Biohazard

While Yeltsin has since apologized for his role in bulldozing the house where the czar was murdered, he has said almost nothing about the anthrax accident at Sverdlovsk. In his autobiography Against the Grain, published in 1990, he briefly referred to the "tragic" outbreak and tucked away in a footnote the assertion that the epidemic was caused by a "leak from a secret factory." A full accounting is long overdue.

In the years since the accident, Sverdlovsk has been called by analysts and many Russians themselves a "biological Chernobyl." They are right. The casualty figures do not compare with those following the 1986 explosion at the Ukrainian nuclear plant, but just as the Chernobyl disaster alerted the world to our questionable management of nuclear power, Sverdlovsk was a grim warning of the dangers of our secret science.

In February 1981, two years after the accident, I received an anxious call from the director of Omutninsk, Vladimir Valov, at my office in Building 107. I was then chief of the main technological department. The message was that some "very important generals" would arrive at the compound later that day.

"Tell everyone in your staff to go home early — except for the technicians in the inner zones," he said. "You'll have to stay around to escort them."

At 5:30 p.m. a jeep pulled up to the front door and two officers emerged. The first was General Vladimir Lebedinsky, who had replaced Smirnov as Fifteenth Directorate commander. The second officer was taller and heavyset. He had a distinctive air of authority, suggesting he was senior to Lebedinsky. Later, I was told he was the head of the military department of the Communist Party Central Committee, the real source of power in the military establishment. His name was Shakhov. Both men wore civilian clothing.

Lebedinsky was surprisingly polite for a senior officer. He apologized for inconveniencing me and asked if I could show them Building 107. Everyone was curious about Omutninsk, and I was getting used to conducting tours for top officials. I brought them proudly to a spot where they could look through sealed windows into Zone Two, the first biosafety enclosure.

They peered at the storage vaults and rows of seed and industrial reactors. One or two hooded technicians were doing cleanup work.

"That's a hell of a lot of glass for such a small amount of germs," Lebedinsky joked. "We don't need to go through all of that in our installations."

His partner gave him a cold look.

"Maybe if you had, Comrade General, you would have avoided what happened at Sverdlovsk," he said quietly.

Lebedinsky turned pale and said nothing. I had never seen a powerful general cut down like that. Both men seemed to have forgotten I was there.

After a few moments Lebedinsky turned on his heels and walked past us down the corridor. I was about to follow, but Shakhov put his hand on my arm and shook his head. He followed the general out a few moments later, ending our tour.

The biggest challenge facing the biological warfare establishment after Sverdlovsk was what to do with the plant itself. It couldn't continue anthrax production now that the eyes of the West were fixed on its activities. The city was closed to foreigners, but we could be certain that Western surveillance efforts would increase.

Three facilities in the country were designated as centers for anthrax production in case of war: Sverdlovsk, Penza, and Kurgan. Sverdlovsk had been the only active production facility; the others were on standby, keeping strains of anthrax in their vaults for the day when an order from Moscow would activate their production lines. The army was desperate to get the industrial anthrax production lines at Sverdlovsk running again. It lobbied hard to revoke the temporary suspension of activities at the plant ordered by Party bosses after the accident.

Pressure to produce more biological weapons was increasing by the month, but hardly anyone at senior levels of the government understood what they were. The average military commander regarded biological armaments as another type of weapon, slightly more useful than dynamite, perhaps, but not particularly more dangerous. Party bureaucrats recognized how lethal such weapons could be, but they didn't understand the unique hazards associated with making them.

Biopreparat took advantage of this confusion to press its case. Our tularemia weapon had shown that we could be as successful as the army in developing new weapons. The fact that we were outwardly a civilian organization made it more likely that our work could be concealed from the West. To the army's astonishment, it found itself outflanked by the tiny agency it had once regarded with contempt.

In 1981, Brezhnev signed a secret decree ordering the relocation of all biological weapons-making equipment and materials from Sverdlovsk to Stepnogorsk, a small biological research facility operated by Biopreparat in the remote deserts of northern Kazakhstan.