Dastan Eleukenov: Our political leadership had not the faintest idea about the biological weapons, of course, and the Party leaders didn't know about them either, no one knew. "Top secret," as they say in English. It was a top secret facility, and... It was a big surprise. Gennadiy Nikolaevich Lepeshkin's recollections of how he came to the capital, to Almaty, were quite interesting. You see, Moscow had discontinued funding, and the staff was not being paid. And times were already difficult enough in the Soviet Union, inflation was rampant, food supplies were irregular. And then he showed up and was able to get in to see the top leadership, and, he told them, as it happens, you have at your disposal this one-of-a-kind, highly dangerous site. And here I should say that they did decide to provide assistance. Not in the sense, of course, of the plant resuming operations and exporting its output, but in the sense of helping people, just so that they didn't go hungry. And later work began, initially, to convert it and then simply to shut it down.