Laboratory B in Sunguľ


Laboratory B in Sunguľ was one of the laboratories under the 9th Chief Directorate of the NKVD that contributed to the Soviet atomic bomb project. It was created in 1946 and closed in 1955, when some of its personnel were merged with the second Soviet nuclear design and assembly facility. It was run as a sharashka – a secret scientific facility run as a prison. Laboratory B employed German scientists from 1947 to 1953. It had two scientific divisions, radiochemistry and radiobiophysics; the latter was headed by the world-renowned geneticist N. V. Timofeev-Resovskij. For two years, the renowned German chemist, Nikolaus Riehl was the scientific director.

Background

Colonel General A. P. Zavenyagin, as head of the 9th Chief Directorate of the NKVD, was deputy to NKVD chief Lavrentiy Beria. From early in 1945, Zavenyagin was responsible for the acquisition of German scientists, equipment, materiel, and intellectual property, under the Russian Alsos, to help Russia with the Soviet atomic bomb project. His authority and responsibilities only increased after the USSR State Defense Committee, on 20 August 1945, issued Decree No. 9877, thereby creating and investing the Special Committee with special and extraordinary powers for solving problems related to the atomic bomb project.
Members of the Special Committee were:
Zavenyagin, as head of the 9th Chief Directorate, then had responsibilities for establishing, building, managing, and providing security for the facilities in the atomic bomb project. Zavenyagin's purview also included the resources of the Gulag; some of the facilities to which the German scientists were assigned were run as a sharashka. German scientists were available for recruitment from the Soviet occupation zone in Germany. Also, immediately after World War II and extending into 1949, the Russians also had a large pool of German PoW scientists and highly skilled specialists from which to recruit; the main camp was at Krasnogorsk.
Facilities to which the German scientists were assigned were under the under authority of the 9th Chief Directorate and included the following :
Laboratory B was established under the 9th Chief Directorate in 1946 by Decree No. 1996 of the Council of Ministers of the USSR. It was known under another cover name as Объект 0211, as well as Object B.
Laboratory B was responsible for the handling, treatment, and use of radioactive products generated in reactors, as well as radiation biology, dosimetry, and radiochemistry. Owing to its proximity to the radiochemical plutonium facility Combine No. 817, the scientists at the institute had access to high-dose radioactive materials.
The scientific staff at Laboratory B – a Sharashka – was both Soviet and German, the former being mostly political prisoners or exiles, although some of the service staff were criminals – one had been convicted of murder. In 1955, the institute had 451 staff members; in 1946 there had been 95. The institute had a maximum of 26 German scientists, and more than 10 of them initially were classified as PoWs. The German contingent left the institute in 1953. The institute had two departments: radiobiophysics and radiochemistry. In 1955, the institute was merged into the newly created second nuclear weapons design institute Nauchno-Issledovatel'skij Institut-1011. During the merger, the radiopathology section of the radiochemistry department was transferred to Combine No. 817 and a section of the radiobiophysics department was transferred to the Ural Branch of the USSR Academy of Sciences.
Accomplishments of Laboratory B include the development of technology for the isolation of fission by-products such as strontium-90, caesium-137, zirconium-65, and the technology to remove these isotopes from chemical compounds.

Directors

The first director of Laboratory B, starting in 1946, was MVD Colonel Alexander Konstantinovich Uralets. From 26 December 1952 to 14 June 1955, the director was the chemist Gleb Arkad'evich Sereda.
Prior to Uralets becoming director of Laboratory B in 1946, he had been the Deputy Chief Corrective Labor Camp Volgostroya, Tagilstorya, the Office of the Chelyabinsk Metallurgical Plant in the camp. After serving as director of Laboratory B, he became deputy director of the Nauchno-Issledovatel'skij Institut-9 for economic and administrative issues; NII-9 was under the 9th Chief Directorate of the MVD and worked on the Soviet atomic bomb project. He received the Order of Lenin for his management of Laboratory B.
After Laboratory B was merged with NII-1011, Sereda went on to be the chief of the nearby TsZL Khimkombinata Mayak in Ozersk.

Scientific Director

was the scientific director of Laboratory B from September 1950 to early autumn in 1952.
Riehl, scientific director of the Auergesellschaft, was sent by the Russians, in 1945, to head a group at Plant No. 12 in Ehlektrostal' to develop an industrial process for production of reactor-grade uranium. Other Germans sent to work there included A. Baroni, Werner Kirst, Henry E. Ortmann, Przybilla, Herbert Schmitz, Herbert Thieme, Tobein, and Günter Wirths. When Riehl learned that professional colleagues from the Kaiser-Wilhelm Institut für Hirnforschung in Berlin, Hans-Joachim Born and Karl Zimmer, were being held in Krasnogorsk, in the main PoW camp for Germans with scientific degrees, Riehl arranged though Zavenyagin to have them sent to Ehlektrostal'. Alexander Catsch was also sent there. At Ehlektrostal', Riehl had a hard time incorporating Born, Catsch, and Zimmer into his tasking on uranium production, as Born was a radiochemist, Catsch was a physician and radiation biologist, and Zimmer was a physicist and radiation biologist; in December 1947, Riehl sent all three to Laboratory B to work with Timofeev-Resovskij.
After the detonation of the Russian uranium bomb, uranium production was going smoothly and Riehl's oversight was no longer necessary at Plant No. 12. Riehl then went, in 1950, to be the scientific director of Laboratory B, where he stayed until 1952. Essentially the remaining personnel in his Ehlektrostal' group were assigned elsewhere, with the exception of Henry E. Ortmann, A. Baroni, and Herbert Schmitz, who went with Riehl to Sungul'.
Besides those already mentioned, other Germans at Laboratory were Rinatia von Ardenne Wilhelm Menke, Willi Lange, Joachim Pani, and K. K. Rintelen. Until Riehl's return to Germany in June 1955, which Riehl had to request and negotiate, he was quarantined in Agudzery starting in 1952; Augudzery, was the location of Institute G.

Scientific Divisions

Laboratory B had two scientific divisions, a radiobiophysics division headed by the geneticist N. V. Timofeev-Resovskij, and a radiochemistry division headed by Sergej Aleksandrovich Voznesenskij.

Radiobiophysics

In 1925, as the Russian part of a collaborative effort between Russia and Germany, the Russians sent Timofeev-Resovskij, and his colleague Sergei Romanovich Tsarapkin, to Germany. There, they worked with Oskar Vogt, director of the Kaiser-Wilhelm Institut für Hirnforschung, to establish the Abteilung für Experimentelle Genetik and Timofeev-Resovskij became its director. Timofeev-Resovskij stayed in Germany through World War II, and built his department to world-renowned status. On the basis of false denunciations, Timofeev-Resovskij and Tsarapkin were arrested by the NKVD in September 1945, returned to Russia, and both sentenced to 10 years in the Gulag. They ended up in the Karaganda prison camp in northern Kazakhstan, one of the most terrible camps in the Gulag; the harsh conditions of Timofeev-Resovskij's transportation and incarceration in the labor camp contributed to a significant decline in his health, including the degradation of his vision brought on by malnutrition. Colonel General Zavenyagin, who had intended to utilize Timofeev-Resovskij's talents in the Soviet atomic bomb project, had Timofeev-Resovskij and Tsarapkin sent to Laboratory B in 1947. Timofeev-Resovskij's wife Elena Aleksandrovna, after receipt of a letter in his handwriting, left Berlin in 1948, with their son Andrew, to join him in Sungul'. The house occupied by the three Timofeev-Resovskijs was every bit as nice as that planned for the German scientists working at the Sungul' institute.
Born, Catsch, and Zimmer, who had worked for Timofeev-Resovskij in Berlin and who were sent to Laboratory B by Riehl in December 1947, were able to conduct work similar to that which they had done in Germany, and all three became section heads in Timofeev-Resovskij's department. Born examined fission products, developed methods of separating plutonium from fission products created in a nuclear reactor, and investigated and developed radiation health and safety measures. Catsch began his work on developing methods to extract radionucleotides from various organs, which he would continue when he left Russia.
The radiobiophysics division under Timofeev-Resovskij had four sections which conducted experimental studies in four basic directions:
The agrobiological and hydrobiological experiments were united on the general basis of the biogeochemical analysis of the experimentally created elementary biogeocenosis and the introduction of special factor radioactive materials into it.

Radiochemistry

On the basis of a false denunciation, Sergej Aleksandrovich Voznesenskij was arrested in June 1941; in April 1942, he was sentenced to 10 years in the Gulag. From March 1943 to 1947, he led a research group in the 4th Special Department of the NKVD in Moscow; the 4th Special Department provided military research and development by utilizing specialist prisoners, i.e., scientists. In December 1947, he was transferred to Laboratory B to head up the radiochemistry division. With the liquidation of Laboratory B and its merger into NII-1011 in 1955, Voznesenskij was transferred to the Ural Polytechnical Institute to head up the Department of Radiochemistry, and was simultaneously appointed as a scientific consultant at Combine No. 817 on problems of radioactive waste cleanup.
The radiochemistry division had four sections and conducted research and development in the following areas:
Laboratory B employed a wide variety of scientists on its staff at various times during its existence, including physicists, chemists, biologists, medical doctors, agronomists, and soil scientists.. Other than those already mentioned above, other personnel at Laboratory B included the following:
Ya. M. Fishman, B. V. Kir'yan, V. L. Anokhin, Lev Aleksandrovich Buldakov, I. Ya. Bashilov, A. A. Goryunov, N. S. Khoreshko, Yurij Klimov, L. A. Kuzovkina, N. V. Luchnik, Yu. I. Moskalev, I. F. Popov, N. A. Poryadkova, E. I. Preobrazhenskaya, D. I. Semenov, V. N. Strel'tsova, E. I. Sokurova, M. Yu. Tissen, A. S. Tkachev, and V. G. Zhukova.