Biohazard

I learned about the 1928 decree and the early typhus experiments from a set of old reports at the Ministry of Defense. Summaries of experiments and testing, they were purposefully short on detail. No one wanted to commit the full information to paper. I can only assume that the original records have long since been destroyed. I was able to piece the rest of the story together with the help of veterans in our program who had learned the facts in turn from older scientists.

The first Soviet facility used for biological warfare research was the Leningrad Military Academy. Small teams of military and GPU scientists began to explore ways of growing significant quantities of typhus rickettsiae. The first attempts to cultivate typhus in the lab employed chicken embryos. Thousands of chicken eggs were sent each week to the Leningrad Military Academy — at a time when most Soviet citizens were lucky to get one full meal a day. By the 1930s, the Leningrad Academy had produced powdered and liquid versions of typhus, for use in a primitive aerosol.

Despite the program's secrecy, the Soviet government could not resist providing a public hint of its achievements. Marshal Kliment Voroshilov, a civil war cavalry hero who was Stalin's commissar for defense, declared on February 22, 1938, that although the Soviet Union planned to uphold the Geneva Protocol outlawing biological weapons, "should our enemies employ such methods against us, then I can tell you that we are ready — quite ready — to employ them against an aggressor on his own soil."

The biological weapons program soon expanded to harness other diseases. The Leningrad Military Academy sent some of its scientists and equipment one hundred miles north to the White Sea, a barren Arctic expanse flecked with tiny islands used to house political prisoners. By the mid-1930s Solovetsky Island, one of the largest, was the second major site of the Soviet biological warfare program.

At Solovetsky, a Soviet prison which later became the hub of Stalin's "Gulag Archipelago" concentration-camp system, scientists worked with typhus, Q fever, glanders, and melioidosis (an incapacitating disease similar to glanders). Solovetsky's large laboratory compound was built by prison labor. Many of the prisoners may also have been involuntary participants in our earliest experiments with biological agents.

The summary reports compiled by the Ministry of Defense describe several dozen cases of melioidosis from that period. The material I saw was intentionally vague as to whether humans were involved, but the way the case reports were arranged — with nineteen in one group, eleven in another, and twelve in yet another— suggested an irregular pattern not usually associated with animal testing. And the symptoms described could only have been experienced by human subjects. There have been repeated allegations in the West about Soviet germ warfare experiments on humans, but I have seen no other reports to indicate that these took place after the 1930s.

The research exacted a grim toll on our scientists. One account of a test with plague in the late 1930s ended with a cryptic note: "This experiment was not finished due to the death of the researcher." Another from the same period reported that twenty workers had been infected with glanders during experiments. The report didn't say where these experiments took place, or whether the workers had died, but in the days before antibiotics, death on exposure was virtually certain.

The biological agents explored before World War II underline the Soviet Union's primary interest in developing battlefield weapons designed to incapacitate enemy troops. Although this objective was reversed after the tularemia outbreak among our soldiers at Stalingrad, the laboratories in Leningrad and on Solovetsky Island were considered so crucial to Soviet defenses that when Nazi tanks invaded Russia in 1941, the high command ordered the immediate evacuation of both sites.

The lab equipment, fermenters, and glass vials containing strains of diseases were loaded on a train and sent south to the city of Gorky. On the day they arrived, Germans subjected Gorky to its first — and only — aerial bombardment of the war. Panicked commanders ordered the train to keep moving.