Military toxins lurk where Muscovites swim

MOSCOW - Some locals call it ''Infectionland'' - several leafy acres of birch woods in southeastern Moscow, where the Soviet military once conducted top-secret chemical weapons tests and dumped tons of poisonous agents.

Barrels of highly toxic mustard gas and lewisite, a poisonous, arsenic-based gas, are still buried somewhere in these woods in the city's Kuzminki residential district. The exact location of the leaky, decades-old containers is unknown, a former military secret that the military itself has forgotten.

The poison is believed to be buried near the shores of two swampy ponds where hundreds of Muscovites come each week to swim, sunbathe, and pick mushrooms and berries.

Most of them have heard about the waste site, but their desire to beat the summer heat outweighs any concern about what lies beneath.

The Kuzminki site is one of hundreds of chemical weapons dumps scattered across Russia, unmarked, unguarded, and often in heavily populated areas, the hazardous legacy of the carelessness and chaos that marked the former Soviet Union's race to develop a chemical arsenal.

At the Kuzminki woods, no barbed wire keeps residents of nearby apartment complexes from wandering into the woods. There are no ''do not swim'' signs to warn bathers of the dangers of the contaminated ponds. There is only the debris of many cookouts, bonfires and pondside parties.

''What's there to be afraid of?,'' asked Tanya Kulenok, 15, as she tossed her shirt and shorts onto the garbage-strewn shore and waded confidently into the waters of the slightly cleaner-looking of the Kuzminki woods' two ponds.

Lev Fyodorov, a retired military chemist who runs a Moscow-based environmental watchdog group, said he had located 203 similarly abandoned chemical weapons dumps and more than 200 abandoned former testing sites.

Fyodorov found the sites by poring over military documents from the 1930s that were classified until the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. But the Russian military has done nothing to clean up these sites, even after it promised to destroy its 44,000 tons of chemical weapons under the 1997 Chemical Weapons Convention.

''The entire country is sitting on chemical weapons dumps, and nobody knows about it,'' Fyodorov said.

Kulenok and her friend, Alesya Lomteva, 15, had heard about the weapons dump in Kuzminki. But as temperatures soared close to 90 degrees last week, the water looked good enough to them and other people in the woods.

''If you are afraid of wolves, don't go in the woods,'' one bather remarked.

The Moscow city government also knows about the Kuzminki site. Last year, after scientists conducted a test that showed traces of mustard gas and arsenic, perhaps from the lewisite, were leaking into the soil, Moscow's mayor, Yuri Luzhkov, asked the military to clean up the site.

The army did nothing. Spokesmen for both the Defense Ministry and Russia's chemical weapons forces declined to comment.

No one has studied the effects of the site on residents' health. Mustard gas may cause cancer of the mouth, throat, skin, and lungs, leukemia, and birth defects, according to the US Department of Health and Human Services. Lewisite is a blistering poison gas that can cause cancer. Exposure to either agent can lead to chronic lung impairment and blindness.

Yefim Brodsky, a military scientist who conducted an analysis of the soil, did not say how much of the poisons he found, but said the amount ''cannot be harmful for humans,'' adding that it was fine for people to swim there.

But Marshal Klim Voroshilov, the former Soviet military commander who in 1937 ordered the destruction of 27.5 tons of poisonous agents at the Kuzminki site, thought otherwise.

''It is necessary to strictly prohibit the use of this land by people, such as living, recreational walking, construction, etc.,'' Voroshilov wrote in a report.

When the military abandoned the testing ground in 1961, it left the toxic materials in the ground, but took away the barbed wire and warning signs, according to Eduard Vilyatitsky, a retired army colonel who served at the Kuzminki site from 1948 to 1958.

Vilyatitsky, 76, said he now suffers from immune deficiency and lung disorders. His doctors are amazed that he is still alive: Everyone else who served in his unit died long ago from exposure to chemical weapons, he said.

''Nobody really knows how much poison there is,'' Vilyatitsky said of the Kuzminki site, ''they have been burying chemical waste and weapons there since 1917. It is hard even for me to tell what is buried there - everything dangerous, everything poisonous.''