Boris Libman: The Terrible Life of a Soviet Hero

The phrase "No good deed goes unpunished" is of uncertain origin, but certainly applies to the Soviet soldier and chemist Boris Libman.

Libman was born to a wealthy Jewish family in Latvia in the brief period between the World Wars. 

Libman was just 18 years old in 1940 when the Russians invaded and made his country into a Soviet state.  During the occupation, the invaders confiscated his family’s property and possessions and drafted Boris into the Soviet Army.  

He was seriously wounded in combat twice; the second time he was left for dead.  He survived, but (as we shall see) his paperwork was not so healthy.  After the war Libman applied to study at the Moscow Institute for Chemistry tuition-free as an honorably discharged disabled veteran.  He was turned down because according to Army records he was dead.  With months of work, he was able to prove he was in fact alive and not trying to steal a dead man’s benefits. 

In 1949 he earned a master’s degree and went to work in Stalingrad to develop a production facility for Sarin--nerve gas.  Despite his treatment by the Soviets, Libman believed in communism and wanted to help with what he saw as the defense of his nation.  Libman worked on lab studies and on setting up a pilot plant.  The main source of information of the Soviet team was captured German scientists who were less than fully cooperative.  Libman was not only a talented chemical engineer, but was fluent in German—a fact he kept from the captured scientists.  Libman listened as the Germans spoke among themselves and was able to get information that the Germans were hiding from their captors. 

Most of the hardware for the Sarin plant was confiscated from a German wartime production facility.  For the new parts, Libman had to work with Soviet producers, and so the projected ground to a halt several times.  In the centrally planned Soviet economy, production was measured by the weight of delivered machinery.  So the small, specialized parts Libman ordered for completing the Sarin plant were of low priority and often poor quality.  It was a full decade before the Sarin plant at Stalingrad was in full production.  The year before, in 1958, Boris Libman was named chief engineer at the Stalingrad plant.  In 1961 he led development of a new facility to produce Soman nerve agent.  Again poor quality parts slowed development of the plant.  By 1963, Soviet plans for war against NATO called for a surprise attack with overwhelming use of chemical agents, including nerve gas.  Libman was under considerable political pressure to get the Soman line in production.

So he cut corners.  In particular, the Stalingrad plant had a containment pond with toxic breakdown products of nerve agents in concentrations 100 times acceptable levels.  In February 1965, snow melt caused flooding throughout the region.  The containment pond overflowed its dikes and spilled into the Volga River.  In less than two days the dike was repaired and no immediate problems were evident. 

But on June 15 tens of thousands of sturgeon floated belly up in the Volga, making the river white with dead fish for 50 miles downstream from Stalingrad.  Experts determined that it took four months for the toxins to build up to deadly levels.  Outrage swept down the river and across the region.  The government needed a scapegoat.  On March 9, 1966, Boris Libman was stripped of the Lenin prize he earned in building the Stalingrad plant, fined two years pay, and sentenced to two years at a labor camp. 

Unlike so many others, Libman’s tale does not end in a Soviet labor camp.  After just a year he was released: the Soman plant was so complicated that the Soviets could find no one else who could run it.  Boris returned to the land of the living once again.

In 1999 he left the Russian Federation and came to America. He lived in Philadelphia until his death a decade ago. 

Some of the mess created by chemical weapons was eventually cleaned up by French chemists, including Armand Lattes.

Talking About the Holocaust After Charlottesville "Unite the Right" Rally

Nazi and Confederate flags fly together in Charlottesville, Va.

How do you talk about the Holocaust?  Sadly, the events of 2017 gave me clarity I never had before. The “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville has given me a way to look at the Holocaust that connects with injustice in America, not only as a terrible event that happened thousands of miles away. 

A friend who is the child of Holocaust survivors told me that she has always seen slavery as central to the Holocaust. Jews in the Death Camps were not just murdered. They were worked till their health failed and then murdered. 

American slaves were dragged from their homes in Africa, stripped of everything, then sentenced to permanent and perpetual slavery, a much more cruel slavery than that in the ancient world. 

In Charlottesville, the Confederate flag and the Nazi flag marched together. The two slave and murder empires flew the flags of their losing armies together.

In my family, our conversation about the Holocaust and slavery began together when my daughters were in middle school.  We had just adopted our son Nigel as a baby.  When Nigel was between one and two years old, I read the novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin to my daughters while their cute baby brother with the poofy hair slept in the next room.

Before reading Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel, America’s history of slavery, of buying and selling and owning people, was abstract.  But as I read the book and Liza and her son had to escape across the frozen Ohio River to freedom, we could talk about just how horrible slavery really was.

At about the same time, my daughters were reading “Night” by Elie Wiesel, a Holocaust memoir, at school.  The parallels helped us talk about what it meant to tear people away from their friends and family and land forever, and to be treated as less than human, less than an animal. 

Nigel is now 18 and a senior in high school. We talked about the Holocaust recently in the context of Charlottesville.  The racists who want to kill and enslave Jews rallied together with the racists who want to enslave and kill African-Americans.

Before Charlottesville, the Confederate lovers could pretend they were just preserving their heritage. But since August, they flew their flags with Nazis. The history of slavery and lynching and Jim Crow oppression is not heritage, it is hate.

"Don't Judge Me!"

The drill sergeant is judging the soldier in front of him.

"Don't Judge Me!" was a phrase I heard more and more often in the last years I served in the Army National Guard.  It was often a surly young soldier telling her superior she was having a bad day and that's why her uniform, weapon, vehicle or work area looks bad.

Telling a sergeant or an officer not to judge you is like telling a wolf to be a vegan.

Not vegan......

When Jesus said, "Judge not....."it was both a warning and guide to the direction of a truly spiritual life, in the sense that it is a life emptied of concern for this world.

Anyone with expertise in this world judges others.

The essence of the warrant officer rank in the Army is someone who has considerable expertise in aircraft or trucks or weapons or administration.  That warrant officer judges everybody within the world of his shop, her hangar, his range, her office.

I have walked into a maintenance building and had a warrant officer gesture toward a mechanic who was trying to replace a turbocharger on a the V-12 diesel engine that powers Patton tanks. Along with the gesture he used the warrant officer signature phrase,

"Watch this shit."

The warrant officer allowed the mechanic to almost screw up the operation, then intervened to show the incompetent soldier how to "Unfuck himself."

One of the First Sergeants I served with in Iraq told me, "I can look at a uniform and how a soldier wears it, private or general, don't matter, and tell you that [soldier's] military career." 

I could not read an entire career from a camouflage uniform, but I could make accurate judgments in milliseconds about a soldier's current state of readiness for the job or mission at hand.  That's what sergeants do.  They judge you or they are asleep.

Judging is everywhere in life there is expertise.  My rule for watching movies is I don't watch movies on subjects in which I have expertise.  So I don't usually watch war movies.  Too many details from wear of the uniform to weapons that never run out of ammo drive me nuts.  And I judge.

So I watch movies about doctors, detectives, spies and sailors.  I have no expertise in these fields, so when a spy makes a glaring procedural error that would cause a cop to cringe, I am blissfully ignorant and enjoy the show.

Of course, this judgment ability is not just to enjoy assailing the incompetent, but for survival. I race bicycles. In races and in training, bicycles ride inches apart at speeds up to 50 mph.  Ten of my 34 broken bones happened in a split second at 50mph when I misjudged a pass I was making and in a few seconds was lying in a ditch bleeding with a broken neck waiting for a MEDEVAC helicopter.

Racers who ride in packs are judging each other all the time. It's a matter of survival. In a bicycle crash, the guy who causes the crash usually does not fall. The guy in front who brakes, or swerves, or drifts, clips the front wheel of the rider behind.  The rider behind falls. The rider in front keeps going.

When I hear or overhear someone asking, "Is she judging me?" I think, "How cute. You really think there is a chance she's not?"

My Dad, Estee Lauder and Dietrich Bohoeffer

In recent months I have immersed myself in my past in a way I have never done before. For a couple of months I have been writing about my life as a soldier.  I started out writing about my tank, but have since veered off into writing about Basic Training.  In military life, the transition from civilian to soldier is a change beyond every other change, even the change back from soldier to civilian.

In the past year, my Jewish identity has also emerged from some vague part of my past to a very present reality.

It would surprise no one, that as I write about my military past and learn more about Judaism and my Jewish identity, that my father would appear, sometimes vividly, sometimes in a whisper.  He was an American Soldier and the fourth of six sons of Jewish immigrants from Russia. (Now Odessa, Ukraine. They called it Russia.)

Among all of my family, my son Nigel has been most interested in, and my occasional companion on, my ventures exploring my past.

On Monday, the Martin Luther King, Jr., holiday, we visited the National Museum of American Jewish History in Philadelphia.

I particularly wanted to see an exhibit that was closing soon on the Russian emigration from the Soviet Union to Israel and America and other countries from the 1960s through the 80s. After Nigel and I walked through that exhibit, we sat in a viewing area on the first floor and watched a series of two-minute biographies of prominent Americans Jews of the last century.  When Sandy Koufax was on screen, I reminded Nigel that his grandfather pitched for the Reading Phillies in the 1930s.  When the biography of Estee Lauder began, the soft-voiced announcer said she was born in 1906, the same year as my father.

Estee Lauder, 1906-2004

The short video traced Estee Lauder's career making cosmetics. She began her business in the 1920s and continued to grow her business though the Great Depression and on to great success in the post-war years.  We watched a dozen more biographies, then took the Market Street El to 30th Street Station for the train home.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, 1906-1945

As we waited for the train, I got an article from a Jewish activist friend about Dietrich Bonhoeffer. 
Bonhoeffer was in America in the late 1930s studying American spirituality.  With war looming and Hitler's attacks on Jews and other people of faith growing, Bonhoeffer left the safe haven of America in June of 1939.  In Germany he organized a Church for believers who were against Hitler and then joined the resistance. In the last month of the war, April 1945, Bonhoeffer was murdered by the Gestapo in the Flossenburg Concentration Camp. He was a German who fought Hitler and died with Jews.

In December, Nigel and I had seen a display of children from the Flossenburg Concentration Camp at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York.

While Bonhoeffer struggled against the Nazis in Germany, my father commanded a Prisoner of War Camp for 600 soldiers of the German Army's Afrika Korps. My father came home to Boston after the war with my mother who he met and married during the war in Pennsylvania. In one of those odd twists of fate, I live less than 30 miles from that Prisoner of War Camp which is now the Reading Airport.  Before he was commander of the POW Camp, my Dad commanded a Black Company. 

And in 2018, the Black grandson my Dad never met--George Gussman died in 1982--went to a Jewish museum on Martin Luther King, Jr. Day to learn about his family's history. 

My father and Estee Lauder were both children of immigrant Jews born in America in 1906. They lived long lives because their parents came here,  leaving countries that would be crushed by Hitler in the 1940s.  In that same year, 1906, a leading German family of scientists and thinkers added a son who would become a famous man of faith.  Bonhoeffer was offered shelter in America and turned it down to return to his people. 

These three lives share only a birth year and the admiration of a son and grandson who learned a little more about courage and the best of America on a day devoted to an American hero.

Nine Years Ago Today: Packing with an Army PowerPoint

In January of 2009 I was packing to deploy to Iraq with the 28th Combat Aviation Brigade. The five bags the Army wanted me to pack each had their own PowerPoint presentation. I packed more than I need, but a lot less than the Army told me to pack. 

In addition to deciding how much I would bring with me on the trip, I had to be careful about how much I would carry at once.  I had shoulder surgery on Halloween of 2008, just in time to be cleared to fly to Oklahoma for pre-deployment training on January 30, 2009. 

By January I was out of the sling, but still technically a No-Go.  I even had a No-Go Counselor to deal with the problem. Which I wrote about here.

America Reversed on Military Service in 1992 at the Polls and on the Street

It occurred to me that since 1992 when the Baby Boomers hit middle age the country reversed on military service.

Every President from Harry Truman to George Bush Sr. was a veteran. In the five elections from 1992 to 2008, the Loser was a combat veteran: Bush Sr. and Bob Dole were decorated WWII veterans, Gore, Kerry and McCain served in the Vietnam War. President Obama is alone among the post-war Presidents in being too young for the draft.

In one of the ironies of American life, when I was in the Vietnam War-era Army, no one thanked me for my service and rich draft dodgers thought I was a loser for serving. But at that time, the only road to the Presidency was through military service. Even Antiwar Hubert Humphrey was a decorated combat pilot.

When I was in the Iraq War Army in the last decade, many people thanked me for my service, but 60 million people, including millions of veterans he sneered at, voted for a man with five deferments who insulted Prisoners of War.

MRE vs. C-Rations: for me, the 21st Century MRE is the Winner!

When I first enlisted in 1972, C-Rations, or more properly the MCI--Meal, Combat, Individual--was breakfast, lunch and dinner in the field if there was no hot chow until I left the Army Reserves in 1984.

In 2007 when I re-enlisted MRE--Meal Ready to Eat--was the field food.  MREs are delicious compared to MCIs. In fact, when I was in the field and the 20-year-olds complained about MREs, I would wish they could be given cold ham and eggs in an olive drab can until they were begging the First Sergeant to give their MREs back!

In 2010, after I returned from Iraq, I made a video comparing the two.  This week it went over 100,000 views on YouTube when a soldier who went to Basic Training in 2007 commented on the video.

Preparing to Survive a Nuclear War, Or Not

In 1977, one of my additional duties as a tank commander in West Germany was CBR NCO. I was the Chemical, Biological, Radiation Weapons Sergeant for our unit.  Each month I gave and hour-long class in a different weapon of mass destruction and how to survive if the Soviets attacked using them.  Although we tank soldiers had a better chance of surviving than ground troops, everyone knew that in a war with nerve gas and nukes and weaponized bugs, we were going to die. 

At the end of each class I would yell, "On your feet!"  The room stood up and I presented the doomsday scenario of the month.  For instance, what should we do if a nuclear weapon detonates directly over or on our position? 

The soldiers answered in unison, "Sergeant Gussman, we will put our heads firmly between our legs and kiss our asses goodbye!" 

We walked out laughing, but no one thought these weapons were anything but terrifying. They still are.
If we knew the nuclear bomb or nerve gas was coming, the main defensive action was to move the unit to safety, if a safe place was available.  

Forty years later, the rest of the world is waking up to what Cold War soldiers assumed could or would be their future, or the end of their future.