The Soviet Union covertly operated the world's largest and most sophisticated known biological weapons program.Leitenberg, M., Zilinskas, R., & Kuhn, J. (2012). Conclusion. In The Soviet Biological Weapons Program (pp. 698-712). Cambridge, Massachusetts; London, England: Harvard University Press. Retrieved February 7, 2021, from http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt2jbscf.30 The Soviet program began in the 1920s and lasted until at least September 1992 but has possibly been continued by the Russian Federation after that. Under a civilian cover organization named Biopreparat, 40 to 50 military-purposed biological research facilities existed throughout the Soviet Union. An anti-agriculture program, Ekologiya, also targeted crops and livestock.
Soviet military doctrine use-cases for biological weapons included strategic, operational, and anti-agriculture. Strategic agents targeted cities with lethal and contagious human pathogens. The causative agents of plague, smallpox, and Q fever were weaponized and stockpiled. Strategic attacks were estimated to kill half the population of a city of millions such as New York City, and complemented Soviet strategic nuclear weapons. It remains unclear if the program operationalized delivery vehicles such as ballistic or cruise missiles.
Operational agents were more incapacitating, for targeting military reinforcements and services in the rear of the battlefield. The pathogens for glanders, tularemia, Venezuelan equine encephalitis, and brucellosis may have been considered for air-delivery by cluster munitions or spray tank. Toxins including botulinum, and enterotoxin type B, which cause botulism and food poisoning respectively, were also investigated as operational weapons until the mid-1970s.
For serving in both strategic and operational roles, the causative agents of anthrax and Marburg virus disease were also stockpiled. Ekologiya studied anti-livestock pathogens such as for rinderpest and anthrax, and anti-crop such as rice blast and stem rust.
These programs became immense and were conducted at dozens of secret sites employing up to 65,000 people. Annualized production capacity for weaponized smallpox, for example, was 90 to 100 tons. In the 1980s and 1990s, many of these agents were genetically altered to resist heat, cold, and antibiotics.
In the 1990s, Boris Yeltsin admitted to an offensive biological weapons program as well as to the true nature of the Sverdlovsk anthrax leak of 1979, which had resulted in the deaths of at least 64 people. Defecting Soviet bioweaponeers such as Vladimir Pasechnik and Colonel Ken Alibek confirmed that the program had been massive and still existed. In 1992, a Trilateral Agreement was signed with the United States and the United Kingdom promising to end biological weapons programs and convert facilities to benevolent purposes, but compliance with the agreement—and the fate of the former Soviet bio-agents and facilities—is still mostly undocumented.
History
Pre-World War II International restrictions on biological warfare began only with the June 1925 Geneva Protocol, which prohibits the use but not the possession or development of chemical and biological weapons. Upon ratification of the Geneva Protocol, several countries made reservations regarding its applicability and use in retaliation. The Soviet Union was one, when it deposited its ratification notice. Due to these reservations, it was in practice a "no-first-use" agreement only.
The principal architect of the Soviet Union's first military biological programme was Yakov Moiseevich Fishman. In August 1925, he was appointed the first head of the Red Army's Military-Chemical Directorate (Voenno-khimicheskoe upravlenie, abbreviated to VOKhIMU). In 1926, at a small laboratory controlled by VOKhIMU, Fishman initiated research on Bacillus anthracis (the causative agent of anthrax). In February 1928, Fishman prepared a key report for Kliment Efremovich Voroshilov (the People's Commissar for Military and Navy Affairs and Chairman of the USSR's Revolutionary Military Council) on the Soviet Union's preparedness for biological warfare. It asserted that "the bacterial option could be successfully used in war" and proposed a plan for the organisation of Soviet military bacteriology. It was at this time that Ivan Mikhailovich Velikanov, an expert on botulinum toxin and botulism, emerged as the lead scientist in the early Soviet biological weapons program. In 1930, Velikanov was placed in command of a new facility, the Red Army's Vaccine-Sera Laboratory in Vlasikha, around 30 miles to the west of Moscow. Buildings at the site belonging to a smallpox institute, subordinate to the People's Commissariat of Health, were transferred to the military facility. Early programs at the military lab focused on Francisella tularensis (the causative agent of tularaemia).
Running parallel to the work underway at Vlasikha, BW research was also being pursued in an institution controlled by the state security apparatus. In July 1931, the Joint State Political Directorate (OGPU), a forerunner of the NKVD, seized control of the in Suzdal and then the following year created a special prison laboratory, or sharashka, where around nineteen leading plague and tularaemia specialists were forced to work on the development of biological weapons. By 1936, scientists working on BW at both Vlasikha and Suzdal were transferred to Gorodomlya Island where they occupied an institute for the study of foot-and-mouth disease which had been built originally for the People’s Commissariat of Agriculture (Narkomzem). Velikanov was placed in command of the Gorodomlya Island facility which was named as the Biotechnical Institute, also known by the code designation V/2-1094. German intelligence reported that the institute was engaged in experiments focused on Francisella tularensis (the causative agent of tularaemia) and Yersinia pestis (the causative agent of plague).
In the summer of 1936, Ivan Mikhailovich Velikanov led the Red Army's first expedition to conduct tests of biological weapons on Vozrozhdeniya Island. Around 100 personnel from Velikanov's Biotechnical Institute participated in the experiments. In July 1937, while planning for a second expedition to the island, Velikanov was arrested by the Soviet security organs and subsequently shot. Later that same summer, Leonid Moiseevich Khatanever, the new director of the Biotechnical Institute and an expert on Francisella tularensis (the causative agent of tularaemia), led a second expedition to Vozrozhdeniya. Two special ships and two aircraft were assigned to Khatanever for use in tests focused on the dissemination of tularaemia bacteria. Germany launched Operation Barbarossa in June 1941 and following the capture of nearby Kalinin in October, the BW facility on Gorodomlya Island was evacuated and eventually relocated to Kirov.
In his account of the history of the Soviet BW programme, Alibek, who as Kanatzhan Baizakovich Alibekov had been a biological weapons scientist for Biopreparat, describes a quite separate strand of early BW research being pursued in Leningrad. This work was allegedly initiated in the 1920s at the Leningrad Military Medical Academy under the control of OGPU (see above). According to Alibek, in 1928, the Revolutionary Military Council signed a decree about the weaponization of typhus. The Leningrad Military Medical Academy began cultivating typhus in chicken embryos. He also alleges that human experimentation occurred with typhus, glanders and melioidosis in the Solovetsky camp. Another, possibly more reliable source, regarding the Soviet BW programme in Leningrad are a series of secret reports generated by the British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) - commonly known as MI6. A total of fourteen highly detailed reports on the Soviet BW programme were issued in the period 1924-1927. SIS identifies Petr Petrovich Maslakovets and Semen Ivanovich Zlatogorov as the lead BW scientists working on Yersinia pestis (the causative organism of plague) and other dangerous pathogens. Zlatogorov was in fact one of the world's leading authorities on pneumonic plague and had studied 40 strains of plague bacilli from around the world. He had been a leading participant of a Russian team despatched to combat the October 1910 to February 1911 outbreak of pneumonic plague in Manchuria. The SIS reports indicate that Zlatogorov and Maslakovets conducted some of their research on a so-called Plague Fort - Fort Alexander 1, located at Kronstadt. Here they aimed to develop strains of plague that remained viable when loaded into artillery shells, aerial bombs and other means of dispersal. German intelligence independently identified the secret BW programme allegedly managed by Zlatogorov and Maslakovets.
World War II
By 1939, with the USSR on a war footing, the Soviet leadership is reported to have believed that the "imperialistic and fascistic countries" had actively undertaken BW preparations and that the use of such weapons, in case of emergency, was a foregone conclusion. Stalin in response ordered an acceleration of BW preparations and appointed Lavrentiy Pavlovich Beria, the head of the NKVD, in overall command of the country's biological warfare programme. In May 1941, a number of measures codenamed Yurta were implemented to counter the perceived threat of biological sabotage by the German and Japanese intelligence services. As a result there was a tightening-up of state control over personnel working on microbial pathogens and an emphasis on the gathering of intelligence from foreign legations relating to the feasibility and use of biological weapons.
On the 22 June 1941, Nazi Germany commenced Operation Barbarossa and invaded the Soviet Union along a 2,900-kilometre front. Such was the rapidity and depth of penetration of the attack that, by September, the Red Army's BW facility - the Sanitary Technical Institute (STI) - on Gorodomlya Island, was under immediate threat of capture. At some point around the 25 September, the facility was evacuated and the buildings partially destroyed. There are various accounts regarding the relocation of STI, with official Russian sources indicating that it was initially transferred to Saratov. In the later summer of 1942, in the face of the German offensive to capture Stalingrad, there was a second evacuation of STI, which was eventually permanently relocated to Kirov, located some 896 kilometres north-east of Moscow on the Vyatka river.