In Stalin's bomb lab, dreams of preservation

By Christian Lowe

SUKHUMI, Georgia (Reuters) - Behind a thicket of weeds and broken window panes, one of the former Soviet Union's dark secrets is the laboratory where captured German scientists worked to build an atomic bomb for Josef Stalin.

The Sukhumi Institute still exists, in a state of limbo. Limping along under semi-siege in Abkhazia, a breakaway region of Georgia whose existence the rest of the world does not recognize, its Cold War past has been all but forgotten.

Once, around 250 German specialists lived here with their families and built centrifuges to separate uranium isotopes. Now a money-making sideline for the few scientists who keep the institute's research going is designing household heaters.

Deputy director Vladimir Kunitsky does have ambitious hopes for the institute, which was nearly wrecked by the separatist war that engulfed this region on the shores of the Black Sea after the Soviet Union collapsed.

He would like to turn part of the former bomb laboratory into a sanatorium, combining cutting-edge treatments using radioactive sources and a beautiful location a short walk from the Black Sea.

"We are preserving some kind of potential," he said in his bare office, where the paint is peeling off the walls.

Abkhazia's unrecognized status, and the suspicion with which many countries regard it, will make realizing his plan difficult. In the late 1990s, the institute was a focus of international concern with reports that radioactive fuel had gone missing, although a United Nations inspection concluded all the nuclear material was in order.

Kunitsky, who first came to Sukhumi as a small boy when his serviceman father was assigned to keep an eye on the Germans, thinks the institute has a duty to keep going: "We are not letting it die out."

Set in the lush grounds of an estate built by the brother of Russia's last tsar, the institute bears witness to Abkhazia's past as a chic holiday destination for the Russian elite.

Its neo-classical concert hall is a gutted shell after an incendiary round landed on it. Nearby, two huge lion statues stand guard outside a laboratory building with ceilings that have caved in.

Six decades ago, the institute's residents arrived under very different circumstances. After World War Two, German scientists were needed to help Moscow compete in the Cold War.

As the war drew to an end, Soviet intelligence homed in on two individuals: Manfred von Ardenne, the son of a Prussian army officer and head of an electron physics laboratory in Berlin, and Gustav Hertz, who had won Nobel Prize in 1925 for his work on experimental physics and was director of a research laboratory at the Siemens Company.

"They were invited," said Kunitsky. "But they were invited in such a way that they could not refuse."

FAR FROM HOME

The story told by institute staff is that the Germans were taken to Moscow and brought before Lavrenty Beria, the feared head of Stalin's secret police who was also in charge of the nuclear program.