Scientists unveil secrets of Stalin’s toxic labs

Science fiction and spy movies in which characters take truth potions, youth elixirs and different pills that give them superb physical strength may not be absolutely fictitious. Secret laboratories of intelligence services develop various drugs capable of either destroying or upgrading any person. Russia is not an exception at this point.

Photo: Scientists unveil secrets of Stalin’s toxic labs

Interpreter Stanislav Lekarev worked in a building adjacent to former NKVD prison in Moscow for several years. Horrific rumors envelop this building. One of them said that prisoners were used as guinea pigs there to test poisons on them. Lekarev also said that poisons and toxins from all over the world were collected and studied in that secret laboratory.

Even recipes of Ivan the Terrible’s healer (known as Doctor Elisey) were studied in the laboratory. It is known that graduated from the University of Cambridge with doctor’s degree. He made special poisons which could kill a human being at the time required by the monarch. Eventually it was the tsar himself who poisoned Elisey as he had become potentially dangerous.

Stalin also had a similar poisoner - Grigory Mairanovsky, who headed the secret laboratory in the above-mentioned building. His favorite poison was curarine which causes cardiac insufficiency. When Stalin died, Mairanovsky was accused of illegal possession of potent agents. He denied the charges and died of heart failure rather soon.

But not only fatal drugs were of interest in the Soviet time. Aleksey Dorogov, a famous scientist who worked in the chemical protection laboratory, invented the medicine against tuberculosis, trophic ulcer and oncological diseases. His patients recovered in 72 percent of cases. Dorogov made his miraculous elixir in a boiling bulb and let the steam flow through a coiled pipe. It produced condensate which he mixed up with egg whites. This very medicine is believed to have cured Beria’s mother from cancer. But the famous scientist ended his life dramatically: he once went away to visit another patient and never came back.

Soviet and American specialists also studied semisynthetic psychedelic drug LSD. They tried to control the human mind with the help of this drug. But U.S. scientists soon discovered that it had an unpredictable influence on people. The researches were eventually deadlocked and subsequently declassified. But all Russian LSD studies still remain a mystery.

Modern-day scientists have already created a substance which allows a soldier to survive even after a nuclear attack. However, the drug allows a human being to stay alive for only several days.

Komsomolskaya Pravda

Translated by Ksenia Sedyakina
Pravda.ru