Pod Insights Throughline What Happened to Vladimir Alexandrov? About this episode Rund Abdelfatah and Cristina Kim try to unravel the mystery of a Soviet scientist who was helping to spread the word about nuclear winter theory—until he disappeared.
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Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
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0:17 Rund Abdelfatah? Hey, it's Rund. Just a quick thing before we start. This is a special bonus episode of Throughline. Every month, we make exclusive episodes just for our very special Throughline Plus supporters that take listeners behind the scenes of our work. But this month, we thought we'd give everyone a chance to listen. If you're already a Plus supporter, thank you so much. It means a lot to us, and you got first access to this episode in your Plus feed. But if you're not a Plus supporter yet, we hope you'll consider joining. It's a great way to support NPR and public media. Go to plus.npr.org/throughline to join now.
1:01 Rund Abdelfatah? Earlier this year, I worked with producer Christina Kim.
1:05 Speaker 02 Hey, Rund.
1:05 Rund Abdelfatah? On an episode about nuclear winter theory, which is the idea that if every world power that had nukes started to actually use them, the world would descend into nuclear winter. Think the end of the world, à la the end of the dinosaurs.
1:26 Speaker 02 It was a theory popularized by the astrophysicist Carl Sagan and other scientists in the 1980s. Some credit the theory with helping to avert nuclear war at the height of the Cold War.
1:37 Speaker 03 A new consciousness is developing which sees the Earth as a single organism and recognizes that an organism at war with itself is doomed.
1:49 Speaker 02 Sagan was the scientist of the time, in large part because he hosted this public media show called Cosmos that made science accessible. And, well, human. He was part scientist, part poet, and 100% magnetic.
2:04 Speaker 03 We are one planet.
2:07 Rund Abdelfatah? You should check out the episode if you haven't already. But we're telling you all this because while Carl Sagan was bringing nuclear winter theory to US audiences, he had a Soviet counterpart.
2:19 Speaker 04 Vladimir Alexandrov.
2:21 Rund Abdelfatah? Vladimir Alexandrov.
2:23 Speaker 04 He was handsome and young, and he spoke decent amount of English and had a sort of a fluency that let him befriend many American scientists.
2:33 Rund Abdelfatah? This is Andrew Revkin. We interviewed him for the original episode because he wrote a big cover story for Science Digest magazine about nuclear winter theory in 1985.
2:43 Speaker 02 And that's when he told us that over the course of covering the nuclear winter story, something happened that the global scientific community couldn't explain.
2:52 Speaker 04 Not long after, my piece ran in March of 1985 in Science Digest magazine. And it was just a month or two later, I started getting emails and I think a call from some of the scientists I had interviewed, saying that one of their Soviet colleagues appeared to have vanished. And this was Vladimir Alexandrov.
3:15 Speaker 02 At the height of his scientific career, Vladimir Alexandrov had disappeared.
3:24 Rund Abdelfatah? Ever since I heard this story, I haven't been able to stop thinking about it. Where did Alexandrov go? Why would he want to disappear? Or who might have wanted him gone?
3:34 Speaker 02 And so for this month's Throughline Plus episode, we're leaning into the infamous genre of true crime.
3:40 Rund Abdelfatah? Oh, boy.
3:41 Speaker 02 Just kidding. We won't be recording ourselves in a car as we chase down a red herring lead. We don't have that kind of budget.
3:47 Rund Abdelfatah? But we will be bringing you the mystery of Vladimir Alexandrov with help from Andrew Revkin.
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5:10 Rund Abdelfatah? OK, so here's what we know. Alexandrov's specialty was atmospheric science, but he got on the nuclear winter train pretty quickly.
5:18 Speaker 04 He was sort of groomed to be the public face of this issue.
5:24 Rund Abdelfatah? At the time, Revkin wrote, quote, "Central casting could not have provided the Soviets with a more attractive spokesman. Tall and charismatic, Alexandrov had a charming wife and a chubby, rock-music-loving daughter, a command of English and Italian, a craving for barbecued spare ribs and hamburgers, and a taste for Western films and popular novels."
5:47 Speaker 02 Pretty much the perfect guy to pair up with the charismatic Carl Sagan.
5:52 Speaker 04 I think Sagan recognized the value of Alexandrov as a public voice from that side of the question.
6:00 Rund Abdelfatah? Sagan and Alexandrov got together to spread the word that it would be best for the whole world if the US and the Soviet Union didn't use their nukes to blow each other up.
6:10 Speaker 04 He was already kind of on this world tour, often along with Carl Sagan and/or others, to try to beat the drama of disarmament and that nuclear winter demonstrated that nuclear war was unwinnable.
6:23 Speaker 02 Alexandrov went to the Vatican to talk to the Pope. He was on US TV. And he even...
6:28 Speaker 04 Testified in Congress.
6:31 Rund Abdelfatah? And all of this was possible because at this time during the Cold War, science was both a means by which the two powers wanted to win, the arms race, but also the bridge.
6:42 Speaker 04 There was this sort of détente, Glasnost effort to use science as a bridge between the Russians and the United States. Alexandrov, he was part of that.
6:53 Rund Abdelfatah? As part of this exchange, Alexandrov spent a lot of time in the US with American scientists.
6:59 Speaker 04 They were congenial friends of his. He had spent enough time in the United States that he had an Oregon driver's license. This is a Soviet scientist in the, you know, early 80s.
7:10 Speaker 02 Alexandrov was a public figure, the Soviet Carl Sagan, friend to American scientists. And no one could have predicted that he would simply disappear on a work trip to Spain. But that's exactly what happened.
7:24 Rund Abdelfatah? Alexandrov traveled to Spain in March 1985 to attend a conference in Córdoba.
7:29 Speaker 04 He was speaking at a nuclear free zone meeting. It was mayors from nuclear cities around the world that wanted to declare that we won't house nuclear weapons here. We won't support nuclear war.
7:42 Speaker 02 So, nothing too out of the ordinary for Alexandrov. He's doing his thing, spreading the word about disarmament. But from the start of his trip to Spain, something had seemed off.
7:52 Rund Abdelfatah? According to the timeline Revkin pieced together through his reporting, Alexandrov arrived in Madrid. And even though there was a Spanish chauffeur waiting for him, he's escorted immediately from the airport to the Soviet embassy by embassy staff. After about half an hour, Alexandrov emerged and immediately asked the Spanish driver, who was waiting nearby, to take him to a bar, any bar.
8:16 Speaker 04 He was very distraught.
8:18 Speaker 02 Alexandrov got drunk and spent the five-hour car ride to Córdoba, where the conference was taking place, alternating between sleeping and getting sick.
8:27 Rund Abdelfatah? That night, after arriving and getting set up in his room, he goes out.
8:31 Speaker 04 He was seen drinking a lot.
8:33 Rund Abdelfatah? And is found by Spanish police, lying in the street, unconscious. His friends later tell Revkin, this is not like Alexandrov.
8:42 Speaker 03 I've tossed a few vodkas down with him on occasion, but he certainly was not a heavy drinker. Bob Sess, atmospheric scientist at the State University.
8:51 Speaker 02 City of New York, Stony Brook. He's drunk throughout the three days of the conference. He refuses to talk to the press. The Spanish newspaper El País writes, quote, "No one saw him until Sunday morning, when he turned up at the conference headquarters in a state of apparent inebriation."
9:09 Rund Abdelfatah? And by Sunday, the conference is over. His original Spanish driver, plus an additional driver for support, are tasked with taking Alexandrov back to Madrid.
9:19 Speaker 02 According to the driver, Alexandrov is like, "Airport, airport, airport." And the driver's like, "Sí, claro." But really, no. The folks from Córdoba have told the driver to take him back to the Soviet Embassy.
9:33 Rund Abdelfatah? OK, and here's where the details get lost in contradictions. This is what we know based on reporting Andrew Revkin did shortly after Alexandrov disappeared.
9:43 Speaker 02 Alexandrov reportedly starts to act violently in the car. The drivers are then asked to take him to Hotel Apartamentos Habana. The drivers refuse.
9:52 Speaker 04 There are reports of him being bundled into a van.
9:54 Rund Abdelfatah? Some say he's put into a van by embassy officials and dropped off at the hotel. According to the receptionist, who was not on duty at the time Alexandrov arrived, but whose friend was. Alexandrov was not drunk or disheveled, and was given a room key.
10:11 Speaker 02 OK, so important note here. Several sources, including some with connections to intelligence, told Revkin that at the time, Hotel Habana had a close relationship with the Soviet Embassy. So anything the hotel employees told him needed to be taken with a grain of salt.
10:27 Rund Abdelfatah? So then, again, according to the receptionist at the hotel, Alexandrov left the hotel and did not spend the night there. The next day, when representatives from the Soviet Embassy came, he wasn't there. So they took his belongings, paid his bill, and left.
10:46 Speaker 02 And that's where the case ends. Since that night, Alexandrov hasn't been seen ever again. There were a lot of questions, but...
10:55 Speaker 04 There's no body.
10:57 Rund Abdelfatah? At the time, it all seemed a bit hush-hush. The Spanish authorities and press are not reporting that he's missing. In fact, it's Alexandrov's American scientist friends that start to ring the alarm. And they actually call up Andrew Revkin.
11:13 Rund Abdelfatah? And say,
11:14 Speaker 04 "We need help. Can you help us find him?"
11:16 Speaker 02 Andrew started digging into it. Where was Vladimir Alexandrov?
11:21 Speaker 04 There was tons of information that I pulled together. You know, I had many different lines of evidence leading to why he might have vanished. But it all kind of ended up murky.
11:35 Speaker 02 There were a lot of questions and ideas of what exactly had happened.
11:39 Speaker 04 There are theories that Cuban operatives in Spain had worked, had maybe been too heavy-handed.
11:46 Rund Abdelfatah? There was the idea that Cuban security guards at the Soviet Embassy roughed him up too much. Or, as his friends hoped, that he had simply defected from the Soviet Union and was starting a new life elsewhere.
11:59 Speaker 03 Who knows? Maybe it'll have a happy ending and we'll find him on a beach in Greece with a girlfriend.
12:05 Speaker 02 But his friends, like American scientist Bob Chevren, weren't optimistic.
12:11 Speaker 03 My gut feeling? I think I'm fairly safe in saying we will never hear from him again or see him again.
12:19 Speaker 04 Everything leads to him being killed for reasons that can only be examined and not nailed down firmly without someone in the Soviet Union, someone in Russia, coming out with a clear basis for information.
12:39 Rund Abdelfatah? The prevailing theory is that Alexandrov was killed. But by who and why? Without more information from Russia, it's hard to piece it all together, according to Andrew Refkin. But there is some information that's come to light that helps us understand what could have been a possible motive.
12:58 Speaker 04 I do think some of that relates to some of the questions about whether he was a spy for us. Or a spy for them in terms of technology access.
13:09 Rund Abdelfatah? Was he a spy, a double agent?
13:12 Speaker 04 This, you know, there was a telling moment late in his life, just before he vanished, actually, when the visa he was granted for his last visit to the United States was marked, he should have no access to supercomputers. So someone within the United States government was starting to get concerned about his level of access to technology here. There are many, I can go on and on about why that is unlikely to have been a real issue, but it certainly was seen to be an issue by the State Department.
13:47 Speaker 02 Revkin can't confirm one way or another, but he knows that the US government was keeping close tabs on Alexandrov.
13:54 Speaker 04 They were tracking him very carefully because of his access to American supercomputing technology in the 80s and late 70s.
14:03 Speaker 02 The US State Department limited how much Alexandrov knew about the USA's supercomputers. And they were well aware that the Soviet government had supported his role as the Soviet face of nuclear winter theory.
14:15 Speaker 04 He was put forward by others within the Soviet science apparatus to direct his attention to nuclear winter.
14:23 Rund Abdelfatah? Had the US decided he knew too much? Or had the Soviet Union feared they'd lost him to the West, especially the more he promoted nuclear winter theory? Was he caught sharing information to one side or both sides? Or had he simply been the victim of professional rivalry? Or a mental breakdown from the pressures of being such a prominent scientist?
14:45 Speaker 02 In the end, there's always more questions than answers. Andrew Revkin tried as best as he could to piece it together in 1986, a year after Alexandrov first went missing. He didn't provide anything conclusive, but some people in power did think he tipped the scales.
15:02 Speaker 04 When my story on the disappearance of Vladimir Alexandrov ran, there was an article in the Liternaia Gazeta, a Soviet publication. They thought that my implications in my article on Alexandrov, that he had been kidnapped and perhaps murdered or accidentally killed by Russian operatives. They didn't like that very much.
15:25 Rund Abdelfatah? Today, we still don't know what happened to Vladimir Alexandrov. Andrew Revkin is still thinking about it. He's currently working with a British documentary team trying to find answers to understand how and why the Soviets' leading scientist on nuclear winter theory vanished and was never found.
15:47 Rund Abdelfatah? OK, that concludes this bonus episode of Throughline Plus. If you're already a Plus supporter, thank you. And if you aren't yet, we hope you'll consider joining for exclusive content just like this. It's a great way to support NPR, public media, and of course, Throughline. Go to plus.npr.org/throughline to join now. And thank you.
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