Jailed Russian Chemist Is Free-Speech Hero : Media: Journalists wonder if things have changed in former Soviet republic as researcher is arrested in wake of his shocking expose on top-secret weapons.

How free are Russians today? Ask Vil S. Mirzayanov, if you can.

For the past 10 days, that’s been impossible. The chemist and father of two young children has been in Lefortovo, the dun-colored, dilapidated KGB holding pen in east Moscow where U-2 pilot Francis Gary Powers was once locked up.

The bespectacled researcher is in jail because he was the acknowledged source for sensational, printed revelations that as recently as this spring, the Russians were hard at work developing a new type of binary chemical weapon.

This super-secret work on what is believed to be the world’s most toxic nerve agent was conducted right here in Moscow at the same time the Kremlin was assuring the United States and other countries that it had halted production of such weapons.

Mirzayanov, 57, an ethnic Tatar, lost his job in February after speaking out against the covert weapons development program. On Friday night, acquaintances say, he was formally charged with revealing state secrets; in the words of a Ministry of Security statement, he impermissibly disclosed information “about developments in the field of chemical technology.”

With myriad questions still unanswered, Russian journalists have nevertheless seized on the affair as their equivalent of the John Peter Zenger case in Colonial America--a crucial precedent for the right of the press to report the truth, and officialdom be damned.

“Politically, this is a tough warning to all journalists--a kind of revival of censorship,” said Igor O. Baranovsky, correspondent for the Moscow News, which printed the expose signed by Mirzayanov and a colleague in September.

“But if in the past censorship was official and we at least knew what we could and couldn’t write about,” Baranovsky said, “this new sort of censorship is wild and arbitrary to the point where a journalist can easily land behind bars for political reasons or some ugly, primitive motive like the squaring of old accounts.”

The Moscow News expose and a more technically detailed article on the research published in the Baltimore Sun stripped away the secrecy from activities at a nondescript glass-and-concrete building on Moscow’s Route of the Enthusiasts, the path taken by 19th-Century political exiles as they set off on foot for Siberia.

“The institute Vil worked at was so top-secret that even to say where you worked was considered breaking a state secret, let alone mentioning the rest,” Nuria K. Mirzayanov, 43, the scientist’s wife, said in an interview. “When he began working there, he signed a paper in which he gave an oath to keep his mouth shut.”

According to the expose, researchers at the Government All-Union Scientific-Research Institute of Organic Chemistry and Technology achieved a military breakthrough by concocting a nerve agent more effective and harder to counter medically than any type previously known.

“Industrial quantities” were then reportedly produced and fashioned into so-called binary arms--weapons where two comparatively harmless substances mix during the launch of a bomb or rocket to produce a supertoxin.

The new chemical, the Moscow News wrote, was “significantly” more effective than VX--a liquid poison invented by the British and refined by the U.S. Army in the 1950s.

Colorless and odorless, VX had been the deadliest of the substances developed since chemical warfare began in World War I. If a drop about the size of a pinhead comes into contact with the skin, it will kill a grown man in 15 minutes. It is long-lasting, evaporating 2,000 times slower than water.

In the spring of 1991, in recognition of the achievement of the new weapon’s creators, then-Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev awarded them the Lenin Prize, according to the Moscow News.

That would have been after Gorbachev’s June, 1990, bilateral agreement with President Bush banning superpower production of chemical weapons on a large scale, and also after Gorbachev had been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, the paper noted.

In the first quarter of this year--when Gorbachev’s Soviet Union had been succeeded by Boris N. Yeltsin’s Russia--field-testing of the poison was wrapped up on an isolated plateau in Uzbekistan. On Jan. 29, Yeltsin declared that Russia would observe the 1990 U.S.-Soviet ban, which has yet to be ratified.

Because of Mirzayanov’s revelations, Moscow’s sincerity may have suddenly seemed suspect.

On Oct. 22, about 8 a.m., Nuria Mirzayanov took her 4-year-old son to kindergarten. When she returned to her two-room Moscow apartment, she found about 15 men in civilian clothes and uniforms outside, hammering on the door.

One man flashed a piece of paper she realized must be a search warrant. But she told the policemen and operatives from the Ministry of Security, a successor agency to the KGB, that they had no right to enter.

“Oh, shut up, please! If your husband doesn’t open the door, we shall break it down,” she remembers hearing in reply. “In America, they would have broken it down long ago.”

Realizing that they were serious, she called to her husband to open the door.

He did, and was taken away.

As Baranovsky notes, it is debatable whether Russian officials had any right to detain Mirzayanov. Although no details have been made officially public yet, acquaintances say he was charged under Article 75 of the Russian Criminal Code, which provides for imprisonment of people who reveal state secrets.

The trouble is, since the collapse of the Soviet Union last December, Russia hasn’t had the time to adopt its own legal definition of “state secrets.”

To plug that gap, Yeltsin signed a decree Jan. 14 maintaining Soviet-era standards--a decision some liberals find intolerable.

Nuria Mirzayanov said her husband first tried to warn the outside world about the work going on along the Route of the Enthusiasts in an article printed in a Moscow tabloid last year.

There was no Western reaction. He did, however, get the attention of his superiors, his wife says ruefully. When the institute cut back its personnel last February, the 27-year veteran was one of the first to go.

Nuria Mirzayanov believes that the Moscow News article brought the sky down on her husband’s head because for the first time he identified the “hero” responsible for the new poison: Gen. Anatoly D. Kuntsevich, formerly of the Soviet Chemical Weapons Troops.

Mirzayanov’s co-author, fellow physical chemist Lev A. Fyodorov, goes further: He thinks Russian military leaders were conducting the weapons development program independently, a notion that he agrees is very disquieting.

“I’m convinced Yeltsin knew nothing about this research--the generals were doing everything behind his back,” said Fyodorov, who was also detained briefly at Lefortovo but then released.

Until this case is cleared up, journalist Natalia Gevorkyan of the Moscow News laments that it will serve as a “menacing raised finger” to anyone in the military-industrial complex, science or law enforcement who is tempted to unmask an official cover-up.

As for journalists, in the opinion of the daily newspaper Izvestia, “all of us writers and people from the visual media are henceforth potential ‘traitors to the Motherland.’ ”

Russian government officials have refused to confirm or deny the Moscow News’ charges. But they assert that if true, the research and development work would not violate Russia’s formal pledges.

“The fact is, the Geneva draft convention banning the development, as well as the production and storage of chemical weapons, has not been signed yet,” said Nikolai G. Pyatkov of the Russian Foreign Ministry’s disarmament department. That is not expected until next January.

Neither a lawyer nor Nuria Mirzayanov has been allowed to see the prisoner at Lefortovo. Bewildered over her family’s ordeal, panicked over how she will feed her two sons if her husband remains inside, Nuria Mirzayanov feels trapped in a bad memory.

“I still refuse to believe that all this is happening,” she said. “I think to myself: This can’t be. They will soon let my husband go. It can’t be happening now. Or has nothing changed in this country?”

Sergei L. Loiko, a reporter in The Times’ Moscow Bureau, contributed to this article.