horrified at first and even tried to destroy Sid's brain development program. But soon, like Nadine, he began to treat "Computer Mowgli" as his real-life child.
Now the father and mother are actively involved in the project, they take care of Sid's "health" - they install more and more new programs to protect against computer viruses, fearing that they may adversely affect the mental development of their baby. The researchers equipped the computer with multimedia and virtual reality systems that make it possible not only to see Sid "in three dimensions and life size", but to hear his voice and even "pick up" ...
The Scientific Observer magazine, which almost completely devoted one of its issues to the history of Sid, reported that the Computer Mowgli project was originally secret, but then a special commission of the US Congress decided to acquaint American taxpayers with some research results. specific name scientific center who performed the mental scan of the baby's brain is not listed. But from some hints, one can understand that we are talking about one of the institutions of the US Department of Defense.
There was a message about "Computer Mowgli" in the Russian press. The popular science almanac "It Can't Be", whose representative visited a computer conference in Las Vegas (USA), said that one of the participants in this project, a certain Steam Rowler, was present there. According to this specialist, scientists were able to scan only about 60 percent of the baby's neurons. But this turned out to be enough for the information entered into the computer to begin to develop itself. This story was not without a criminal motive. Some American computer-obsessed geek managed to "hack" the project's security program through a computer network and copy dozens of files from it. This is how Sid's "unauthorized and rather flawed" brother appeared. Fortunately, the child prodigy was "figured out" and the first attempt in the history of mankind "electronic kidnapping" was stopped.
Unfortunately, the main details of the project remain in the shadows: how was the scanning practically carried out, how quickly and successfully is the development of the copied intelligence, what is its real potential? Americans are in no hurry to share these secrets. And, very possibly, they have very good reasons for this. The same Steam Rowler was alarmed at a conference in Las Vegas and vaguely hinted that the appearance of a virtual demon, written off from a living person, could have very serious and unpredictable consequences for our civilization.
EXPERIMENT "NAUTILUS" - research on the passage of telepathic signals through a large layer of water. On July 25, 1959, a mysterious passenger boarded the American nuclear submarine Nautilus. The boat immediately left the port and plunged into the depths of the Atlantic Ocean for sixteen days. During all this time, no one saw the nameless passenger - he never left the cabin. But twice a day he sent the captain leaflets with strange signs. Now it was a star, then a cross, then two wavy lines... Captain Anderson placed the sheets in a light-tight envelope, put the date, hour and his signature. Above was a frightening vulture; "Top secret. In case of danger of capturing a submarine, destroy it!" When the boat landed in the port of Croyton, the passenger was met by an escort who took him to a military airfield, and from there to the state of Maryland. Soon he was talking to the director of the Biological Sciences Division of the US Air Force Research Office, Colonel William Bowers. He pulled out an envelope from the safe labeled "Research Center, H. Friendship, Maryland." The mysterious passenger, whom Bowers referred to as Lieutenant Jones, produced his Nautilus-marked package. They arranged the sheets of paper side by side, in accordance with the dates stamped. More than 70 percent of the characters in both envelopes matched ...
This information was voiced in the late 1950s by two French conspiracy theorists - Louis Povel and Jacques Bergier. Their article did not pass by the attention of the Soviet authorities protecting the country from a potential aggressor. On March 26, 1960, the Minister of Defense Marshal of the USSR Malinovsky received a report from Colonel Engineer, Candidate of Sciences Poletaev:
“The US Armed Forces have adopted telepathy (transmission of thoughts over a distance without the help of technical means) as a means of communication with submarines at sea. Scientific research on telepathy have been conducted for a long time, but since the end of 1957 large US research organizations have joined the work: Rend Corporation, Westinghouse, Bell Telephone Company and others. At the end of the work, an experiment was carried out - the transfer of information using telepathic communication from the base to the Nautilus submarine, which was submerged under the polar ice at a distance of up to 2000 kilometers from the base. The experience went well."
Refutations poured in that the Nautilus had never been used for such experiments, that during the period described it did not go to sea at all. Nevertheless, after this publication, similar experiments were repeatedly carried out in different countries, including in the USSR (Experiment "Arctic Circle").
The Minister, as expected, took a keen interest in such a striking success of a potential adversary. Several secret meetings were held with the participation of Soviet specialists in parapsychology. The possibility of opening works on the study of the phenomenon of telepathy in the military and military-medical aspects was discussed, but at that time they ended in nothing.
In the mid-1990s, correspondents for the Chicago magazine Zeus Wick conducted a series of interviews with the captain of the Nautilus, Anderson. His answer was categorical: “There were definitely no experiments on telepathy. The article by Povel and Bergier is wholly false. On July 25, 1960, the day the Nautilus was said to have gone to sea to conduct a telepathic session, the boat was in dry dock at Portsmouth.
These statements were verified by journalists through their channels and turned out to be true.
According to the author of the book "Parapsychological Warfare: Threat or Illusion" Martin Ebon was behind the articles about the "Nautilus". USSR State Security Committee! The purpose of the "duck", according to the author, is quite original: to convince the Central Committee of the CPSU to give the go-ahead to start such work in the Union. Allegedly, party leaders, brought up in the spirit of dogmatic materialism, experienced a prejudice against idealistic parapsychology. The only thing that could have prompted them to develop the relevant research was information about successful developments abroad.
EXPERIMENT "ARCAL CIRCLE" - a global experiment on "remote transmission of mental images", conducted in June 1994 on the initiative of the Novosibirsk Institute of General Pathology and Human Ecology. This large-scale scientific event involved several thousand volunteers, researchers and psychic operators from twenty countries. Telepathic signals were transmitted from different continents, from special hypomagnetic chambers that isolate the Earth's magnetic field, from anomalous zones of the planet, such as, for example, the "Perm Triangle" and the cave of the "Black Devil" in Khakassia ...
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The results of the experiment, according to Novosibirsk scientists, confirmed the reality of the existence of mental connections between people. The "Arctic Circle" is a natural continuation of research begun in the last century. Here is a brief chronology of scientific research in this area:
- ...1875. The famous chemist A. Butlerov, who was also engaged in the study of anomalous phenomena, put forward an electrical induction hypothesis to explain the phenomenon of thought transmission at a distance.
- ...1886. English researchers E. Gurney, F. Myers and F. Podmore used the term "telepathy" to refer to this phenomenon (for the first time).
- ...1887. Professor of Philosophy, Psychology and Physiology of Lviv University Y. Okhorovich presented a detailed justification of Butlerov's hypothesis.
Serious experiments in the field of telepathy were carried out in 19-9-1927 by Academician V. Bekhterev at the Leningrad Institute for the Study of the Brain. At that time, the famous engineer B. Kazhinsky conducted the same experiments. Remember A. Belyaev's science fiction novel "The Lord of the World" (1929). The plot of this work is as follows: in the hands of immoral people there is an invention that allows you to read and write people's thoughts, as well as transmit trouble-free mental orders with the help of special emitters. The book is completely built on the scientific ideas of Bernard Bernardovich Kazinsky. To emphasize this, Belyaev even named a positive hero - Kachinsky, changing only one letter in Kazhinsky's surname ...
The results obtained by Bekhterev and Kazhinsky, judging by the available data, confirmed the existence of the phenomenon of thought transmission over a distance. In 1932, the Leningrad Brain Institute received a government order from the People's Commissariat of Defense of the USSR to activate experimental studies in the field of telepathy. Scientific leadership was entrusted to Professor L.Vasiliev.
The Laboratory of Biophysics of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR (Moscow), headed by Academician P. Lazorev, also received a corresponding order. The executor of the theme, ordered by the military, and therefore received the "secrecy stamp", was Professor S. Turlygin. The memoirs of these people have been preserved: "We have to admit that there really is a certain physical agent that establishes the interaction of two organisms with each other,"; Professor S. Turlygin stated. "Neither shielding nor distance worsened the results," Professor L. Vasiliev admitted.
- ... In September 1958 (according to some publications), by order of the Minister of Defense of the USSR, Marshal R. Malinovsky, several closed meetings were held on the study of the phenomenon of telepathy. The head of the Main Military Medical Directorate, Professor L. Vasiliev, Professor P. Gulyaev and other specialists were present ...
- ...1960. At the Physiological Institute (Leningrad), a special laboratory was organized to study telepathic phenomena.
- ...1965- 1968. In Akademgorodok near Novosibirsk, at the Institute of Automation and Electrometry of the Siberian Branch of the USSR Academy of Sciences, an extensive program of telepathic research on humans and animals was carried out;
Closed studies in parapsychology were carried out at the Moscow Institute of the Brain of the USSR Academy of Sciences, at the Institute for Information Transmission Problems (IPPI) of the USSR Academy of Sciences, and at other institutes and laboratories. Secret experiments were carried out with the active participation of the military using expensive equipment, up to the involvement of submarines.
- ...1969. By order of the Secretary of the Central Committee of the CPSU P. Demichev, a special meeting of the commission to investigate the problem of parapsychological phenomena and the reasons for the increased public interest in them was held. Gathered all the color domestic psychology- A. Luria, A. Lyuboevich, V. Zinchenko ... They were tasked with dispelling the myth about the existence of a parapsychological movement in the USSR. Despite everything, it still says: "There is a phenomenon ..."
The existence of the phenomenon was also confirmed by the global experiment ("Arctic Circle") by Novosibirsk scientists. But telepathic phenomena are still perceived by the mass consciousness as a kind of fiction, a hoax. Probably because the true nature of this phenomenon has not yet found a clear explanation.
Death ValleyThe accusation of the USSR in experiments on people
"Valley of Death" - a documentary story about special uranium camps in the Magadan region. Doctors in this top-secret zone conducted criminal experiments on the brains of prisoners.
Revealing Nazi Germany of genocide, the Soviet government, in deep secrecy, at the state level, put into practice an equally monstrous program. It was in such camps, under an agreement with the VKPB, that Hitler's special brigades were trained and gained experience in the mid-30s.
The results of this investigation were widely covered by many world media. Alexander Solzhenitsin also participated in a special TV show hosted live by the NHK of Japan (by phone).
"Valley of Death" is a rare piece of evidence that captures the true face of Soviet power and its vanguard: VChK-NKVD-MGB-KGB.
Attention! This page shows photographs of a human brain autopsy. Please do not view this page if you are an excitable person, suffer from any form of mental disorder, if you are pregnant or under 18 years of age.
If you line up all the people who "at the call of the party" looked at the sky through the prison bars of the Gulag, then this living tape will stretch to the moon.
I have seen many concentration camps. Both old and new. I spent several years in one of them. Then I studied the history of the camps of the Soviet Union according to archival documents, but I ended up in the most terrible one a year before the moment when the KGB forced me to flee the country. This camp was called "Butugychag", which in translation from the language of Russian northern peoples means "Valley of Death".
The place got its name when hunters and nomadic tribes of reindeer herders from the families of Egorovs, Dyachkovs and Krokhalevs, roaming along the Detrin River, came across a huge field dotted with human skulls and bones, and when the deer in the herd began to get sick with a strange disease - at first their wool fell out on legs, and then the animals lay down and could not get up. Mechanically, this name passed to the remains of the Beria camps of the 14th branch of the Gulag.
The zone is huge. It took me many hours to cross it from end to end. Buildings or their remains could be seen everywhere: along the main gorge, where the buildings of the enrichment factory stand; in many lateral mountain branches; behind neighboring hills, densely indented with scars of search pits and holes in adits. In the village of Ust-Omchug, closest to the zone, I was warned that it was not safe to walk along the local hills - at any moment you could fall into the old adit.
The well-traveled road ended in front of the uranium enrichment plant, gaping with black gaps in the windows. There is nothing around. The radiation killed every living thing. Only moss grows on black stones. The poet Anatoly Zhigulin, who was sitting in this camp, said that at the furnaces, where water was evaporated from the uranium concentrate after washing on metal trays, the prisoners worked for one to two weeks, after which they died, and new slaves were driven to replace them. That was the level of radiation.
My Geiger counter came to life long before I got to the factory. In the building itself, it crackled without interruption. And when I approached the 23 metal barrels of concentrate that had been left against the outer wall, the danger signal became unbearably loud. Active construction went on here in the early 40s, when the question arose: who would be the first owner of atomic weapons.
From the wooden gate, with handles polished to a shine by the palms of convicts, I pass to the cemetery. Rare sticks stuck between boulders, with plaques-tablets. However, the inscriptions are no longer readable. Bleached, erased their time and wind.
“Recently, two operations were performed in the Magadan hospital during a conditional “gas attack”. The doctors, the medical staff who helped them and the patients put on gas masks. The surgeons Pulleritz and Sveshnikov, nurse Antonova, orderlies Karpenyuk and Terekhina took part in the operation. The first operation was performed by one of the fighters of the frontier detachment, who had an enlargement of the veins of the spermatic cord. Patient K. had his appendix removed. Both operations, together with preparation, took 65 minutes. The first experience in Kolyma of surgeons in gas masks was quite a success. "
Even if during the experiment a gas mask was also put on the patient, then what did the experimenters do with a hole open in the stomach?
So, moving from building to building, from the ruins of complexes obscure to me, concentrated at the bottom of the gorge, I climb to the very top of the ridge, to a solitary standing, intact camp. A piercingly cold wind drives low clouds. Latitude of Alaska. Summer is here, at most, two months a year. And in winter, the frost is such that if you pour water from the second floor, then ice falls to the ground.
Rusty tin cans rumbled underfoot near the soldier's tower. Picked up one. Still read the inscription on English language. This is stew. From America for Red Army soldiers at the front. And for the Soviet "internal troops". Did Roosevelt know who he was feeding?
I go into one of the barracks, crowded with bunk beds. Only they are very small. Even crouched, they can not fit. Maybe they are for women? Yes, the size is too small for women. But now, a rubber galosh caught my eye. She lay forlornly under the corner bunks. My God! The galosh fits completely in the palm of my hand. So, these are bunk beds for children! So I went to the other side of the ridge. Here, right behind the "Butugychag", there was a large women's camp "Bacchante", which functioned at the same time.
Remains are everywhere. Here and there fragments, joints of tibia bones come across.
In the burnt ruins, I stumbled upon a chest bone. Among the ribs, a porcelain crucible caught my attention - I worked with such in the biological laboratories of the university. The incomparable, sugary smell of human ashes oozes from under the stones...
| "I am a geologist, and I know that the former zone is located in the region of a powerful polymetallic ore cluster. Here, in the interfluve of the Detrin and Tenka, reserves of gold, silver, and cassiterite are concentrated. But Butugychag is also known for the manifestation of radioactive rocks, in particular uranium-bearing. By genus In my work, I have had to visit these places more than once. The enormous strength of the radioactive background is detrimental to all living things here. This is the reason for the tremendous mortality in the zone. Radiation at Butygychag is uneven. Somewhere it reaches a very high, extremely life-threatening level, but there are also places where the background is quite acceptable". A. Rudnev. 1989 (Rudnev published this letter in the village newspaper of Ust-Omchug "Lenin's Banner", in order to prevent schoolchildren from excursions to the "Butugychaga" area) |
The day of research was over. I had to hurry down, where in the house of a modern power plant, at its caretaker, I found shelter for these days.
Victor, the owner of the house, was sitting on the porch when I wearily approached and sat down beside him.
Where were you, what did you see? he asked monosyllabically.
I told about the uranium factory, the children's camp, the mines.
“Yes, don’t eat berries here and don’t drink water from the rivers,” Victor interrupted and nodded at a barrel of imported water standing on car wheels.
- What are you looking for?
I narrowed my eyes, looked point-blank at the young master of the house.
- The mine, under the letter "C" ...
- You won't find it. Previously, they knew where it was, but after the war, when the camps began to close, they blew everything up, and all Butugychag's plans disappeared from the geological department. Only the stories that the letter "Ts" was filled to the very top with the corpses of those who were shot remained.
He paused. - Yes, not in the mines, and not in the children's camps, the secret of "Butugychag". There's their secret, - Victor showed his hand in front of him. - Behind the river, you see. There was a laboratory complex. Strongly guarded.
- What did they do in it?
- And you go tomorrow to the upper cemetery. Look...
But before going to the mysterious cemetery, Victor and I examined the "laboratory complex".
The area is tiny. It was made up of several houses. All of them are diligently destroyed. Blasted to the ground. Only one strong end wall remained standing. It is strange: out of the entire huge number of buildings in "Butugychag", only the "infirmary" was destroyed - it was burned to the ground, yes, this zone.
The first thing I saw were the remains of a powerful ventilation system with characteristic bells. Such systems are equipped with fume hoods in all chemical and biological laboratories. Four rows of barbed wire perimeter stretched around the foundations of the former buildings. It still survives in places. Inside the perimeter are poles with electrical insulators. It seems that a high voltage current was also used to protect the object.
Making my way among the ruins, I remembered the story of Sergei Nikolaev from the village of Ust-Omchug:
“Just before the entrance to Butugychag there was Object No. 14. We didn’t know what they were doing there. But this zone was guarded especially carefully. ". But in order to get to object No. 14, one more was needed - a special pass and with it it was necessary to go through nine checkpoints. Everywhere sentries with dogs. On the hills around - machine gunners: the mouse will not slip through. No. 14 "specially built nearby airfield".
Indeed, a top-secret object.
Yes, the bombers knew their business. There is little left. True, the nearby prison building survived, or, as it is called in the documents of the Gulag, "BUR" - a high-security barrack. It is composed of roughly hewn stone boulders, covered from the inside of the building with a thick layer of plaster. On the remains of the plaster in two chambers, we found the inscriptions scratched with a nail: "30.XI.1954. Evening", "Kill me" and an inscription in Latin script, in one word: "Doctor".
Horse skulls were an interesting find. I counted 11 of them. About five or six lay inside the foundation of one of the blown up buildings.
It is unlikely that horses were used here as a draft force. The same opinion is shared by those who went through the Kolyma camps.
"I personally visited many enterprises in those years and I know that even for the removal of timber from the hills, for all cases, not to mention mountain work, one type of labor was used - the manual labor of prisoners ..." From the answer of the former constable F. Bezbabichev to the question of whether
how horses were used in the economy of the camps.
Well, at the dawn of the nuclear age, they might well have been trying to get an anti-radiation serum. And this cause, since the time of Louis Pasteur, it was the horses that served faithfully.
How long ago was that? After all, the Butugychag complex has been well preserved. The bulk of the camps in Kolyma were closed after the "exposure" and execution of their godfather - Lavrenty Beria. In the weather station house, which stands above the children's camp, I managed to find an observation log. The last date stamped on it is May 1956.
Why are these ruins called a laboratory? I asked Victor.
- Somehow a car with three passengers drove up, - he began to tell, clearing in the weeds, among the broken tiles, another horse skull. There was a woman with them. And although guests are rare here, they did not name themselves. They got out of the car at my house, looked around, and then, a woman, pointing to the ruins, said: "Here was a laboratory. And over there - an airport ...".
They did not stay long, and they could not be asked about anything. But all three are aged, well dressed...
The Berlag camps were especially secret and is it any wonder that no official data on their prisoners can be obtained. But there are archives. The KGB, the Ministry of Internal Affairs, the party archives - lists of prisoners are stored somewhere. In the meantime, only scanty, fragmentary data suggest a carefully erased trail. Exploring the abandoned Kolyma camps, I looked through thousands of newspapers and archival references, getting closer and closer to the truth.
The writer Asir Sandler, the author of "Knots for Memory" published in the USSR, told me that one of his readers was a prisoner of a mysterious sharashka, a scientific institution in which prisoners worked. It was somewhere in the vicinity of Magadan...
The secret of the "Butugychag" complex was revealed the next day, when, with difficulty navigating the intricacies of the ridges, we climbed a mountain saddle. It was this secluded place that the camp administration chose for one of the cemeteries. Two others: "officer's" - for the camp staff and, possibly, for civilians, as well as a large "Zekov's" - are located below. The first is near the processing plant. The belonging of his dead to the administration is given out by wooden pedestals with stars. The second begins immediately outside the walls of the burnt infirmary, which is understandable. Why drag the dead over the mountains ... And here, from the central part, at least a mile. Yes, even up.
Slightly noticeable mounds. They can be mistaken for a natural relief, if they were not numbered. As soon as they sprinkled gravel on the dead man, they stuck a stick next to it with a number punched on the lid of a can of stew. But where do the convicts get canned food from? Two-digit numbers with a letter of the alphabet: Г45; B27; A50...
At first glance, the number of graves here is not so great. Ten and a half rows of crooked sticks with numbers. There are 50-60 graves in each row. This means that only about a thousand people found their last refuge here.
But, closer to the edge of the saddle, I find marks of a different type. There are no individual mounds here. On a flat area, the posts are dense, like the teeth of a comb. Ordinary short sticks - branches of chopped trees. Already without tin covers and numbers. Just mark the place.
Two swollen mounds indicate the pits where the dead were dumped in a heap. Most likely, this "ritual" was carried out in winter, when it was not possible to bury each one separately, in frozen and hard as concrete soil. The pits, in this case, were harvested from the summer.
And here's what Victor was talking about. Under the elfin bush, in a grave torn apart by animals or people, lies a half of a human skull. The upper part of the vault, half an inch above the brow ridges, is neatly and evenly cut. Clearly a surgical cut.
Among them are many other bones of the skeleton, but what attracts my attention is the upper cut off part of the skull with a bullet hole in the back of the head. This is a very important find, because it indicates that the opened skulls are not a medical examination to determine the cause of death. Who first puts a bullet in the back of the head, and then performs an anatomical autopsy to determine the cause of death?
We need to open one of the graves, - I say to my fellow traveler. - You need to make sure that this is not the "work" of today's vandals. Victor himself told about the raids on the camp cemeteries of the village punks: they take out skulls and make lamps out of them.
We select the grave under the number "G47". Didn't have to dig. Literally five centimeters through the soil thawed over the summer, the sapper shovel hit something.
Carefully! Don't damage the bones.
“Yes, there is a coffin here,” the assistant replied.
- Coffin?! I was amazed. A coffin for a convict is as unseen as if we stumbled upon the remains of an alien. This is truly an amazing cemetery.
Never, nowhere in the vast expanses of the Gulag, were prisoners buried in coffins. They threw them into adits, buried them in the ground, and in winter they simply buried them in the snow, drowned them in the sea, but so that coffins would be made for them?! .. Yes, it looks like this is a "sharashka" cemetery. Then the presence of coffins is understandable. After all, the convicts were buried by the convicts themselves. And they were not supposed to see the opened heads.
At the north end of the cemetery, the ground is littered with bones. Clavicles, ribs, tibia, vertebrae. All over the field, halves of skulls turn white. Straight cut over toothless jaws. Big, small, but equally restless, thrown out of the ground by an evil hand, they lie under the piercing blue sky of Kolyma. Is it possible that such a terrible fate dominated their owners that even the bones of these people are doomed to reproach? And it still pulls here with the stench of bloody years.
Again a series of questions: who needed the brains of these unfortunates? What years? By whose command? Who the hell are these "scientists" who, with ease, like a hare, put a bullet into a human head, and then, with devilish meticulousness, gutted the still smoking brains? And where are the archives? How many masks does it take to judge the Soviet system for the crime called genocide?
None of the well-known encyclopedias provides data on experiments on living human material, except to look in the materials of the Nuremberg trials. Only the following is obvious: it was precisely in those years when the Butugychag was functioning that the effect of radioactivity on the human body was intensively studied. There can be no talk of any autopsies of those who died in the camps for a medical report on the causes of death. None of the camps did this. A human life was worth negligibly cheap in Soviet Russia.
The trepanation of skulls could not be carried out on the initiative of local authorities. Lavrenty Beria and Igor Kurchatov were personally responsible for the nuclear weapons program and everything connected with it.
It remains to assume the existence of a successfully implemented state program, sanctioned at the level of the government of the USSR. For similar crimes against humanity, the "Nazis" are still being driven around Latin America. But only in relation to domestic executioners and misanthropes, their native department shows enviable deafness and blindness. Is it because the sons of executioners are sitting in warm armchairs today?
Little touch. Histological studies are carried out on the brain, extracted no more than a few minutes after death. Ideally, in vivo. Any method of killing gives a "not clean" picture, since a whole complex of enzymes and other substances appear in the brain tissues, released during pain and psychological shock.
Moreover, the purity of the experiment is violated by the euthanasia of the experimental animal or the introduction of psychotropic drugs into it. The only method used in biological laboratory practice for such experiments is decapitation - almost instantaneous cutting off of the animal's head from the body.
I took with me two fragments from different skulls, for examination. Fortunately, there was a familiar prosecutor in the Khabarovsk Territory - Valentin Stepankov (later - the Prosecutor General of Russia).
You understand what it smells like, - the prosecutor of the region with the badge of a member of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR on the lapel of his jacket looked at me, lowering the sheet with my questions for the expert. - Yes, and according to the affiliation, the Magadan prosecutor's office, and not mine, should deal with this case ...
I was silent.
- Okay, Stepankov nodded, - I also have a conscience. And he pressed the button on the table.
“Prepare a decision to initiate a criminal case,” he turned to the newcomer. And again to me: - Otherwise, I can not send the bones for examination.
- What's the deal? the assistant asked.
- Pass it on to the people of Magadan...
The conclusion of the examination 221-FT, I received a month later. Here is his abridged summary:
"The right part of the skull, presented for research, belongs to the body of a young man, no more than 30 years old. The sutures of the skull between the bones are not closed. Anatomical and morphological features indicate that the bone belongs to a part of the male skull with characteristic features of the Caucasoid race.
The presence of multiple defects in the compact layer (multiple, deep cracks, areas of scarification), their complete fat-freeness, white color, fragility and brittleness, indicate the prescription of the death of the man who owned the skull, 35 years or more from the moment of the study.
The smooth upper edges of the frontal and temporal bones were formed from sawing them, as evidenced by the traces of sliding - tracks from the action of a sawing tool (for example, a saw). Given the location of the cut on the bones and its direction, I believe that this cut could have been formed during an anatomical examination of the skull and brain.
Part of the skull number 2, more likely belonged to a young woman. The even upper edge on the frontal bone was formed by cutting a sawing tool - a saw, as evidenced by step-like slip marks - routes.
Part of the skull No. 2, judging by the less altered bone tissue, was in the burial places for less time than part of the skull No. 1, given that both parts were in the same conditions (climatic, soil, etc.)"
Forensic medical expert V. A. Kuzmin.
Khabarovsk Regional Bureau of Forensic Medical Examination.
November 13, 1989
My search didn't end there. I visited "Butugychag" two more times. More and more interesting materials fell into the hands. Witnesses appeared.
P. Martynov, a prisoner of the Kolyma camps under the number 3-2-989, points to the direct physical extermination of the Butugychag prisoners: “Their remains were buried at the Shaitan pass. they cleaned the remains of the animals pulled from the glacier on the pass, where even today human bones are found on a huge area ... "
Perhaps there you need to look for an adit under the letter "C"?
interesting information managed to get it from the editorial office of the Leninskoye Znamya newspaper in Ust-Omchug (now the newspaper is called Tenka), where a large mining and processing plant is located - Tenkinsky GOK, to which Butugychag belonged.
The journalists handed me a note from Semyon Gromov, the former deputy director of the Mining and Processing Plant. The note touched upon a topic of interest to me. But, perhaps, the price of this information was Gromov's life.
Here is the text of this note:
"The daily "withdrawal" along the Tenlagh was 300 convicts. The main reasons were hunger, illness, fights between prisoners and just" the convoy fired. "A OP was organized at the Tymoshenko mine - a health center for those who had already "reached." This point, of course, he did not heal anyone, but some professor worked there with the prisoners: he went and drew circles on the robes of prisoners with a pencil - these will die tomorrow. By the way, on the other side of the road, on a small plateau, there is a strange cemetery. Strange because everyone , buried there, the skulls have been sawn apart. Isn't this connected with the professor's work?"
Semyon Gromov recorded this in the early 80s and soon died in a car accident.
I also got another document from the GOK - the results of radiological studies at the Butugychag facility, as well as measurements of the radioactivity of objects. All these documents were strictly confidential. When the US War Department, at my request, requested geological map this area, even the CIA denied the presence of uranium mining in these places. And I visited six special facilities of the uranium Gulag of the Magadan region, and one of the camps is located at the very edge of the Arctic Ocean, not far from the polar city of Pevek.
I found Khasana Niyazov already in 1989, when perestroika and glasnost relieved the fear of many. The 73-year-old woman was not afraid to give an hour-long interview in front of a TV camera.
From the recording of the interview with H. Niyazova:
H.N. - I have not been to Butugychag, God bless. We considered it a penal camp.
- How were the prisoners buried?
H.N. - No way. Sprinkled with earth or snow if he died in winter, and that's it.
- Were there coffins?
H.N. - Never. What coffins are there!
- Why are all convicts buried in coffins at one of the three cemeteries of "Butugychag" and their skulls have been sawn apart?
H.N. - It was opened by doctors ...
- For what purpose?
H.N. - We, among the prisoners, were talking: they were doing experiments. Learned something.
- Was it done only in Butugychag, or somewhere else?
H.N. - Not. Only in "Butugychag".
- When did you learn about the experiments at Butugychag?
H.N. - It was around 1948-49, the conversations were fleeting, but we were all frightened by this ...
- Maybe it was sawed alive?
H.N. - And who knows... There was a very large medical unit. There were even professors...
I interviewed Hasan Niyazov after my second visit to Butugychag. Listening to the courageous woman, I looked at her hands with the camp number burned out.
- This can not be! - then exclaim Jak Sheahan, - the chief of the CBS News bureau, peering at the screen and not believing his eyes. - I always thought that it was only in the fascist camps ...
I was looking for Shaitan Pass. Remember, Martynov, prisoner No. 3-2-989, wrote that after the experiments, the corpses were buried in a glacier at the pass. And the cemetery indicated by Victor was in a different place. There was no pass, no glacier. Perhaps there were several special cemeteries. Where is Satan, no one remembers. The name was known, heard before, but there are about two dozen passes in the Butugychag area.
On one of them, I stumbled upon an adit walled up with an ice plug. She would not have attracted attention in any way if it were not for the remnants of clothing frozen into the ice. These were Zekov's robes. I know them too well to be confused with something else. All this meant only one thing: the entrance was walled up on purpose when the camp was still working.
Finding a crowbar and a pickaxe was not difficult. They were scattered around the galleries in abundance.
The last blow of the crowbar broke through the ice wall. After opening a hole for the body to pass through, I slid down the rope from the giant stalactite blocking the way. Flicked the switch. The beam of the lantern played in some kind of gray atmosphere, sort of smoked by smokers. A cloyingly sweet smell tickled my throat. From the ceiling, a beam glided over an icy wall and…
I started. Before me was the road to hell. From the very bottom to the middle, the passage was littered with half-decomposed bodies of people. The rags of decayed clothes covered the bare bones, the skulls turned white under the tufts of hair...
Backing away, I left the dead place. No nerves are enough to spend considerable time here. I only managed to note the presence of things. Knapsacks, knapsacks, collapsed suitcases. And more ... bags. Seems to be female hair. Big, full, almost my height ...
The posters of my photo exhibition "The accusation of the USSR in experiments on people" so excited the authorities of Khabarovsk that the head of the KGB department of the region and prosecutors of all ranks, not to mention party bosses, arrived at the opening. The officials present gritted their teeth, but could not do anything - in the hall were the operators of the Japanese NHK, headed by one of the directors of this powerful television company - my friend.
The prosecutor general of the region, Valentin Stepankov, added fuel to the fire. Jumping on a black "Volga", he picked up a microphone and ... officially opened the exhibition.
Taking advantage of the moment, I asked the head of the KGB, Lieutenant General Pirozhnyak, to inquire about the Butugychag camps.
The answer came surprisingly quickly. The very next day, a man in civilian clothes appeared at the exhibition and said that the archives were in the information and computer center of the Ministry of Internal Affairs and the KGB in Magadan, but they had not been dismantled.
To my request over the phone to work with the archives, the head of the Magadan KGB, laughing, answered:
- Well, what are you! The archive is huge. You will take it apart, Seryozha, well ... for seven years ...
On my third and last visit to "Butugychag", my main goal was to film a special cemetery on videotape.
I go around the dug up graves, looking for a whole box. Here is a corner of the board peeking out from under the stones. I rake the rubble so that it does not fall into the coffin. The board is rotten, you have to lift it with care.
Under the arm, leaning his forehead against the side wall, a large male skull grins toothily. The upper part of it is evenly sawn. It fell off like the lid of a hideous box, revealing a sticky coating of the remnants of a once-stolen brain. The bones of the skull are yellow, which have not seen the sun, on the eye sockets and cheekbones the hair is pulled up on the face of the scalp. This is the process of trepanation...
I carry into the coffin all the skulls picked up along the field.
"Sleep well" - is it possible to say so in this cemetery?
I'm already far from the graves, and the yellow skull - here it is, nearby. I see him lying in his coffin-box. How were you killed, unfortunate? Is it not that terrible death, for the "purity of the experiment"? And wasn’t a free-standing drill built for you a hundred meters from the blown-up laboratory?
And why are there words on its walls: "Kill me..."; "Doctor"?
Who are you, prisoner, what is your name? Isn't your mother still waiting for you?
"I'm writing from a distant land... I'm still waiting for a meeting with my son. It happened like that. 1942. My husband and son were drafted into the army. I could... And in 1943 I received a letter, it is not known who the author is, he writes like this: your son, Mikhail Chalkov, did not return from work, we were together in the Magadan camp in the Omchug valley, if there is an opportunity, I will tell you.
I still cannot understand why my son did not write a single letter and how did he get there?
Forgive my concern, but if you have children, you will believe how difficult it is for parents. I devoted all my youth to waiting, left alone with four children ...
Describe that camp. I'm still waiting, maybe he's there..."
Karaganda region, Kazakh SSR,
Chalkova A. L.
In the death camp "Butugychag" died:
01. Foma Savvich Maglich- captain of the 1st rank, chairman of the commission for the acceptance of ships in Komsomolsk-on-Amur;
02. Sleptsov Petr Mikhailovich- Colonel who served with Rokossovsky;
03. Kazakov Vasily Markovich- foreman lieutenant from the army of General Dovator;
04. Nazim Grigory Vladimirovich- the chairman of the collective farm from the Chernihiv region;
05. Morozov Ivan Ivanovich- sailor of the Baltic Fleet;
06. Bondarenko Alexander Nikolaevich- factory locksmith from Nikopol;
07. Rudenko Alexander Petrovich- senior lieutenant of aviation;
08. Belousov Yury Afanasyevich- "penalty box" from the battalion on Malaya Zemlya;
09. Reshetov Mikhail Fedorovich- tankman;
10. Yankovsky- Secretary of the Odessa Regional Committee of the Komsomol;
11. Ratkevich Vasily Bogdanovich- Belarusian teacher;
12. Star Pavel Trofimovich- senior lieutenant, tanker;
13. Ryabokon Nikolay Fedorovich- an auditor from the Zhytomyr region;
...
330000.
...
330001.
...
...
I described the camp to you.
Forgive me, mother.
Sergei Melnikoff
Magadan region, 1989-90
Death Valley Accusation of the USSR in experiments on people
"Valley of Death" - a documentary story about special uranium camps in the Magadan region. Doctors in this top-secret zone conducted criminal experiments on the brains of prisoners.
Revealing Nazi Germany of genocide, the Soviet government, in deep secrecy, at the state level, put into practice an equally monstrous program. It was in such camps, under an agreement with the VKPB, that Hitler's special brigades were trained and gained experience in the mid-30s.
The results of this investigation were widely covered by many world media. Alexander Solzhenitsin also participated in a special TV show hosted live by the NHK of Japan (by phone).
"Valley of Death" is a rare piece of evidence that captures the true face of Soviet power and its vanguard: VChK-NKVD-MGB-KGB.
Attention! This page shows photographs of a human brain autopsy. Please do not view this page if you are an excitable person, suffer from any form of mental disorder, if you are pregnant or under 18 years of age.
If you line up all the people who "at the call of the party" looked at the sky through the prison bars of the Gulag, then this living tape will stretch to the moon.
I have seen many concentration camps. Both old and new. I spent several years in one of them. Then I studied the history of the camps of the Soviet Union according to archival documents, but I ended up in the most terrible one a year before the moment when the KGB forced me to flee the country. This camp was called "Butugychag", which in translation from the language of Russian northern peoples means "Valley of Death".
Butugychag, where they were not buried, but thrown off a cliff. There were pits dug. Oksana went there when she was free (see). What should be there to surprise a person who has served 10 years! I saw an old man there: he was walking behind the zone, crying. He served 15 years, does not return home, walks here, begging. Said this is your future.
(Nina Hagen-Thorn)
The place got its name when hunters and nomadic tribes of reindeer herders from the families of Egorovs, Dyachkovs and Krokhalevs, roaming along the Detrin River, came across a huge field dotted with human skulls and bones, and when the deer in the herd began to get sick with a strange disease - at first their wool fell out on legs, and then the animals lay down and could not get up. Mechanically, this name passed to the remains of the Beria camps of the 14th branch of the Gulag.
The zone is huge. It took me many hours to cross it from end to end. Buildings or their remains could be seen everywhere: along the main gorge, where the buildings of the enrichment factory stand; in many lateral mountain branches; behind neighboring hills, densely indented with scars of search pits and holes in adits. In the village of Ust-Omchug, closest to the zone, I was warned that it was not safe to walk along the local hills - at any moment you could fall into the old adit.
The well-traveled road ended in front of the uranium enrichment plant, gaping with black gaps in the windows. There is nothing around. The radiation killed every living thing. Only moss grows on black stones. The poet Anatoly Zhigulin, who was sitting in this camp, said that at the furnaces, where water was evaporated from the uranium concentrate after washing on metal trays, the prisoners worked for one to two weeks, after which they died, and new slaves were driven to replace them. That was the level of radiation.
My Geiger counter came to life long before I got to the factory. In the building itself, it crackled without interruption. And when I approached the 23 metal barrels of concentrate that had been left against the outer wall, the danger signal became unbearably loud. Active construction went on here in the early 40s, when the question arose: who would be the first owner of atomic weapons.
From the wooden gate, with handles polished to a shine by the palms of convicts, I pass to the cemetery. Rare sticks stuck between boulders, with plaques-tablets. However, the inscriptions are no longer readable. Bleached, erased their time and wind.
“Recently, two operations were performed in the Magadan hospital during a conditional “gas attack”. The doctors, the medical staff who helped them and the patients put on gas masks. The surgeons Pulleritz and Sveshnikov, nurse Antonova, orderlies Karpenyuk and Terekhina took part in the operation. The first operation was performed by one of the fighters of the frontier detachment, who had an enlargement of the veins of the spermatic cord. Patient K. had his appendix removed. Both operations, together with preparation, took 65 minutes. The first experience in Kolyma of surgeons in gas masks was quite a success. "
Even if during the experiment a gas mask was also put on the patient, then what did the experimenters do with a hole open in the stomach?
So, moving from building to building, from the ruins of complexes obscure to me, concentrated at the bottom of the gorge, I climb to the very top of the ridge, to a solitary standing, intact camp. A piercingly cold wind drives low clouds. Latitude of Alaska. Summer is here, at most, two months a year. And in winter, the frost is such that if you pour water from the second floor, then ice falls to the ground.
Rusty tin cans rumbled underfoot near the soldier's tower. Picked up one. There is also an inscription in English. This is stew. From America for Red Army soldiers at the front. And for the Soviet "internal troops". Did Roosevelt know who he was feeding?
I go into one of the barracks, crowded with bunk beds. Only they are very small. Even crouched, they can not fit. Maybe they are for women? Yes, the size is too small for women. But now, a rubber galosh caught my eye. She lay forlornly under the corner bunks. My God! The galosh fits completely in the palm of my hand. So, these are bunk beds for children! So I went to the other side of the ridge. Here, right behind the "Butugychag", there was a large women's camp "Bacchante", which functioned at the same time.
Remains are everywhere. Here and there fragments, joints of tibia bones come across.
In the burnt ruins, I stumbled upon a chest bone. Among the ribs, a porcelain crucible caught my attention - I worked with such in the biological laboratories of the university. The incomparable, sugary smell of human ashes oozes from under the stones...
"I am a geologist, and I know that the former zone is located in the region of a powerful polymetallic ore cluster. Here, in the interfluve of the Detrin and Tenka, reserves of gold, silver, and cassiterite are concentrated. But Butugychag is also known for the manifestation of radioactive rocks, in particular uranium-bearing. By genus In my work, I have had to visit these places more than once. The enormous strength of the radioactive background is detrimental to all living things here. This is the reason for the tremendous mortality in the zone. Radiation at Butygychag is uneven. Somewhere it reaches a very high, extremely life-threatening level, but there are also places where the background is quite acceptable".
A. Rudnev. 1989
The day of research was over. I had to hurry down, where in the house of a modern power plant, at its caretaker, I found shelter for these days.
Victor, the owner of the house, was sitting on the porch when I wearily approached and sat down beside him.
Where were you, what did you see? he asked monosyllabically.
I told about the uranium factory, the children's camp, the mines.
And what are you looking for?
I narrowed my eyes, looked point-blank at the young master of the house.
Mine, under the letter "C" ...
You won't find. Previously, they knew where it was, but after the war, when the camps began to close, they blew everything up, and all Butugychag's plans disappeared from the geological department. Only the stories that the letter "Ts" was filled to the very top with the corpses of those who were shot remained.
He paused. - Yes, not in the mines, and not in the children's camps, the secret of "Butugychag". There's their secret, - Victor showed his hand in front of him. - Behind the river, you see. There was a laboratory complex. Strongly guarded.
What did they do in it?
And you go tomorrow to the upper cemetery. Look...
But before going to the mysterious cemetery, Victor and I examined the "laboratory complex".
The area is tiny. It was made up of several houses. All of them are diligently destroyed. Blasted to the ground. Only one strong end wall remained standing. It is strange: out of the entire huge number of buildings in "Butugychag", only the "infirmary" was destroyed - it was burned to the ground, yes, this zone.
The first thing I saw were the remains of a powerful ventilation system with characteristic bells. Such systems are equipped with fume hoods in all chemical and biological laboratories. Four rows of barbed wire perimeter stretched around the foundations of the former buildings. It still survives in places. Inside the perimeter are poles with electrical insulators. It seems that a high voltage current was also used to protect the object.
Making my way among the ruins, I remembered the story of Sergei Nikolaev from the village of Ust-Omchug:
“Just before the entrance to Butugychag there was Object No. 14. We didn’t know what they were doing there. But this zone was guarded especially carefully. ". But in order to get to object No. 14, one more was needed - a special pass and with it it was necessary to go through nine checkpoints. Everywhere sentries with dogs. On the hills around - machine gunners: the mouse will not slip through. No. 14 "specially built nearby airfield".
Indeed, a top-secret object.
Yes, the bombers knew their business. There is little left. True, the nearby prison building survived, or, as it is called in the documents of the Gulag, "BUR" - a high-security barrack. It is composed of roughly hewn stone boulders, covered from the inside of the building with a thick layer of plaster. On the remains of the plaster in two chambers, we found the inscriptions scratched with a nail: "30.XI.1954. Evening", "Kill me" and an inscription in Latin script, in one word: "Doctor".
Horse skulls were an interesting find. I counted 11 of them. About five or six lay inside the foundation of one of the blown up buildings.
"I personally visited many enterprises in those years and I know that even for the removal of timber from the hills, for all affairs, not to mention mountain work, one type of labor was used - the manual labor of prisoners ..." From the answer of the former convict F Bezbabichev to the question of whether
how horses were used in the economy of the camps.
Well, at the dawn of the nuclear age, they might well have been trying to get an anti-radiation serum. And this cause, since the time of Louis Pasteur, it was the horses that served faithfully.
How long ago was that? After all, the Butugychag complex has been well preserved. The bulk of the camps in Kolyma were closed after the "exposure" and execution of their godfather - Lavrenty Beria. In the weather station house, which stands above the children's camp, I managed to find an observation log. The last date stamped on it is May 1956.
Why are these ruins called a laboratory? I asked Victor.
Once a car with three passengers drove up, - he began to tell, clearing in the weeds, among the broken tiles, another horse skull. There was a woman with them. And although guests are rare here, they did not name themselves. They got out of the car at my house, looked around, and then, a woman, pointing to the ruins, said: "Here was a laboratory. And over there - an airport ...".
They did not stay long, and they could not be asked about anything. But all three are aged, well dressed...
A female doctor saved my life when I was imprisoned at one of the most terrible mines in Kolyma - "Butugychag". Her name was Maria Antonovna, her last name was unknown to us ...
(From the memoirs of Fyodor Bezbabichev)
The Berlag camps were especially secret and is it any wonder that no official data on their prisoners can be obtained. But there are archives. The KGB, the Ministry of Internal Affairs, the party archives - lists of prisoners are stored somewhere. In the meantime, only scanty, fragmentary data suggest a carefully erased trail. Exploring the abandoned Kolyma camps, I looked through thousands of newspapers and archival references, getting closer and closer to the truth.
The writer Asir Sandler, the author of "Knots for Memory" published in the USSR, told me that one of his readers was a prisoner of a mysterious sharashka, a scientific institution in which prisoners worked. It was somewhere in the vicinity of Magadan...
The secret of the "Butugychag" complex was revealed the next day, when, with difficulty navigating the intricacies of the ridges, we climbed a mountain saddle. It was this secluded place that the camp administration chose for one of the cemeteries. Two others: "officer's" - for the camp staff and, possibly, for civilians, as well as a large "Zekov's" - are located below. The first is near the processing plant. The belonging of his dead to the administration is given out by wooden pedestals with stars. The second begins immediately outside the walls of the burnt infirmary, which is understandable. Why drag the dead over the mountains ... And here, from the central part, at least a mile. Yes, even up.
Slightly noticeable mounds. They can be mistaken for a natural relief, if they were not numbered. As soon as they sprinkled gravel on the dead man, they stuck a stick next to it with a number punched on the lid of a can of stew. But where do the convicts get canned food from? Two-digit numbers with a letter of the alphabet: Г45; B27; A50...
But, closer to the edge of the saddle, I find marks of a different type. There are no individual mounds here. On a flat area, the posts are dense, like the teeth of a comb. Ordinary short sticks - branches of chopped trees. Already without tin covers and numbers. Just mark the place.
Two swollen mounds indicate the pits where the dead were dumped in a heap. Most likely, this "ritual" was carried out in winter, when it was not possible to bury each one separately, in frozen and hard as concrete soil. The pits, in this case, were harvested from the summer.
And here's what Victor was talking about. Under the elfin bush, in a grave torn apart by animals or people, lies a half of a human skull. The upper part of the vault, half an inch above the brow ridges, is neatly and evenly cut. Clearly a surgical cut.
Among them are many other bones of the skeleton, but what attracts my attention is the upper cut off part of the skull with a bullet hole in the back of the head. This is a very important find, because it indicates that the opened skulls are not a medical examination to determine the cause of death. Who first puts a bullet in the back of the head, and then performs an anatomical autopsy to determine the cause of death?
We need to open one of the graves, - I say to my fellow traveler. - You need to make sure that this is not the "work" of today's vandals. Victor himself told about the raids on the camp cemeteries of the village punks: they take out skulls and make lamps out of them.
We select the grave under the number "G47". Didn't have to dig. Literally five centimeters through the soil thawed over the summer, the sapper shovel hit something.
Carefully! Don't damage the bones.
Coffin?! I was amazed. A coffin for a convict is as unseen as if we stumbled upon the remains of an alien. This is truly an amazing cemetery.
Never, nowhere in the vast expanses of the Gulag, were prisoners buried in coffins. They threw them into adits, buried them in the ground, and in winter they simply buried them in the snow, drowned them in the sea, but so that coffins would be made for them?! .. Yes, it looks like this is a "sharashka" cemetery. Then the presence of coffins is understandable. After all, the convicts were buried by the convicts themselves. And they were not supposed to see the opened heads.
In 1942 there was a stage in the Tenkinsky district, where I also ended up. The road to Tenka began to be built somewhere in 1939, when Commissar 2nd rank Pavlov became the head of Dalstroy, and Colonel Garanin became the head of USVITL. Everyone who fell into the clutches of the NKVD was first of all fingerprinted. This was the beginning of the camp life of any person. This is how she ended. When a person died in a prison or camp, then he, already dead, went through exactly the same procedure. The deceased was fingerprinted, they were compared with the original ones, and only after that he was buried, and the case was transferred
to the archive.
(From the memoirs of s / c Vadim Kozin)
At the north end of the cemetery, the ground is littered with bones. Clavicles, ribs, tibia, vertebrae. All over the field, halves of skulls turn white. Straight cut over toothless jaws. Big, small, but equally restless, thrown out of the ground by an evil hand, they lie under the piercing blue sky of Kolyma. Is it possible that such a terrible fate dominated their owners that even the bones of these people are doomed to reproach? And it still pulls here with the stench of bloody years.
Again a series of questions: who needed the brains of these unfortunates? What years? By whose command? Who the hell are these "scientists" who, with ease, like a hare, put a bullet into a human head, and then, with devilish meticulousness, gutted the still smoking brains? And where are the archives? How many masks does it take to judge the Soviet system for the crime called genocide?
None of the well-known encyclopedias provides data on experiments on living human material, except to look in the materials of the Nuremberg trials. Only the following is obvious: it was precisely in those years when the Butugychag was functioning that the effect of radioactivity on the human body was intensively studied. There can be no talk of any autopsies of those who died in the camps for a medical report on the causes of death. None of the camps did this. A human life was worth negligibly cheap in Soviet Russia.
The trepanation of skulls could not be carried out on the initiative of local authorities. Lavrenty Beria and Igor Kurchatov were personally responsible for the nuclear weapons program and everything connected with it.
It remains to assume the existence of a successfully implemented state program, sanctioned at the level of the government of the USSR. For similar crimes against humanity, "Nazis" are being chased around Latin America to this day. But only in relation to domestic executioners and misanthropes, their native department shows enviable deafness and blindness. Is it because the sons of executioners are sitting in warm armchairs today?
Little touch. Histological studies are carried out on the brain, extracted no more than a few minutes after death. Ideally, in vivo. Any method of killing gives a "not clean" picture, since a whole complex of enzymes and other substances appear in the brain tissues, released during pain and psychological shock.
Moreover, the purity of the experiment is violated by the euthanasia of the experimental animal or the introduction of psychotropic drugs into it. The only method used in biological laboratory practice for such experiments is decapitation - almost instantaneous cutting off of the animal's head from the body.
I took with me two fragments from different skulls, for examination. Fortunately, there was a familiar prosecutor in the Khabarovsk Territory - Valentin Stepankov (later - the Prosecutor General of Russia).
You understand what it smells like, - the prosecutor of the region with the badge of a member of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR on the lapel of his jacket looked at me, lowering the sheet with my questions for the expert. - Yes, and according to the affiliation, the Magadan prosecutor's office, and not mine, should deal with this case ...
I was silent.
Okay, Stepankov nodded, - I also have a conscience. And he pressed the button on the table.
Prepare a decision to initiate a criminal case, - he turned to the newcomer. And again to me: - Otherwise, I can not send the bones for examination.
What's the deal? the assistant asked.
Pass it on to the people of Magadan...
I repeat, those responsible for the death of those prisoners who were sent under the numbers of the letter thousand "3-2" live in Magadan, of which 36 people survived in one winter.
(P. Martynov, prisoner of the Kolyma camps No. 3-2-989)
The conclusion of the examination 221-FT, I received a month later. Here is his abridged summary:
"The right part of the skull, presented for research, belongs to the body of a young man, no more than 30 years old. The sutures of the skull between the bones are not closed. Anatomical and morphological features indicate that the bone belongs to a part of the male skull with characteristic features of the Caucasoid race.
The presence of multiple defects in the compact layer (multiple, deep cracks, areas of scarification), their complete fat-freeness, white color, fragility and brittleness, indicate the prescription of the death of the man who owned the skull, 35 years or more from the moment of the study.
The smooth upper edges of the frontal and temporal bones were formed from sawing them, as evidenced by the traces of sliding - tracks from the action of a sawing tool (for example, a saw). Given the location of the cut on the bones and its direction, I believe that this cut could have been formed during an anatomical examination of the skull and brain.
Part of the skull number 2, more likely belonged to a young woman. The even upper edge on the frontal bone was formed by cutting a sawing tool - a saw, as evidenced by step-like slip marks - routes.
Part of the skull No. 2, judging by the less altered bone tissue, was in the burial places for less time than part of the skull No. 1, given that both parts were in the same conditions (climatic, soil, etc.)"
Forensic medical expert V. A. Kuzmin.
Khabarovsk Regional Bureau of Forensic Medical Examination.
My search didn't end there. I visited "Butugychag" two more times. More and more interesting materials fell into the hands. Witnesses appeared.
P. Martynov, a prisoner of the Kolyma camps under the number 3-2-989, points to the direct physical extermination of the Butugychag prisoners: “Their remains were buried at the Shaitan pass. they cleaned the remains of the animals pulled from the glacier on the pass, where even today human bones are found on a huge area ... "
Perhaps there you need to look for an adit under the letter "C"?
We managed to get interesting information from the editorial office of the Leninskoye Znamya newspaper in Ust-Omchug (now the newspaper is called Tenka), where a large mining and processing plant is located - Tenkinsky GOK, to which Butugychag belonged.
The journalists handed me a note from Semyon Gromov, the former deputy director of the Mining and Processing Plant. The note touched upon a topic of interest to me. But, perhaps, the price of this information was Gromov's life.
Here is the text of this note:
"The daily "withdrawal" along the Tenlagh was 300 convicts. The main reasons were hunger, illness, fights between prisoners and just" the convoy fired. "A OP was organized at the Tymoshenko mine - a health center for those who had already "reached." This point, of course, he did not heal anyone, but some professor worked there with the prisoners: he went and drew circles on the robes of prisoners with a pencil - these will die tomorrow. By the way, on the other side of the road, on a small plateau, there is a strange cemetery. Strange because everyone , buried there, the skulls have been sawn apart. Isn't this connected with the professor's work?"
Semyon Gromov recorded this in the early 80s and soon died in a car accident.
I also got another document from the GOK - the results of radiological studies at the Butugychag facility, as well as measurements of the radioactivity of objects. All these documents were strictly confidential. When the US War Department, at my request, requested a geological map of the area, even the CIA denied the presence of uranium mining in these places. And I visited six special facilities of the uranium Gulag of the Magadan region, and one of the camps is located at the very edge of the Arctic Ocean, not far from the polar city of Pevek.
I found Khasana Niyazov already in 1989, when perestroika and glasnost relieved the fear of many. The 73-year-old woman was not afraid to give an hour-long interview in front of a TV camera.
From the recording of the interview with H. Niyazova:
H.N. - I have not been to Butugychag, God bless. We considered it a penal camp.
How were the prisoners buried?
H.N. - No way. Sprinkled with earth or snow if he died in winter, and that's it.
Were there coffins?
H.N. - Never. What coffins are there!
Why are all the convicts buried in coffins at one of the three cemeteries of "Butugychag" and their skulls have been sawn apart?
H.N. - It was opened by doctors ...
For what purpose?
H.N. - We, among the prisoners, were talking: they were doing experiments. Learned something.
Was this done only in Butugychag, or somewhere else?
H.N. - Not. Only in "Butugychag".
When did you learn about the experiments at Butugychag?
H.N. - It was around 1948-49, the conversations were fleeting, but we were all frightened by this ...
Maybe it was sawed alive?
H.N. - And who knows... There was a very large medical unit. There were even professors...
I interviewed Hasan Niyazov after my second visit to Butugychag. Listening to the courageous woman, I looked at her hands with the camp number burned out.
It can't be! - then exclaim Jak Sheahan, - the chief of the CBS News bureau, peering at the screen and not believing his eyes. - I always thought that it was only in the fascist camps ...
Original taken from aboutcccp in Inhuman Experiments of the Soviet Union
Inhuman experiments of the Soviet Union
In accordance with the plan of research and experimental work…
At 09:33, an explosion of one of the most powerful nuclear bombs at that time thundered over the steppe. Following in the offensive - past the forests burning in an atomic fire, villages demolished from the face of the earth - the "eastern" troops rushed to the attack.
Aircraft, striking ground targets, crossed the stem of a nuclear mushroom. 10 km from the epicenter of the explosion in radioactive dust, among molten sand, the "Westerners" held the defense. More shells and bombs were fired that day than during the storming of Berlin.
The consequences for those participating in the operation are the exposure of 45,000 Soviet soldiers.
And although I don’t think that the Soviet Union took special care of its soldiers, no one would send them to apparent death in peacetime either. When they shout about the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, they forget about the monstrous consequences of the little study of the effect of radiation on humans. After five years of the Japanese tragedy, the US nuclear test is like a show where the audience brought folding chairs and took their seats in the front row.
American soldiers were in open trenches almost a kilometer from the epicenter.
In total, 8 Desert Rock exercises were conducted in the USA, 5 of them before the Totsk exercises.
Of course, this does not excuse the guilt of the Soviet command, which did not conduct its own study, as it followed on the heels of the Americans.
Now it is important to understand and realize the tragedy and mistakes of nuclear tests using living soldiers. The American government admitted its mistakes and allocated multimillion-dollar compensation to those participating in such experiments, singling them into the so-called category of "atomic" veterans and victims.
Under the compensation program were not only military personnel, but also miners and workers in the extraction and processing of uranium, as well as residents of these areas.
Uranium miners, millers, and ore transporters - $100,000;
“Onsite participants” at atmospheric nuclear weapons tests - $75,000; and
individuals who lived downwind of the Nevada Test Site (“downwinders”) - $50,000.
https://www.justice.gov/civil/common/reca
What did the Soviet government do? All participants in the exercise were taken under a non-disclosure agreement for state and military secrets for a period of 25 years. Dying from early heart attacks, strokes and cancer, they could not even tell their doctors about their radiation exposure. Few participants in the Totsk exercises managed to survive to this day. Half a century later, they told Moskovsky Komsomolets about the events of 1954 in the Orenburg steppe.
What did the Russian government do for the victims of the Totsk experiment? Declared people disabled and assigned a disability group, erected a monument. They laid flowers at the monument.
Do you think that the Russian government has fulfilled its duty to veterans and people affected by the Totsk experiment, is that enough?
In the early 1990s, scientists from Yekaterinburg, St. nuclear explosion". The data presented in it confirmed that residents of seven districts of the Orenburg region were exposed to radiation to varying degrees. They had a progressive increase in cancer
Preparing for Operation Snowball
“Throughout the end of the summer, military echelons from all over the Union went to the small Totskoye station. None of the arrivals - even the command of the military units - had any idea why they were here. Our train at each station was met by women and children. Handing us sour cream and eggs, women they lamented: “Darlings, I suppose you are going to fight in China,” says Vladimir Bentsianov, chairman of the Committee of Veterans of Special Risk Units.
In the early 1950s, serious preparations were made for a third world war. After tests conducted in the United States, the USSR also decided to test a nuclear bomb in open areas. The place of the exercises - in the Orenburg steppe - was chosen because of the similarity with the Western European landscape.
“At first, combined arms exercises with a real nuclear explosion were planned to be held at the Kapustin Yar missile range, but in the spring of 1954, the Totsky test site was assessed, and it was recognized as the best in terms of security,” Lieutenant General Osin recalled at one time.
Participants of the Totsk exercises tell a different story. The field where it was planned to drop a nuclear bomb was clearly visible.
“For the exercises, the strongest guys were selected from us. We were given personal service weapons - modernized Kalashnikov assault rifles, ten-shot automatic rifles and R-9 radio stations,” recalls Nikolai Pilshchikov.
The campground stretched for 42 kilometers. Representatives of 212 units - 45,000 military personnel arrived at the exercises: 39,000 soldiers, sergeants and foremen, 6,000 officers, generals and marshals.
Preparations for the exercises, code-named "Snowball", lasted three months. By the end of the summer, the huge battlefield was literally dotted with tens of thousands of kilometers of trenches, trenches and anti-tank ditches. We built hundreds of pillboxes, bunkers, dugouts.
On the eve of the exercises, the officers were shown a secret film about the operation of nuclear weapons. "For this, a special cinema pavilion was built, into which they were allowed only on the basis of a list and an identity card in the presence of the regiment commander and a representative of the KGB. At the same time, we heard:" You had a great honor - for the first time in the world to act in real conditions of the use of a nuclear bomb. "It became clear , for which we covered the trenches and dugouts with logs in several rolls, carefully smearing the protruding wooden parts with yellow clay. "They should not have caught fire from light radiation," Ivan Putivlsky recalled.
"Residents of the villages of Bogdanovka and Fedorovka, who were located 5-6 km from the epicenter of the explosion, were asked to temporarily evacuate 50 km from the site of the exercise. They were taken out in an organized manner by the troops, they were allowed to take everything with them. The evacuated residents were paid per diem for the entire period of the exercise," - says Nikolai Pilshchikov.
"Preparation for the exercises was carried out under artillery cannonade. Hundreds of aircraft bombed the specified areas. A month before the start, a Tu-4 aircraft daily dropped a "blank" into the epicenter - a dummy bomb weighing 250 kg," Putivlsky, a participant in the exercises, recalled.
According to the memoirs of Lieutenant Colonel Danilenko, in an old oak grove surrounded by a mixed forest, a white limestone cross measuring 100x100 m was applied. The training pilots aimed at it. Deviation from the target should not exceed 500 meters. Troops were all around.
Two crews were trained: Major Kutyrchev and Captain Lyasnikov. Until the very last moment, the pilots did not know who would be the main and who would be the understudy. Kutyrchev's crew had the advantage, which already had experience in flight tests of the atomic bomb at the Semipalatinsk test site.
To prevent damage by a shock wave, troops located at a distance of 5-7.5 km from the epicenter of the explosion were ordered to be in shelters, and further 7.5 km - in trenches in a sitting or lying position.
“On one of the hills, 15 km from the planned epicenter of the explosion, a government platform was built to monitor the exercises,” says Ivan Putivlsky. “The day before, it was painted with oil paints in green and white. stations laid an asphalt road on deep sands. The military traffic police did not let any extraneous vehicles onto this road.
"Three days before the start of the exercise, top military leaders began to arrive at the field airfield near Totsk: Marshals of the Soviet Union Vasilevsky, Rokossovsky, Konev, Malinovsky," Pilshchikov recalls. Zhu-De and Peng-Te-Huai. All of them were housed in a government town built in advance in the area of the camp. A day before the exercises, Khrushchev, Bulganin and Kurchatov, the creator of nuclear weapons, appeared in Totsk. "
Marshal Zhukov was appointed head of the exercises. Around the epicenter of the explosion, marked with a white cross, military equipment was placed: tanks, planes, armored personnel carriers, to which "landing troops" were tied in trenches and on the ground: sheep, dogs, horses and calves.
Tu-4 bomber dropped a nuclear bomb from 8000 meters
On the day of departure for the exercises, both Tu-4 crews prepared in full: nuclear bombs were hung on each of the aircraft, the pilots simultaneously started the engines and reported that they were ready to complete the task. The crew of Kutyrchev received the command to take off, where the scorer was Captain Kokorin, the second pilot was Romensky, the navigator was Babets. The Tu-4 was accompanied by two MiG-17 fighters and an Il-28 bomber, which were supposed to conduct weather reconnaissance and filming, as well as guard the carrier in flight.
“On September 14, we were alarmed at four in the morning. It was a clear and quiet morning,” says Ivan Putivlsky. government tribune sounded 15 minutes before the nuclear explosion: "The ice has broken!" 10 minutes before the explosion, we heard the second signal: "The ice is coming!" We, as instructed, ran out of the cars and rushed to the prepared shelters in the ravine on the side of tribunes. They lay down on their stomachs, with their heads in the direction of the explosion, as they were taught, with their eyes closed, putting their hands under their heads and opening their mouths. The last, third, signal sounded: "Lightning!" In the distance there was an infernal roar. The clock stopped at around 9 hours 33 minutes".
The carrier plane dropped the atomic bomb from a height of 8,000 meters on its second approach to the target. The power of the plutonium bomb under the code word "Tatyanka" was 40 kilotons of TNT - several times more than the one that was blown up over Hiroshima. According to the memoirs of Lieutenant General Osin, a similar bomb was previously tested at the Semipalatinsk test site in 1951. Totskaya "Tatyanka" exploded at an altitude of 350 m from the ground. The deviation from the planned epicenter was 280 m in the northwest direction.
At the last moment, the wind changed: it carried the radioactive cloud not to the deserted steppe, as expected, but straight to Orenburg and further, towards Krasnoyarsk.
5 minutes after the nuclear explosion, artillery preparation began, then a bomber attack was struck. Guns and mortars of various calibers, Katyushas, self-propelled artillery mounts, and tanks dug into the ground began to speak. The battalion commander told us later that the density of fire per kilometer of area was greater than when Berlin was taken, Kazanov recalls.
"During the explosion, despite the closed trenches and dugouts where we were, bright light, after a few seconds we heard a sound in the form of a sharp lightning discharge, - says Nikolai Pilshchikov. - After 3 hours, an attack signal was received. Aircraft, striking ground targets 21-22 minutes after a nuclear explosion, crossed the stem of a nuclear mushroom - the trunk of a radioactive cloud. I and my battalion in an armored personnel carrier proceeded 600 meters from the epicenter of the explosion at a speed of 16-18 km / h. I saw a forest burned from root to top, crumpled columns of equipment, burnt animals. "In the very epicenter - within a radius of 300 m - not a single hundred-year-old oak tree remained, everything burned down ... Equipment a kilometer from the explosion was pressed into the ground ..."
“We crossed the valley, one and a half kilometers from which the epicenter of the explosion was, we crossed in gas masks,” recalls Kazanov. It was hard to recognize the area after the explosion: grass was smoking, scorched quails were running, shrubs and copses had disappeared. I was surrounded by bare, smoking hills. There was a solid black wall of smoke and dust, stench and burning. there was ringing and noise ... The Major General ordered me to measure the level of radiation near the fire dying down with a dosimetric device. I ran up, opened the damper on the bottom of the device, and ... the arrow went off scale. "Get in the car!" - the general commanded, and we drove off from this place, which turned out to be near the immediate epicenter of the explosion ... "
Two days later - on September 17, 1954 - a TASS message was printed in the Pravda newspaper: "In accordance with the plan of research and experimental work, one of the types of atomic weapons was tested in the Soviet Union in recent days. The purpose of the test was to study the effect atomic explosion. Valuable results were obtained during the test, which will help Soviet scientists and engineers successfully solve problems of protection against atomic attack. " The troops completed their task: the country's nuclear shield was created.
Residents of the surrounding, two-thirds of the burned villages dragged the new houses built for them to the old - inhabited and already infected - places by logs, collected radioactive grain, potatoes baked in the ground in the fields ... And for a long time the old residents of Bogdanovka, Fedorovka and the village of Sorochinsky remembered strange glow of firewood. The woodpile, made of trees charred in the area of the explosion, glowed in the dark with a greenish fire.
Mice, rats, rabbits, sheep, cows, horses and even insects that had been in the "zone" were subjected to close examination... a day of training with dry rations wrapped in almost a two-centimeter layer of rubber ... He was immediately taken for research. The next day, all soldiers and officers were transferred to a regular diet. Delicacies disappeared. "
They were returning from the Totsk training ground, according to the memoirs of Stanislav Ivanovich Kazanov, they were not in the freight train in which they arrived, but in a normal passenger car. Moreover, their composition was passed without the slightest delay. Stations flew by: an empty platform on which a lone stationmaster stood and saluted. The reason was simple. In the same train, in a special car, Semyon Mikhailovich Budyonny was returning from the exercises.
“In Moscow, at the Kazansky railway station, the marshal was waiting for a magnificent meeting,” Kazanov recalls. “Our cadets of the sergeant school did not receive any insignia, special certificates, or awards ... The gratitude that the Minister of Defense Bulganin announced to us, we also did not receive anywhere later ".
The pilots who dropped the nuclear bomb were each awarded a Pobeda brand car for the successful completion of this mission. At the analysis of the exercises, the crew commander Vasily Kutyrchev received the Order of Lenin from the hands of Bulganin and, ahead of schedule, the rank of colonel.
The results of combined arms exercises with the use of nuclear weapons were labeled "top secret."
The third generation of people who survived the tests at the Totsk test site lives with a predisposition to cancer
For reasons of secrecy, no checks and examinations of the participants in this inhuman experiment were carried out. Everything was hidden and hushed up. Civilian casualties are still unknown. Archives of the Totsk Regional Hospital from 1954 to 1980. destroyed.
“In the Sorochinsky registry office, we made a sample according to the diagnoses of people who died over the past 50 years. Since 1952, 3,209 people have died from oncology in nearby villages. Immediately after the explosion, there were only two deaths. And then two peaks: one 5-7 years after explosion, the second - from the beginning of the 90s.
We also studied immunology in children: we took the grandchildren of people who survived the explosion. The results stunned us: in the immunograms of Sorochinsk children there are practically no natural killers that are involved in anti-cancer protection. In children, the interferon system - the body's defense against cancer - actually does not work. It turns out that the third generation of people who survived the atomic explosion lives with a predisposition to cancer," says Mikhail Skachkov, professor at the Orenburg Medical Academy.
The participants of the Totsk exercises were not given any documents, they appeared only in 1990, when they were equated in rights with Chernobyl victims.
Of the 45 thousand soldiers who took part in the Totsk exercises, a little more than 2 thousand are now alive. Half of them are officially recognized as invalids of the first and second groups, 74.5% have diseases of the cardiovascular system, including hypertension and cerebral atherosclerosis, another 20.5% have diseases of the digestive system, and 4.5% have malignant neoplasms. and blood diseases.