On December 2, 2020, the head of the Foreign Intelligence Service of the Russian Federation Sergey Naryshkin called Dmitry Ivanovich Mendeleev among the most famous people "engaged in intelligence activities, political and military-strategic intelligence." We checked whether the great scientist had something to do with secret services.

The foreign intelligence service (SVR) is considered the successor to the foreign department of the All -Russian Extraordinary Commission and therefore celebrates the centenary in 2020. On the eve of a significant date, the head of the department and part -time Chairman Russian Historical Society Sergey Naryshkin gave interview The magazine "Historian". What is logical, the conversation was dedicated to the past of the Russian secret service. In particular, Naryshkin listed famous people who participated in intelligence, including calling the great scientist Dmitry Mendeleev.

Although in an interview, the head of the SVR does not specify the sources of his information, it is easy to determine them. In 1995, the department Published "Essays on the history of Russian foreign intelligence" in six volumes. The editor -in -chief of this collective work was Evgeny Primakov, who at that time held the post of director of the SVR.

In the first volume with the subtitle “from ancient times to 1917” there is the text of Andrei Itskov “Russia - the USA: attempts to rapprocheted”. In addition to working on essays, Itskov also wrote The book “The death of Johnstown is the CIA crime”, which “exposes the organized CIA organized by the villainous murder of 918 American citizens in the Gayan jungle.” It was not possible to find academic publications and articles of this author in authoritative scientific journals on history.

Itskov claims that in the mid-1870s, “a stream of cheap American oil, obtained using the latest technologies, literally flooded the world market with this valuable energy product, and Russia began to carry huge financial losses.” When the thought of “dealing with American innovations” appeared, they began to look for a suitable “candidate for“ scouts ”, and, according to the author, Mendeleev became them. In 1876, the scientist went to the World Exhibition in Philadelphia, where he got acquainted with statistical data, made “many personal contacts” and held a lot of “meetings with prominent American specialists and scientists”, visited oil wells and examined the oil pipelines. Itskov also writes that Mendeleev “tried to find the secret to the manufacture of smokeless gunpowder” in parallel “at the request of the Russian military department”, and “information received on this issue” made it possible to reproduce the explosive composition and develop a more effective technology. Itskov learned all this from two sources: Mendeleev’s labor “on oil affairs” and his “papers” from a certain archive of MMA (Fund 1, Case 21, Sheet 32). It was not possible to find an archive known under such an abbreviation. Apparently, it does not exist.

In 1996, the director of the museum-archiva Mendeleev SPbU, historian of science Igor Dmitriev Published The analysis of Itskov’s publication. Unlike a colleague who wrote essays for the SVR, Dmitriev is one of the largest specialists On the life and heritage of Mendeleev, who wrote more than one study about the scientist. He largely bases critical remarks addressed to Itskov on the numerous texts of Mendeleev and documents stored in his museum and the Russian State Archive of the Navy - unlike MMA, accurately existing.

As Dmitriev rightly remarks, Itskov himself does not mention any actions of Mendeleev that could be characterized as “intelligence”. The chemist was really interested in the theme of the oil since the 1860s and participated in the discussion of reforms in this area, despite the fact that the difference is the importance of oil then and now Incredible. Therefore, the Russian technical society petitioned for the sending of Mendeleev to America to get acquainted with overseas experience. Upon his return, the scientist presented the report to the Minister of Finance and published book "Oil industry in the North American state of Pennsylvania and the Caucasus." Among the sources of Itskov there are no these texts.

Mendeleev constantly emphasizes in his records: the Americans talked about their oil production everything that was interested in, showed equipment, provided statistics and official reports. In America, Mendeleev did not have to use any “espionage” techniques, but it was also not there: “Our Baku techniques have nothing to learn from the Americans regarding distillation, you can, if you borrow, are some mechanical devices, but they will use and pay off only such enormous plants, which are American ones.” There was no secret in a logistics decision on the transfer of oil refineries from places of extraction to places of marketing - Mendeleev proposed this idea back in 1863.

Essays also states that during a trip to America in 1876, Mendeleev managed to find out the method of manufacturing smokeless gunpowder. Itskov who wrote about this did not bother that the first samples of acceptable quality appeared In the United States, almost 20 years later - how could Mendeleev spy them? It is all the more strange to blame the scientist of the theft or spying of the technology, if we take into account that, thanks to Mendeleev, in Russia, smokeless gunpowder appeared earlier than in the United States. Domestic specialists began development back in the mid-1880s, Mendeleev joined the process in 1890, and by 1893 he successfully completed the tests. High -quality smokeless gunpowder managed to get two years earlier than Americans.

To solve this problem, the scientist again went on a foreign trip to exchange experience, but not to America, but to France and the UK. The trip was documented in detail: the chemist conducted a notebook and sent letters, the correspondence of the Marine Technical Committee, which was Mendeleev, was also preserved. According to these data, in Europe, the chemist also did not use “spy” methods, limiting himself to official ways: for example, thanks to the help of the Russian ambassador, he managed to convince the French minister to give permission to familiarize themselves with the production of gunpowder. Otherwise, the picture was not very different from the events of 14 years ago in America: European colleagues showed Mendeleev the laboratories and talked about production.

The minimum Fleur of Bondiana in this story appears thanks to the son of chemist Ivan Dmitrievich. In his memoirs, he retells his father’s memories of that trip: “I was sent abroad by a military department with a secret mission. <...> I also quickly opened the secret to the manufacture of French gunpowder, taking advantage of the fact that the powder plant stood on a separate railway line. Having taken the annual report of the railway company on the movement of goods, I found the ratio of substances that I needed in the production of powder ... ”It is funny that this certificate in the essay was not mentioned. However, Dmitriev characterizes the memoirs of Ivan Mendeleev as containing “many, to put it mildly, inaccuracies” and draws attention to the fact that in 1890 the scientist’s son was six years old. Dmitriev is sure: if such a story took place, he was designed for children's perception and did not correspond to reality.

Unlike Newton or Darwin, Mendeleev’s legacy has not yet been represented in the form of a single digital archive, thanks to which all its texts, diaries and correspondence would become available to any person. In such a situation, we are forced to focus on the authority of researchers, the sources and argumentation by them. The SVR has not presented fundamentally new evidence for 25 years. Compared to a detailed and detailed study of a recognized specialist in Mendeleev, a chapter from a book on the history of the SVR on Cheyr pages with reference to the archive, the existence of which is in question, clearly causes less confidence.

Fake

What do our verdicts mean?

Read on the topic:

1. https://historyrussia.org/polemika/intervyu-s-storikami/est-takaya-professiya.html
2. I. Dmitriev. "Special Mission" Mendeleev: Facts and arguments