The Soviet Biological Weapons Program

Milton Leitenberg, Raymond A. Zilinskas, Jens H. Kuhn

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780674070233
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

Russian officials claim today that the USSR never possessed an offensive biological weapons program. In fact, the Soviet government spent billions of rubles and hard currency to fund a hugely expensive weapons program that added nothing to the country's security. This history is the first attempt to understand the broad scope of the USSR's offensive biological weapons research—its inception in the 1920s, its growth between 1970 and 1990, and its possible remnants in present-day Russia. We learn that the U.S. and U.K. governments never obtained clear evidence of the program's closure from 1990 to the present day, raising the critical question whether the means for waging biological warfare could be resurrected in Russia in the future.Based on interviews with important Soviet scientists and managers, papers from the Soviet Central Committee, and U.S. and U.K. declassified documents, this book peels back layers of lies, to reveal how and why Soviet leaders decided to develop biological weapons, the scientific resources they dedicated to this task, and the multitude of research institutes that applied themselves to its fulfillment. We learn that Biopreparat, an ostensibly civilian organization, was established to manage a top secret program, code-named Ferment, whose objective was to apply genetic engineering to develop strains of pathogenic agents that had never existed in nature. Leitenberg and Zilinskas consider the performance of the U.S. intelligence community in discovering and assessing these activities, and they examine in detail the crucial years 1985 to 1992, when Mikhail Gorbachev's attempts to put an end to the program were thwarted as they were under Yeltsin.

1

The Soviet Union’s Biological Warfare Program, 1918–1972

IN NOVEMBER 1998, a large assemblage of former Soviet Army officers met for a reunion of, to put it frankly, bioweaponeers. The event took place in Kirov, a Russian city located in the Ural Mountains. Since 1941 this industrial city has had the distinction of being the home of the Scientific Research Institute of Microbiology,1 which was the Soviet Union’s, and now is Russia’s, Ministry of Defense’s (MOD) main biodefense facility, overseeing all other MOD biological weapons research facilities. In Soviet times, it also was the most important military facility dedicated to researching, developing, testing, and manufacturing biological warfare (BW) agents of bacterial and toxin origin. In addition to carrying out militarily directed research and development (R&D), it was, together with a sister institute in Leningrad, the major training facility for military biological scientists who were to staff other MOD biological warfare institutes and the ostensibly civilian biotechnology facilities. The members of the group that met in 1998 came from many parts of Russia, as well as some countries that once had been components of the Soviet empire. They were there to celebrate the 70th anniversary of the founding of the Kirov Institute.2

The reunion provided a landmark for those considering the history of the Soviet Union’s BW effort, because it unequivocally publicized the fact that an important military institute dedicated to biological weapons defense and offense came into being in 1928. Prior to the founding of the Kirov Institute, certain military units were probably assigned responsibilities that included defending against biological and chemical weapons, but they were nowhere near as important as the Kirov Institute and were typically part of larger formations whose primary mission was to fight, not to defend.

While there is some information available on these early defensive Soviet BW efforts, there are only bits and pieces of data about the beginning and early development of the Soviet Union’s offensive BW program. What little is known about both of these programs, defensive and offensive, is set forth in this chapter.

We call the entire period 1918–1972 the Soviet BW program’s first generation (the period after 1972 is the second generation). The first generation has three parts. It begins by considering BW-related developments that occurred between the end of World War I and 1946. This part draws extensively from the admirable study that Valentin Bojtzov and Erhard Geissler did of this period,3 and adds new information that has become available from our interviews and recently published Soviet/Russian articles and books. The chapter then describes and discusses BW-related events that occurred during 1946–1972. Third, the chapter draws conclusions about when the Soviet BW program commenced, its decline before and resurgence after World War II, and why the second generation BW program was established in the beginning of the 1970s.

Before proceeding, it is necessary to explain that some of the information about Soviet activities for the period of time before and during World War II was provided by two German military officers: Lieutenant Colonel Walter Hirsch and Major Heinrich Kliewe.4 Both were in the German Wehrmacht and were given responsibility for collecting intelligence about the Soviet BW and chemical warfare (CW) programs. Most of their intelligence was derived from interviews with prisoners of war and, as such, is of uneven quality. Some is, frankly speaking, fantastic; for example, a captured Soviet Air Force pilot told Kliewe that the Moscow underground rail system had been designed so it could be hermetically sealed off from the outside world. On the other hand, Hirsch and Kliewe undoubtedly gathered extremely valuable information, which we have cross-checked with other sources that were not accessible to the Germans, such as information collected from the Soviet archives that were partially opened after 1992, accounts of the history of Soviet defense efforts written by Russian military historians in the 1990s, and interviews with Soviet BW scientists.

1918–1946: Establishing Soviet BW and Defense Programs

Russian armies suffered heavy losses from disease during all of the three major conflicts they were involved in at the beginning of the century: the Russo-Japanese war of 1904–1905, World War I, and the civil war between the Red and White forces (1918–1921). Disease caused more casualties than did weapons in all of these conflicts.5 Red Army commanders are said to have been especially impressed with the viciousness of typhus.6 A Soviet epidemiologist writes, “There were 20 to 30 million cases of typhus between 1918 and 1922 in the territories controlled by the new Soviet Republic, and a mortality [sic] rate of around 10%.”7 Vladimir Lenin was quoted as having despaired: “We are suffering from a desperate crisis.… A scourge is assailing us, lice, and the typhus that is mowing down our troops. Either the lice will defeat socialism, or socialism will defeat the lice!”8

Aside from disease, Russian forces suffered “thousands of casualties” from German chemical weapons during World War I, but no BW was waged on Germany’s eastern front.9 So it is understandable that the Bolshevik government that took power in Russia after the 1917 revolution was intent on creating a chemical industry generally, but one that also could produce modern chemical weapons. To integrate chemical weapons into its military force structure, in 1925 the Worker’s and Peasant’s Red Army (RKKA) established the Military Chemical Agency under the directorship of Yakov Fishman, who was to remain in this position until 1937 when he fell victim to Stalin’s Great Purge. Whether Soviet military leaders considered biological weapons at that time is uncertain, although British intelligence reports of 1926 and 1927 indicate they might have (see Chapter 12).

To defend itself against diseases, the RKKA established the Vaccine-Serum Laboratory and ordered it to develop vaccines and sera against common infectious diseases. In 1933 professor Ivan M. Velikanov, then the head of the microbiology department of the M. V. Lomonosov Moscow State University (MSU), was appointed director of the laboratory. The laboratory was built approximately 30 kilometers from Moscow, in a village called Vlasikha.10

At approximately the same time, the United State Political Administration (OGPU) set up a laboratory, named the Special Purpose Bureau, for the study of highly infectious diseases.11 It was sited on the property of the former Pokrovsky Monastery in the small town of Suzdal located in the Vladimir oblast (akin to province). Special Purpose Bureau staff were “mostly younger engineers, chemists, and technicians,” who were graduates of the Military Chemical Academy (later renamed the Kliment Voroshilov Military Academy).12 Some of its scientists were prisoners of the OGPU,13 who originated at important existing research institutes, such as the Moscow Institute of Epidemiology and Microbiology (established in 1891) and the Kharkov Scientific Research Institute of Microbiology, Vaccine, and Serum Studies (established in 1887).

In 1992, reporters from Nezavisimaya Gazeta interviewed a former Special Purpose Bureau employee.14 Yelizaveta Parshina, aged 76, told them that the bureau was headed by a military man named Faybich,15 who was a physician and bacteriologist. The facility’s staff members lived in the monks’ cells and were not allowed to leave the monastery grounds. The monastery’s gates were “wrapped in a half-meter layer of thick felt which was saturated with formalin and lysol.”16 A monastery church served as an animal facility, containing cages in which non-human primates, guinea pigs, and rats were kept. In addition, sheep and two camels used for tests grazed in the monastery’s yard. Bureau scientists studied cholera, plague, tetanus, and malaria. Parshina described experiments using aerosolized cholera bacteria that involved human subjects. One of the bureau’s scientists had used himself as a test subject. He inoculated himself with tetanus bacteria, and after his death, which came about after a terrible ordeal, his body was used for further experiments. Wheras we cannot ascertain the validity of Parshina’s testimony, this is one of several claims that laboratories operated by Soviet secret police agencies used human subjects for experimental or testing purposes.17

As the Special Purpose Bureau was being established, the Soviet Union secretly agreed with Germany, first in 1921 and again in 1928, to exchange information on CW and conduct joint field tests on methods for delivering and spreading CW agents.18 This arrangement was terminated in 1933. Apparently, no similar agreement covered biological weapons, probably because Germany at that time had no interest in them. However, a confidential Soviet source told the authors that lessons pertaining to the effective dispersion of CW agents later proved to be useful to the BW program.19

The fact that the two nations had agreed to collaborate did not mean that they trusted one another. Quite the opposite. Documents obtained by Bojtzov from the State Military Archives of Russia demonstrate that by 1930 the Soviet government was receiving “intelligence” that Germany and other Western nations were developing biological weapons.20 Perhaps intelligence such as this was instrumental in the Soviet government’s decision to establish a biological defense facility. In 1933 the government combined and reorganized the Vaccine-Serum Laboratory and the Special Purpose Bureau,21 creating the RKKA Military Medical Scientific Institute;22 Velikanov was named its director.23 The institute remained at Vlasikha.

In 1934 the institute was renamed the RKKA Biotechnical Institute.24 It was moved to Gorodomlya Island, located on Seliger Lake, near Ostashkov city in Kaliningrad oblast in 1937. The reason for the move was an accident at the institute that was perceived as having endangered Moscow’s population. The deputy director of the institute, Abram L. Berlin, was unknowingly infected by Yersinia pestis during an experiment involving a newly developed plague vaccine.25 After being infected, but before he showed symptoms, Berlin was called to Moscow to report on the new vaccine’s progress. While there, he infected two other people with plague, and all three died. Fortunately the disease did not spread, due to the quick response of local health authorities.26 This is the first known fatal accident involving a Soviet scientific worker doing BW-related research. Other such accidents were to follow.

The RKKA Biotechnical Institute was renamed the Medical-Technical Institute of the RKKA (STI) in 1940. After the June 1941 German invasion, Soviet authorities feared that the Kaliningrad oblast would be overrun by German forces, so they moved the institute to Saratov, where it was renamed the Scientific Research Institute of Epidemiology and Hygiene. As the Battle of Stalingrad raged during the latter part of 1942, the Luftwaffe mounted air attacks on nearby cities, including Saratov. To safeguard the institute, it was moved yet again, this time to Kirov, where it took over the facilities of the oblast hospital and where it remains to this day. The institute and host city are described in more detail in Chapter 3.

By the time World War II began, the Kirov Institute was only one component, albeit the most important, of a large system. As we noted above, in 1925 Yakov Fishman had been placed in charge of the Military Chemical Agency, which accorded him a leading role in both the Soviet chemical warfare and BW programs. One of his first acts was to set up a small BW laboratory, eventually to be called the Scientific Research Institute of Health, in Moscow headed by Nikolay N. Ginsburg. In 1928 Fishman submitted a progress report to Kliment Yefremovich Voroshilov (1881–1969), the commissar for defense. The report had four parts.27 The first described the work that had been done by Ginsburg (see below), which was said to demonstrate the feasibility of BW. The second assessed the potential uses of bacteria for purposes of warfare and sabotage, including their use as payloads in artillery shells and bombs. The third presented a plan for the organization of military biology. And the fourth presented another plan for organizing defenses against biological attacks.

Acting on Fishman’s recommendations, the Military Chemical Agency was designated as the lead agency for managing both the offensive BW program and a program to defend against biological attacks. The Military Chemical Agency was controlled by the MOD, which in turn was commanded by the Politburo. It is of particular importance that for the first time a civilian agency, the People’s Health Commissariat, was ordered to coordinate and execute military requests (tasks) related to BW.28 At that time, the Commissariat was operating a substantial research network, consisting of at least 35 institutions working in such disciplines as epidemiology, genetics, immunology, microbiology, virology, and plague protection.

The Soviet offensive BW program appears to have officially commenced in 1928 as a result of a secret decree issued by th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Note on Transliteration
• Introduction
• 1. The Soviet Union’s Biological Warfare Program, 1918–1972
• 2. Beginnings of the “Modern” Soviet BW program, 1970–1977
• 3. USSR Ministry of Defense Facilities and Its Biological Warfare Program
• 4. Open-Air Testing of Biological Weapons by Aralsk-7 on Vozrozhdeniye Island
• 5. Soviet Civilian Sector Defenses against Biological Warfare and Infectious Diseases
• 6. Biopreparat’s Role in the Soviet Biological Warfare Program and Its Survival in Russia
• 7. Biopreparat’s State Research Center for Applied Microbiology (SRCAM)
• 8. All-Union Research Institute of Molecular Biology and Scientific-Production Association “Vector”
• 9. Biopreparat Facilities at Leningrad, Lyubuchany, and Stepnogorsk
• 10. Soviet Biological Weapons and Doctrines for Their Use
• 11. Distinguishing between Offensive and Defensive Biological Warfare Activities
• 12. Assessments of Soviet Biological Warfare Activities by Western Intelligence Services
• 13. United States Covert Biological Warfare Disinformation
• 14. Soviet Allegations of the Use of Biological Weapons by the United States
• 15. Sverdlovsk 1979: The Release of Bacillus anthracis Spores from a Soviet Ministry of Defense Facility and Its Consequences
• 16. Soviet Research on Mycotoxins
• 17. Assistance by Warsaw Pact States to the Soviet Union’s Biological Warfare Program
• 18. The Question of Proliferation from the USSR Biological Warfare Program
• 19. Recalcitrant Russian Policies in a Parallel Area: Chemical Weapon Demilitarization
• 20. The Soviet Union, Russia, and Biological Warfare Arms Control
• 21. The Gorbachev Years: The Soviet Biological Weapons Program, 1985–1992
• 22. Boris Yeltsin to the Present
• 23. United States and International Efforts to Prevent Proliferation of Biological Weapons Expertise from the Former Soviet Union
• 24. Conclusion
• Illustrations
• Annex A: Acronyms and Russian Terms
• Annex B: Glossary
• Annex C: A Joint Decree of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, USSR, and the USSR Council of Ministers, dated 24 June 1981
• Annex D: Joint US/UK/Russian Statement of Biological Weapons, September 1992
• Notes
• Acknowledgments
• Index