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. 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 , commander of Soviet BW programme in 1939 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. For instance, tularaemia is endemic in the region, and outbreaks had previously occurred in 1938 and the winter of 1941-1942; the disease was already present among the civilian population by the time German troops arrived. Infected rodents — rampant at the front, as sanitation systems had completely broken down and the uncollected grain harvest provided plentiful food for the rodent population — were the key to the large-scale outbreaks, which spread through inhalation of dust from contaminated straw in mattresses or from consumption of tainted food and water. Crucially, Geissler notes that there are no contemporary accounts by neither the German or Soviet armies nor intelligence services regarding the use of
F. tularensis as a biological weapon at Stalingrad. The new military institute later pursued major programmes focused on variola virus and viral haemorrhagic fevers. In his uncorroborated account, Alibek claims that capacity for the production of
smallpox virus was established in
Zagorsk. In 1953 the management of the Soviet BW programme was assigned to the USSR Ministry of Defence's Fifteenth Administration. In August 1958, the latter created a new Scientific-Research Technical Bureau (
NITB), the prime task of which was to create covert dual-use BW facilities at a number of pharmaceutical and microbiological enterprises. Over the next decade or so, dual-use BW production plants were created at Berdsk, Omutninsk, Penza and Kurgan. It is therefore apparent that previous perceptions by Western scholars of the Khrushchev era as contributing little to the development of the Soviet Union's biological warfare capabilities are incorrect. Rimmington argues that this "
was in fact a pivotal period in the Soviet programme, when BW production technology was being transferred from the military to facilities concealed within civil manufacturing plants. This was later to manifest itself as a key feature of the subsequent Biopreparat programme". The USSR was a signatory of 1972
Biological Weapons Convention (BWC). However, citing doubts concerning the United States’ compliance with the BWC, they subsequently augmented their biowarfare programs. The Soviet bioweapon effort became a huge program rivaling its considerable investment in nuclear arms. It comprised various institutions operating under an array of different ministries and departments including the Soviet
Ministry of Defense,
Ministry of Agriculture,
Ministry of Health,
USSR Academy of Sciences, and
KGB. In April 1974, a new agency, the All-Union Science Production Association
Biopreparat, was created under the Main Administration of the Microbiological Industry (
Glavmikrobioprom) to spearhead the Soviet offensive BW programme.
Biopreparat pursued offensive research, development, and production of
biological agents under the guise of legitimate civil
biotechnology research. It conducted its secret activities at numerous sites across the USSR and employed 30-40,000 people. In the 1980s, the Soviet Ministry of Agriculture successfully developed variants of
foot-and-mouth disease and
rinderpest against cows,
African swine fever for pigs, and
psittacosis to kill chicken. These agents were prepared to be sprayed down on enemy fields from tanks attached to airplanes over hundreds of miles. The secret program was code-named "Ecology". In 1989 the defector
Vladimir Pasechnik convinced the British that the Soviets had
genetically engineered a strain of
Yersinia pestis to resist
antibiotics. This triggered
George H. W. Bush and
Margaret Thatcher to pressure Gorbachev into opening for inspection several of his facilities. The visits occurred in January 1991. In the 1990s, the
President of the Russian Federation,
Boris Yeltsin, admitted to an offensive bio-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. Soviet defectors, including Colonel
Ken Alibek, the first deputy chief of Biopreparat from 1988 to 1992, confirmed that the program had been massive and that it still existed. On 11 April 1992, Yeltsin decreed "the termination of research on offensive biological weapons, the dismantlement of experimental technological lines for the production of biological agents and the closure of biological weapons testing facilities", Yeltsin promised to end the Russian bio-weapons program and to convert its facilities for benevolent scientific and medical purposes. Compliance with the agreement, as well as the fate of the former Soviet bio-agents and facilities, is still mostly undocumented.
Milton LeitenBerg and , in
The Soviet Biological Weapons Program: A History (2012), state flatly that "In March 1992...Yeltsin acknowledged the existence of an illegal bioweapons program in the former Soviet Union and ordered it to be dissolved. His decree was, however, not obeyed." They conclude that "In hindsight, we know that with the ultimate failure of the... [negotiations] process and the continued Russian refusal to open the... facilities to the present day, neither the Yeltsin or
Putin administrations ever carried out 'a visible campaign to dismantle once and for all' the residual elements of the Soviet bioweapons program". In the 1990s, specimens of deadly bacteria and viruses were stolen from western laboratories and delivered by
Aeroflot planes to support the Russian biological weapons program. At least one of the pilots was a
Russian Foreign Intelligence Service officer". In the 2000s, the academician, "A.S.", proposed a new biological warfare program, called the "Biological Shield of Russia" to president
Vladimir Putin. The program reportedly includes institutes of the Russian Academy of Sciences from
Pushchino. In 2019, a gas explosion at the
State Research Center of Virology and Biotechnology VECTOR in
Novosibirsk Oblast briefly renewed attention on the Russian and Soviet programs. VECTOR is one of two facilities in the world which officially maintains the live smallpox virus, alongside the
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in
Georgia, US. As of 2021, the United States "assesses that the Russian Federation (Russia) maintains an offensive BW program and is in violation of its obligation under Articles I and II of the BWC. The issue of compliance by Russia with the BWC has been of concern for many years". == Doctrine ==