One Man in his Time

An extraordinary rediscovered memoir of one man striving to make a distinguished scientific career—and live an ordinary life—amidst the brutal purges of Stalinist Russia

“Remarkable. . . an astonishing testimony that has never seemed more timely or more pertinent”  — Nicholas Shakespeare

From humble origins, the eminent Russian scientist Nicholas Borodin forged a career in microbiology in the era of Stalin. Pragmatic and dedicated to his work, he accepted the Soviet regime, so much so that he even worked on several occasions with the Secret Police, providing information on those around him.

But in 1948, while on a state-sponsored trip to the UK to report on the bulk manufacture of antibiotics, he could no longer ignore his rising consciousness of the suppression of independent thought in his country. It was then that he committed high treason by writing to the Soviet ambassador to renounce his citizenship.

One Man in his Time is the story of a man trying to live an ordinary life in extraordinary times. Rich in incident and astonishing details, it charts Borodin's childhood during the revolution and famine through to his scientific career amidst the suspicion and violence of the purges. Written with crystal clarity, it is unsparing and frank in its depiction of the author's collaboration with Soviet authorities. Published here with an introduction by foreign correspondent and journalist John Simpson, One Man in His Time offers unparalleled insight into the daily reality of life under totalitarian rule.Introduction by John Simpson vii
Foreword xii Early Impressions and Experiences 1
ii King Famine 27
iii We Are Blue-Shirted Students 52
iV We Are Frightened of Nothing 71
V Red Army Man 86
Vi “The Military Laboratory” 103
Vii Starting a Career 118
Viii Armavir Research Institute 141
iX Day by Day 164
X Consulting the Political Police 179
Xi Pages from the Diary 201
Xii Crime and Punishment 210
Xiii The Transcaucasus 227
XiV Moscow 1936–37 244
XV Baku 250
XVi 22nd June 1941 266
XVii By Fire and Sword 286
XViii Mission for the Government 312
XiX Moscow 1946–47 329
XX High Treason 336"Engrossing... Borodin’s raw account captures the tension between his love of science and hatred of tyranny. It’s a unique perspective on the first decades of the Soviet Union"
—Publishers Weekly

"This disconcerting insider’s perspective of the enormity of autocratic rule and the dire consequences of subjugating science to ideology offers a dire warning of perennial relevance."
—Library JournalN.M. Borodin was born in 1905 in Kamensk, Russia. After a childhood marred by civil war and famine, Borodin enrolled to study in Novocherkassk with the aim of becoming a microbiologist. He briefly served in the Red Army as part of his military service before embarking on a successful career researching animal disease, including posts in Armavir, Moscow and Baku. Borodin kept working through Stalin's purges and received the Order of Lenin. He renounced his Soviet citizenship in London in 1948, and went on to write One Man in His Time, a memoir of his life and career in Stalinist Russia.This is a book like no other I have come across. Its simple title, bland byline (‘N. M. Borodin D. Sc.’) and opaque opening pages conceal the extraordinary story of a life-journey which leads Nikolai Michailovich Borodin from his origins in a peasant Cossack family under Tsar Nicholas II to the collapse of imperial rule and the Russian revolution, the starvation years of the Civil War, the terrifying growth of Stalin’s police state, the German invasion of Russia and Borodin’s emergence as a senior scientist entrusted with a hugely important mission abroad; and then to his decision to turn his back on the Soviet state, which he had come to detest, and defect to Britain at the end of the Second World War.

His experiences are dizzying and sometimes pretty scary. They are portrayed in a flat, unemotional style which nevertheless manages to capture the precise look of places and people: ‘Alekseev, the chief of the division of Armavir headquarters of the Political Police for the exter- mination of sabotage of the national economy was a man of middle height, in his late thirties, with watchful grey eyes… Only a few minutes before our first conversation started I saw an expression of a not very pleasant kind on his face. It happened that he had obviously forgotten he had appointed me to come and had ordered a guard to bring into his office a prisoner from the cellar under the building for a routine night interrogation. It also transpired that it was against the regulations of the place that arrested people should be seen by free citizens unless it was specially arranged; and Alekseev was very displeased. For a second there was confusion in the office, and then he ordered the guard to take away the grey figure of a man of indefinite age whose lips were trembling as if he were ready to cry. We began our conversation as though nothing had happened.’

It’s often quite hard to work out whether you really like Borodin or not. Perhaps that’s because he’s so honest about himself and his thought-processes. Faced during the Stalinist Terror with a friend with a dodgy political record, Borodin runs through the possibilities: should he turn him away, or denounce him, or take him in and give him a job? He’s quite prepared to do the decent thing, but instead he chooses the bureaucratic option and shoves the decision off to a regional committee. None of it matters anyway, because the man simply vanishes.

Borodin’s frankness allows him to admit to reflections that you or I would probably want to suppress, in order not to show ourselves up. But he is a scientist, and a very good one: he examines his own motives in his political petri dish, and simply describes them for us. There is no posturing, no virtue-signalling; quite possibly no virtue. Or is it perhaps that he’s luxuriating in his new-found ability, as a political refugee in safe, non-judgemental Britain, to be absolutely honest, no matter how it might look to his new compatriots? He was told he had to work for what he calls the Political Police (we would call them the NKVD, or latterly the KGB and FSB, but they’re all basically the same thing) and did so reluctantly yet conscientiously: ‘I recorded with great care many cases I came across of intellectuals accused of sabotage or criminal wrecking. First I watched them with excitement and internal agitation but later I got so used to the picture that I was not troubled with any emotions and even businesslike accounts of the number of cartridges, disinfectants and protective clothes expended in mass executions did not produce any impression.’

The various cases he recorded are horribly fascinating: you can’t stop reading them even though you’d like to. Each case, inevitably, ends in execution—the head of the bacon factory who can’t give up the frank, confrontational ways of the Old Bolsheviks in these new Stalinist days when everyone has to watch what they say; the microbiologist who didn’t realise he was among informers when he said the Communists were worse than the Tsars; or Ishenko, the senior officer from the Political Police, who knew from experience how appalling the process of being executed was, and begs Borodin to give him a potassium cyanide cap- sule to help him die a quick death. Borodin reflects that things will be bad for himself if the poison is discovered, so he gives him a capsule containing pure soda. ‘I never saw Ishenko again,’ Borodin writes.

And yet we can’t help but sympathise with him when his mission to the US and Britain to obtain penicillin unrolls. It’s much too exciting to spoil by dropping hints, so I won’t go into any detail here—except to say that the man who sent him was Anastas Mikoyan, a comrade of Stalin’s f rom way back and one of the survivors of the bad days of the 1930s and 40s. Like Borodin, Mikoyan was obliged to do all sorts of terrible things, but he was basically a decent man who under other circumstances would probably have made a good politician.

For me, the question I was left with at the end of this extraordinary book was, how well would any of us behave if we were surrounded by a political system of pure evil like the one Stalin created? Borodin at least had the courage to defect, and the willpower to do what his conscience (what was left of it) told him he must do—escape to a system which was decent, free and open; a system where he could write and publish this blisteringly honest account of everything he’d done in possibly the worst half-century that any nation has been obliged to endure in human history. There but for the grace of God we and any other nation might find ourselves going.

John Simpson,
Oxford


Foreword


“This out of all will remain— They have lived and have tossed: So much of the game will be gain,
Though the gold of the dice has been lost.”
Love of Life, Jack London

The characters, names, incidents, events and places are genuine wherever they are given in this book, which has been written because the path I trod was vivid, full of interest and adventures. My fight for a career was also rich with impressions and exciting events. So much of the game remains to me as gain, “though the gold of the dice has been lost”.

I wrote this book in English which I have spoken only since 1945, nevertheless I like to use this tongue for thinking, speaking and writing equally well with my native Russian.

N. M. B.