Vil Sultanovich Mirzayanov (, ; born 9 March 1935 in
Starokangyshevo,
Dyurtyulinsky District
Dyurtyulinsky District (; , ') is an administrativeConstitution of the Republic of Bashkortostan, Article 64 and municipalLaw #126-z district (raion), one of the fifty-four in the Republic of Bashkortostan, Russia. It is located in the north ...
,
Bashkortostan
Bashkortostan, officially the Republic of Bashkortostan, sometimes also called Bashkiria, is a republic of Russia between the Volga river and the Ural Mountains in Eastern Europe. The republic borders Perm Krai to the north, Sverdlovsk Oblast ...
) is a
Russian
Russian(s) may refer to:
*Russians (), an ethnic group of the East Slavic peoples, primarily living in Russia and neighboring countries
*A citizen of Russia
*Russian language, the most widely spoken of the Slavic languages
*''The Russians'', a b ...
chemist
A chemist (from Greek ''chēm(ía)'' alchemy; replacing ''chymist'' from Medieval Latin ''alchemist'') is a graduated scientist trained in the study of chemistry, or an officially enrolled student in the field. Chemists study the composition of ...
of ethnic
Tatar origin who now lives in the
United States
The United States of America (USA), also known as the United States (U.S.) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It is a federal republic of 50 U.S. state, states and a federal capital district, Washington, D.C. The 48 ...
, best known for revealing secret
chemical weapon
A chemical weapon (CW) is a specialized munition that uses chemicals formulated to inflict death or harm on humans. According to the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), this can be any chemical compound intended as ...
s experimentation in Russia.
Early life
Vil Sultanovich Mirzayanov was born in a village in rural Bashkortostan, the son of the village school teacher. The Mirzayanov family is
Tatar, a
Turkic ethnic minority in Russia. His father, a staunch
Communist
Communism () is a sociopolitical, philosophical, and economic ideology within the socialist movement, whose goal is the creation of a communist society, a socioeconomic order centered on common ownership of the means of production, di ...
, broke with a 200 year old family tradition in which the oldest sons entered the
Muslim clergy
Muslims () are people who adhere to Islam, a monotheistic religion belonging to the Abrahamic tradition. They consider the Quran, the foundational religious text of Islam, to be the verbatim word of the God of Abraham (or ''Allah'') as it ...
. In 1953, he graduated from the Dyurtyuli Tatar School No. 1 with a silver medal.
Career
Mirzayanov was employed by the State Research Institute of Organic Chemistry and Technology. He was then assigned to a secret military chemical weapons laboratory,
GosNIIOKhT
The State Research Institute of Organic Chemistry and Technology () (GosNIIOKhT) is a Russian research institute engaged in the development of chemical technologies for use in the national economy and the production of relevant goods and prod ...
() situated in
Shikhany, which was developing the
Novichok agent programme of nerve agents. He was head of a counter-intelligence department that performed measurements outside the chemical weapons facilities to make sure that foreign spies could not detect any traces of production. To his horror, the levels of deadly substances were 80 times greater than the maximum safe concentration.
[ Yevgenia Albats and Catherine A. Fitzpatrick. ''The State Within a State: The KGB and Its Hold on Russia — Past, Present, and Future'', 1994. (see pages 325-328)] (A full account by Mirzayanov is available online.
)
Concerned mostly with environmental contamination, Mirzayanov and his colleague
Lev Fyodorov decided to reveal the extent of chemical weapons experimentation in Russia, which Russia used as a workaround to comply with the proposed
1990 Chemical Weapons Accord and the existing
Wyoming Memorandum of Understanding but still produce chemical-like weapons. In 1992, they published an article about the USSR and Russia's development of extremely potent fourth-generation chemical weapons from the 1970s until the early 1990s, in ''
Moskovskiye Novosti'' weekly, and for safety purposes in the
Baltimore Sun
''The Baltimore Sun'' is the largest general-circulation daily newspaper based in the U.S. state of Maryland and provides coverage of local, regional, national, and international news.
Founded in 1837, the newspaper was owned by Tribune Publish ...
through an associated article written by veteran correspondent
Will Englund.
The publication appeared just on the eve of Russia's signing of the 1990 Chemical Weapons Convention. Later according to Mirzayanov, the Russian Military Chemical Complex (MCC) was using defense conversion money received from the West for development of the chemical warfare facility.
[Vadim J. Birstein. ''The Perversion Of Knowledge: The True Story of Soviet Science.'' Westview Press (2004) ]
Exposing Russian secrets
Mirzayanov was arrested on October 22, 1992, on charges of
treason
Treason is the crime of attacking a state (polity), state authority to which one owes allegiance. This typically includes acts such as participating in a war against one's native country, attempting to Coup d'état, overthrow its government, spy ...
, brought by the Russian
military industrial complex authorities — he was not allowed to know the exact charges, as they were also declared a state secret. Held in
Lefortovo Prison, during the resultant court case, the existence of Novichok agents was openly admitted by Russian authorities. According to expert witness testimonies prepared for the
KGB
The Committee for State Security (, ), abbreviated as KGB (, ; ) was the main security agency of the Soviet Union from 1954 to 1991. It was the direct successor of preceding Soviet secret police agencies including the Cheka, Joint State Polit ...
by three scientists, Novichok and other related chemical agents had indeed been produced and therefore the disclosure by Mirzayanov represented
high treason
Treason is the crime of attacking a state authority to which one owes allegiance. This typically includes acts such as participating in a war against one's native country, attempting to overthrow its government, spying on its military, its d ...
.
However, the trial collapsed. Mirzayanov was released because "not one of the formulas or names of poisonous substances in the ''Moscow News'' article was new to the Soviet press, nor were locations ... of testing sites revealed."
According to
Yevgenia Albats, "the real
state secret revealed by Fyodorov and Mirzayanov was that generals had lied — and were still lying — to both the international community and their fellow citizens."
Mirzayanov was released, but kept under house arrest and observation. In 1995, he relocated to the United States where he presently resides,
taking a position at
Rutgers University
Rutgers University ( ), officially Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, is a Public university, public land-grant research university consisting of three campuses in New Jersey. Chartered in 1766, Rutgers was originally called Queen's C ...
in
New Jersey
New Jersey is a U.S. state, state located in both the Mid-Atlantic States, Mid-Atlantic and Northeastern United States, Northeastern regions of the United States. Located at the geographic hub of the urban area, heavily urbanized Northeas ...
.
[
On October 26, 2008, Mirzayanov was elected to the Presidium of the Milli Mejlis of the Tatar People in exile. On January 17, 2009, in an article on ]CNN
Cable News Network (CNN) is a multinational news organization operating, most notably, a website and a TV channel headquartered in Atlanta. Founded in 1980 by American media proprietor Ted Turner and Reese Schonfeld as a 24-hour cable ne ...
, he published the DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE OF TATARSTAN, adopted at a Special Meeting of the Milli Mejlis of the Tatar People on December 20, 2008. At a conference on the separation of Tatarstan from Russia, held in Ankara in the same year, Mirzayanov was elected "Prime Minister" of the "government in exile
A government-in-exile (GiE) is a political group that claims to be the legitimate government of a sovereign state or semi-sovereign state, but is unable to exercise legal power and instead resides in a foreign country. Governments in exile usu ...
". In March 2010, Mirzayanov signed the " Putin Must Go" campaign.
In March 2018, after the poisoning of Sergei and Yulia Skripal
The poisoning of Sergei and Yulia Skripal, also known as the Salisbury poisoning, was a botched assassination attempt to poison Sergei Skripal, a former Russian military officer and double agent for the British intelligence agencies in the cit ...
, Mirzayanov spoke about how Russia maintained tight control over its Novichok stockpile and that the agent is too complicated for a non-state actor to have weaponized. "It's torture. It's absolutely incurable." "I never imagined even in my bad dreams that this chemical weapon, developed with my participation, would be used as terrorist weapons."[Novichok nerve agent inventor says only Russia could be behind UK poison attack](_blank)
Reuters
Reuters ( ) is a news agency owned by Thomson Reuters. It employs around 2,500 journalists and 600 photojournalists in about 200 locations worldwide writing in 16 languages. Reuters is one of the largest news agencies in the world.
The agency ...
/ AP, ''ABC News Online
ABC News, also known as ABC News and Current Affairs, is a public news service produced by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. The service covers both local and world affairs, broadcasting both nationally as ABC News, and across the Asia- ...
'', 2018-03-14 Both victims later recovered and left the hospital. Mirzayanov said only the Russians can be behind the weapon's use in the poisoning and said he was convinced Russia carried it out as a way of intimidating opponents of President Vladimir Putin.[It's The Russians, Says Chemist Who Uncovered Existence Of 'Novichok']
''NDTV''. 14 March 2018. Retrieved 21 August 2018. He added that the Russians could argue that maybe someone had synthesized them "and they could make me guilty!"
See also
Lev Alexandrovich Fyodorov
References
General
American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Biography of Vil Mirzayanov
*Lev Fyodorov and Vil Mirzayanov, "Poisoned Politics," '' Moskovskiye Novosti'' weekly No. 38, 1992 (September, 20). Much of this information was published earlier in the newspaper "Top Secret" run by Artyom Borovik in September 1991. However the KGB did not arrest Mirzayanov earlier due to political turmoil in Russia at this time, according to a book by Yevgenia Albats.
*
*
*
*
Chemical Weapons: An Expose
"Dismantling the Soviet/Russian Chemical Weapons Complex"
{{DEFAULTSORT:Mirzayanov, Vil
Living people
20th-century Russian chemists
Inmates of Lefortovo Prison
Russian emigrants to the United States
American people of Tatar descent
Rutgers University faculty
Year of birth missing (living people)
Russian people of Tatar descent
Soviet chemists