Biohazard

I told him our workers spent weekend afternoons swimming and picnicking with their families at a nearby river. On a weekday, there would be no one there.

"Wonderful!" he boomed. "Let's get some refreshments."

It was a lovely, warm summer day. The park by the riverbank was deserted and the birch trees shifted gently in the breeze. Pavlov tore off his clothes and jumped into the water with a yell. I followed him, watching with amusement as he splashed like a child in the ice-cold stream.

We clambered to the shore, dried ourselves, dressed, and unwrapped packages of hard-boiled eggs, sausages, bread, and onions. Pavlov brought out a bottle of clear vodka and two glasses. We sat in the shade, blissfully contemplating the world.

In Russia, a glass of vodka is an invitation to expose your soul. Without planning to, I began to pour out my frustrations.

"I can't get anything done here!" I said. "There are never enough scientists, and we never do important work anyway. I wish they would give us something serious to do."

Pavlov swallowed the contents of his glass in one gulp and set it down on the riverbank.

"Don't be an ass," he said.

I was too stunned to speak.

"Let me give you some advice," he went on. "Never wish for something too hard, because you just might get it."

I wondered if the vodka had made me more candid than I ought to have been, especially with someone from headquarters.

I tried to save face. "I should never drink in the afternoons," I said, hoping that he would smile and change the subject.

But Pavlov didn't smile.

"You know about Sverdlovsk, don't you?" he asked suddenly.

I considered what to say. Most of us knew, unofficially, about the army biological research facility in Sverdlovsk, in the eastern foothills of the Urals. It was built after the war, using specifications found in the Japanese germ warfare documents captured in Manchuria.

"Well, I know they're doing anthrax work," I responded. "Have they had some kind of achievement?"

He shook his head in irritation. "You haven't been told? There's been an accident."

"What kind of accident?"

He poured out another glass of vodka, drank it down, and smiled mischievously.

"You're too young to hear about this kind of thing."

I begged him to tell me more, but he refused.

"I can't tell you if you don't already know," he said in an exasperated voice. "I only brought it up to show you how lucky you are not to be doing the kind of work you want to do, the 'important work' they were doing in Sverdlovsk. You're young, you're happy, you've got a family. That's reason enough not to be ambitious."

He poured himself a third glass. I thought I'd let it go at that.

"They are idiots!" he exploded after a prolonged silence. "They killed a lot of people."

Pavlov returned to Moscow after several more days of paperwork in Berdsk. He was careful never to mention Sverdlovsk again.

The story went public a few months later — in a way. In November 1979, a Russian magazine published by anti-Soviet emigres in what was then West Germany reported that an explosion in a military facility in the southwest section of Sverdlovsk had released a cloud of deadly bacteria the previous April. It claimed that as many as a thousand people had died. Western news agencies picked up the story, quoting U.S. intelligence officials who claimed that the accident was clear evidence of Soviet violation of the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention.

Moscow denied the reports. On June 12, 1980, a statement published by the official Soviet news agency TASS declared that there had only been a "natural outbreak of anthrax among domestic animals" in the Sverdlovsk region.

"Cases of skin and intestinal forms of anthrax were reported in people, because dressing of animals was sometimes conducted without observing rules established by veterinary inspections," the statement said, adding that all of the patients had been treated successfully in local hospitals.

This was a lie, of course.

The German magazine and the U.S. intelligence sources were right that there had been an accident, but they got many of the facts wrong. Within a year, every senior Biopreparat official knew that something terrible had happened at Sverdlovsk. Nothing was said officially, but the news spread like wildfire. I learned the truth by talking to people who had been at the plant when the accident happened, and to army officers who had been in charge of the cleanup.

My pursuit of the facts was not a matter of indulging idle curiosity. We had to know what had happened if we were to protect ourselves from a similar disaster. As I rose higher in The System, I applied some of the lessons of Sverdlovsk to the plants under my control.

In fact, as neither Oleg Pavlov nor I could have known at the time, the Sverdlovsk incident would precipitate my speedy advancement. Not only did it help me get the "serious" work I'd been craving, but it set Biopreparat on a new course of development over the next decade.