Grigory Mairanovsky

Grigory Mairanovsky is born in the Black Sea port of Batumi into a Jewish family.

The Great War mobilizes European science for slaughter and, for the first time, industrial chemistry produces poison gas, the technology Mairanovsky will later refine for murder.

Mairanovsky, who ran the special laboratory of the All-Union Institute of Experimental Medicine from 1935 to 1937 and joined the NKVD in August 1937, takes charge of its special toxicological laboratory on 15 September 1938, testing poisons on condemned prisoners in search of an untraceable compound.

In February 1939 the NKVD moves Mairanovsky's poison research into its 4th Special Section, systematizing lethal experiments on condemned prisoners. The often quoted date of 20 February rests on Birstein, not on a file reference.

Mairanovsky is made a doctor of medical sciences in June 1940 for classified work on the biological activity of mustard gas in skin tissue. The poison called K-2, said to kill within a quarter of an hour and leave no trace, comes from the memoir literature, not from the files.

The American Gulag prisoner Isaiah Oggins is killed with curare in Mairanovsky's laboratory, a documented case of the 'Kamera' at work.

Amid the 'Doctors' Plot', Mairanovsky is arrested on 13 December 1951. The MGB's Special Board sentences him to ten years only on 14 February 1953, under the articles on abuse of office and unlawful handling of poisons.

Interrogated on 27 August 1953, Mairanovsky states that Beria approved his proposal and had him test poisons on condemned prisoners. A protocol of a Beria interrogation for 28 August 1953 could not be verified, and the accounts of what he said that day disagree. He is shot in December.