The Soviet Union's biological weapons program started in the late 1920s. Earlier that decade, the Soviet Union had emerged from a brutal civil war in which over 16 million people died, many from disease, so the new Soviet government was acutely aware of the impact that disease could have on a conflict. In 1928, just a few years after signing the Geneva Protocol that bans the use of bacteriological weapons, the Soviet government ordered its scientists to begin studying ways in which diseases could be turned into weapons.
Throughout the 30s and 40s, the Soviet program continued to grow. New laboratories were built and research was expanded to include work on Q fever, glanders, and melioidosis. These early efforts were the start of what would become the world's largest biological weapons program.
After WWII, the Soviet biological weapons program continued to increase in size until it was operating on a massive scale. At its peak, it employed 60,000 people, including support staff, in a network of 50 military and civilian research institutes scattered throughout the Soviet Union.
In 1972, a year after the Soviet Union signed the Biological Weapons Convention, an organization with the cover name of Biopreparat was created and charged with the task of developing biological weapons that were resistant to antibiotics and vaccines. Biopreparat was part of a larger biological weapons program that involved the Soviet minisitries of defense, agriculture, and health and the Soviet Academy of Sciences. Biopreparat in particular was tasked with working on a variety of agents including tularemia, plague, anthrax, smallpox, Marburg, and Ebola.
Apart from working on agents that targeted humans, Soviet scientists also developed biological weapons that could be used against crops and animals. These included foot-and-mouth disease, rinderpest, and African swine fever. These diseases can cause damage in livestock and crops on a truly massive economic scale, resulting in billions of dollars lost in damages, expected earnings, and exports.
Much of what is known about the secret Soviet biological weapons program has come from high-level figures within the program who defected to the United States. One the most important of these defectors is Ken Alibek, who was Deputy Director of Biopreparat. In his book about the Soviet biological weapons program, Alibek describes how he became involved in biological weapons research. He started his graduate studies in 1973 with the goal of becoming a military psychiatrist. While doing research for a course on epidemiology, Alibek became interested in the potential of biological weapons.
Alibek refocused his studies on infectious diseases and epidemiology, and his enthusiasm eventually caught the eye of Biopreparat recruiters. When offered the opportunity to work in Biopreparat, Alibek accepted. Upon arriving at his new post at a biological weapons production plant, Alibek met with KGB officials who informed him of the nature of the work he was going to be doing. The KGB officer said, "You are aware that this isn't normal workÉI have to inform you that there exists an international treaty on biological warfare, which the Soviet Union has signed. According to that treaty no one is allowed to make biological weapons. But the United States signed it too, and we believe that the Americans are lying."
In a book he wrote about his experiences in Biopreparat, Alibek writes, "It was not difficult for me to believe that the United States would use any conceivable weapon against us, and that our own survival depended on matching their duplicity."
On the question of the ethics of working on biological weapons, Alibek writes, "The five minutes I spent with [the KGB officer] represented the first and last time any official would bring up a question of ethics for the rest of my career."
At first, Alibek was concerned about the implications of the work he was doing for Biopreparat. While training to become a bioweapons expert, he and his fellow students struggled to reconcile the oath they took during medical school to do no harm with the fact that they were learning how to produce highly lethal biological agents. Alibek writes "I still shuddered occasionally when I looked at the bacteria multiplying in our fermenters and considered that they could end the lives of millions of people." Alibek's love for the exciting scientific work he was doing, however, soon won out over any ethical qualms that may have held him back. In his words, "the idealistic young doctorÉwho had agonized over the difference between saving lives and taking them, was gone."
The Soviet biological weapons program was highly classified, with research carried out at locations that sometimes did not appear on maps. In spite of their efforts at concealment an event that took place in the Russian city of Sverdlovsk could have blown the cover on the Soviet program. Located in a residential area of Sverdlovsk was a secret military facility known as the Microbiology and Virology Institute. Despite its innocent sounding name, the Institute was in charge of manufacturing weaponized anthrax. The anthrax made in Sverdlovsk was especially lethal because it was produced in a dry, powdered form, which made it easier to disperse, and more likely to cause infection. More information on the lethality of anthrax can be found in Section Four of Unit One.
In early April of 1979, an accidental release of finely milled anthrax from the production facility in Sverdlovsk killed about 100 people. This was perhaps the first suggestive evidence of the existence of the Soviet program and its violation of the Biological Weapons Convention. The Soviet government tried to cover up the incident, claiming that the anthrax outbreak was caused by infected meat. Many years later, in 1993, an international scientific team conducted an investigation into what had happened. The team found considerable evidence that the outbreak was caused by the release of anthrax from the biological weapons plant.