Biohazard

We were the victims of our own gullibility. I have come to believe that the most senior Soviet officials must have known all along that the Americans had no serious biological warfare program after 1969—after all, our intelligence agencies were among the best at their craft, and they had not come up with any real evidence. But the fiction had been necessary to instill in us a sense of urgency. The Soviet biological warfare program, born initially out of fear and insecurity, had long since become a hostage to Kremlin politics. This would explain why Kryuchkov had been so willing to trade it away in 1990 and why bureaucrats like Kalinin and Bykov refusal to give it up. In the city of Little Rock, thirty-five miles north of Pine Bluff, we got a taste of American politics. Shcherbakov and I were sitting at the Excelsior Hotel bar on the first evening after checking in when we became aware of a crowd streaming past us. Curious, we followed it to a large room adjacent to the lobby. There was a great deal of cheering and waving of signs. A boyish light-haired man stood on a raised platform at the front of the room, raising his hands to acknowledge the applause. Shcherbakov, who knew some English and had a passing acquaintance with U.S. affairs, told me this energetically smiling man had just announced his candidacy for president of the United States.

"He's the governor," confided Shcherbakov, "but he doesn't have a chance. No one ever became president from Arkansas."

Before we departed Pine Bluff, the director handed out diplomas certifying that we were "Arkansas Travelers." They were signed by Governor William Jefferson Clinton.

Our last stop was the Salk Center at Swiftwater in northern Pennsylvania. A research institute for the development of vaccines, it had no military past, present, or future, at least none we could discern. We returned wearily to Washington, D.C., where the approaching Christmas holiday ended all further talk of biological weapons — to the relief both of our hosts and of ourselves.

On our final afternoon in America, we were taken on a tour of the capital. Our guide was Lisa Bronson, an official from the division responsible for disarmament policy in the Department of Defense who had been in Moscow the previous fall to negotiate the terms of our visit. She had accompanied us throughout our journey across America. A sharp, brisk woman in her mid-thirties, she had gotten to know most of us well. At various stops along the way, she had challenged us about the Soviet biological weapons program. Naturally, we denied we had one. But I admired her persistence.

Standing on Pennsylvania Avenue near the White House, we steered the conversation in a different direction.

"What do scientists actually earn here?" someone asked.

There was no interpreter, and Sandakchiev, who spoke English fairly well, translated.

"That depends on your experience," she answered. "A government scientist can make between fifty thousand and seventy thousand dollars, but a scientist in the private sector could earn up to two hundred thousand dollars a year."

We looked at her in astonishment. At the time, a top-level Russian scientist could expect to earn the equivalent of about one hundred dollars a month. I screwed up the courage to ask a question of my own.

"With my experience," I said, "could I find a job here?"

She smiled. "If you know English."

"Okay," I said as Sandakchiev translated. "If I ever come here, I'll ask for your help."

Everyone started to laugh, including me.

Communist Prospekt

Almaty, 1992

Gorbachev resigned the day we returned to Moscow, on December 25, 1991. Lena told me the news as I walked into my apartment late that evening, my arms laden with gifts from the United States. On New Year's Eve, the red hammer-and-sickle flag of the Soviet Union came down from the Kremlin. In its place rose the Russian tricolor, the flag that had waved over the Russian White House the previous August.

The new government of Russia seized the imagination of the world. It wasn't, however, my government. I was an officer of a colonial empire that no longer existed, a stranger in a country that was not my own. I was entitled to become a citizen of Russia, but in truth I was now a foreigner.

Tens of thousands of people like me were orphaned by the collapse of the Soviet Union. Whether we were Kazakhs, Ukrainians, Moldovans, or Azerbaijanis, no matter how closely we were linked to Russia by marriage or government position, and however much we welcomed the new climate of freedom, we faced the same difficult choice. Should we go "home" to countries with which we had no real connection, or live as aliens in what would from now on be an adopted homeland?