Occasional Paper 11

The Soviet Biological 

Weapons Program and Its 

Legacy in Today’s Russia 

Raymond A. Zilinskas
Center for the Study of Weapons of Mass Destruction

National Defense University

MR. CHARLES D. LUTES

Director

MR. JOHN P. CAVES, JR.

Deputy Director

Since its inception in 1994, the Center for the Study of Weapons of Mass 

Destruction (WMD Center) has been at the forefront of research on the 

implications of weapons of mass destruction for U.S. security. Originally 

focusing on threats to the military, the WMD Center now also applies its 

expertise and body of research to the challenges of homeland security. The 

Center’s mandate includes research, education, and outreach. Research 

focuses on understanding the security challenges posed by WMD and on 

fashioning effective responses thereto. The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of 

Staff has designated the Center as the focal point for WMD education in the 

joint professional military education system. Education programs, including its 

courses on countering WMD and consequence management, enhance 

awareness in the next generation of military and civilian leaders of the WMD 

threat as it relates to defense and homeland security policy, programs, 

technology, and operations. As a part of its broad outreach efforts, the WMD 

Center hosts annual symposia on key issues bringing together leaders and 

experts from the government and private sectors. Visit the center online at 

http://wmdcenter.ndu.edu. 


Center for the Study of Weapons of Mass Destruction

Occasional Paper, No. 11

National Defense University Press

Washington, D.C.

July 2016

The Soviet Biological 

Weapons Program and Its 

Legacy in Today’s Russia

Raymond A. Zilinskas
Opinions, conclusions, and recommendations expressed or implied 

within are solely those of the contributors and do not necessarily represent 

the views of the Defense Department or any other agency of the Federal 

Government. Cleared for public release; distribution unlimited.

Portions of this work may be quoted or reprinted without permission, provided that a standard source credit line is included. NDU Press 

would appreciate a courtesy copy of reprints or reviews.

First printing, July 2016
Contents

Acknowledgments ................................................................................ vii

Executive Summary ................................................................................. 1

The Soviet Union’s First-Generation Biological

Warfare Program, 1926–1972................................................................. 5

The 1972 Decision to Acquire a Second-Generation Biological 

Warfare Program .................................................................................. 18

What’s Past Is Prologue......................................................................... 42

Appendix. Biography of Colonel-General

Yefim Ivanovich Smirnov ...................................................................... 48

Notes...................................................................................................... 51

About the Author ................................................................................. 60

vii

The Soviet Biological Weapons Program

Acknowledgments

Several individuals contributed greatly to the success of this project, and the 

author wishes to thank them for their encouragement and assistance. In particular, 

I am indebted to Dr. Mikhail Tsypkin, an associate professor in the Department 

of National Security Affairs at the Naval Postgraduate School and an expert on 

Soviet military affairs, who reviewed a draft of this paper and helped me navigate 

the labyrinthine Soviet bureaucracy and its difficult decisionmaking process. I also 

thank Dr. Seth Carus and Mr. Paul Bernstein for their guidance while the occasional paper was being developed and Ms. Helen Zilinskas for having edited a 

late version of the draft paper.

1

The Soviet Biological Weapons Program

Executive Summary

In its first Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) Case Study, the Center for 

the Study of Weapons of Mass Destruction (CSWMD) at the National Defense 

University examined President Richard M. Nixon’s decision, on November 25, 

1969, to terminate the U.S. offensive biological weapons program.1 This occasional 

paper seeks to explain why the Soviet government, at approximately the same 

time, decided to do essentially the opposite, namely, to establish a large biological 

warfare (BW) program that would be driven by newly discovered and powerful 

biotechnologies. By introducing the innovation of recombinant DNA technology—commonly referred to as genetic engineering—the Soviets were attempting 

to create bacterial and viral strains that were more useful for military purposes 

than were strains found in nature.

Nixon’s decision was widely publicized and documents revealing the reasons 

behind it are, in the main, available to the public in the National Archives, the 

Nixon Presidential Library in San Clemente, California, and publications written 

by members of the Nixon administration. In sharp contrast, the Soviet decision 

was highly secret at the time and remains so to this day. All contemporary documents pertaining to the Soviet offensive BW program remain classified and none 

of the military officers and officials who operated it has spoken or written about it 

except to deny that it existed or to belie its offensive intent.

The information that has become available about the program has been divulged by scientists and administrators who previously worked in the civilian component of the Soviet BW program, called Biopreparat. Some of them had defected to Western countries and there told their stories, while others chose to remain 

in Russia after the Soviet Union dissolved in December 1991 and later divulged 

details of their past secret activities in their own publications, or in broadcasts or 

print interviews. However, Biopreparat employees, even those who held managerial positions, did not have sufficiently high clearances to be informed about highlevel BW-related decisionmaking. Decisions such as those that instituted what 

in effect was a new BW program, and ordered the Soviet Ministry of Defense 

(MOD) to develop strategies and tactics for the use of biological weapons, were 
2 

CSWMD Occasional Paper 11

made at the highest levels by members of the Politburo and Central Committee of 

the Communist Party (CCCP) and the MOD’s General Staff (GS). 

Nevertheless, some information pertaining to the establishment of Biopreparat, the planning of programs to research and develop weapons against humans (codenamed Ferment) and animals and plants (codenamed Ekology), and 

the accomplishments of these program have become known because Biopreparat 

scientists learned about them from military scientists who divulged some of this 

knowledge while working together or in relaxed situations. Thus, the two authors 

of an extensive history of the Soviet BW program, one of whom is the author of 

this paper, were able to collect sufficient information from their interviews with 

Biopreparat employees, autobiographies written by weapons scientists, and articles written by investigative Russian reporters to describe and discuss important 

aspects of Soviet decisionmaking concerning BW.2

 While this paper draws largely 

on the contents of this book, additional information comes from sources listed 

in the endnotes, particularly from the studies on Soviet military decisionmaking 

conducted by John G. Hines, Ellis M. Mishulovich, and John F. Shull.3

In historical terms, the Soviet BW program had two so-called “generations,” 

defined as distinct periods of time during which types of weapons were developed 

from earlier types.4 The first generation of the Soviet BW program commenced 

about 1928 and was based on naturally occurring pathogens that had caused devastating epidemics during World War I and the subsequent Russian Civil War. 

The second generation began approximately in 1972 when the decision was made 

at the highest political level to institute a research and development (R&D) system that utilized newly discovered techniques of genetic engineering to create 

novel or enhanced bacterial and viral strains that were better adapted for BW 

purposes than strains found in nature. President Boris Yeltsin ordered the cessation of the offensive BW program some months after the Soviet Union dissolved 

in December 1991 and in 1992 publically stated that it had conducted an offensive BW program in violation of the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention. 

However, after Vladimir Putin was elected president, high-level Russian officials 

have lied about the Soviet BW program, stating that it was strictly a defensive 

program that had not broken international law. As is discussed later in this paper, 
3

The Soviet Biological Weapons Program

elements of the Soviet offensive BW program continue in Russia and may provide 

the basis for a third-generation BW program supported by the current leadership.

The first section of this paper describes the Soviet BW program’s first generation, including its establishment, work plan and operations, and accomplishments. 

The second section focuses on “establishing the conditions” for the Soviet decision 

that was made sometime during 1969‒1971 to establish and operate the secondgeneration BW program. Conditions that are considered include the geopolitical 

challenges as perceived by the Soviet government, the decisionmaking process for 

military acquisitions, and the inferior state of the biosciences in the Soviet Union 

at that time, which stimulated Soviet bioscientists to “play the military card” in 

order to introduce genetic engineering into the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics’ (USSR’s) bioscience establishment. The final section has two sub-sections. 

The first summarizes the key factors that drove Soviet decisionmaking in the early 

1970s to institute a huge offensive BW program. The second informs readers that 

even before Vladimir Putin was elected president for the second time, he openly 

stated that new weapons were to be developed using high technologies including 

“genetics.” Based on this promise, and considering the secrecy that still keeps the 

military biological institutes and anti-plague institutes closed to outsiders, the 

paper discusses the possibility that the Putin administration may institute a thirdgeneration BW program. The appendix consists of a short biography of the Soviet 

general Yefim Ivanovich Smirnov who was for many years in charge of the Soviet 

BW program.

5

The Soviet Biological Weapons Program

The Soviet Union’s First-Generation Biological Warfare 

Program, 1926–1972

Russian armies suffered heavy losses from disease during all three of the major conflicts they were involved in at the beginning of the 20th century: the RussoJapanese War (1904–1905), World War I (1914‒1917), and the civil war between 

the Red and White forces (1918–1921). Disease caused more casualties in all of 

these conflicts than did weapons.5 Armies and civilians were especially devastated 

by 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 rate of around 10 percent.”7 Vladimir I. Lenin is quoted 

as having stated, “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

Biological warfare was not waged on the Eastern Front during World War I,9

but with Russian troops having experienced the full effects of German chemical 

weapons,10 the Bolshevik government that took power after the 1917 revolution 

was intent on creating a chemical industry that could serve both civilian and military purposes. To integrate chemical weapons into its force structure, the Worker’s 

and Peasant’s Red Army (RKKA) created the Military Chemical Agency in 1925 

under the directorship of Yakov M. Fishman, who was to remain in this position 

until 1937 when he fell victim to Joseph Stalin’s Great Purge. One of Fishman’s 

first acts as director was to set up a small BW laboratory in Moscow, which was 

named the Scientific Research Institute of Health and was headed by Nikolay N. 

Ginsburg. In 1928, Fishman submitted a four-part progress report to Kliment 

Y. Voroshilov, People’s Commissar for Military and Naval Affairs. The first part 

described the work that had been done by Ginsburg (see below), which demonstrated the feasibility of BW. The second assessed the potential uses of bacteria for warfare and sabotage, including as payloads in artillery shells and bombs. 

The third part presented a plan for the organization of military biology, and the 

fourth presented a plan for organizing defenses against biological attacks. Acting on Fishman’s recommendations, the Revolutionary Military Council in 1928 

issued a secret decree that ordered the establishment of offensive and defensive 
6 

CSWMD Occasional Paper 11

BW programs and designated the Military Chemical Agency to manage both.11

In addition, a civilian agency, the People’s Health Commissariat, was ordered to 

coordinate and execute military tasks related to BW.12 At that time, the People’s 

Health Commissariat was operating a substantial network consisting of at least 

35 institutions working in such disciplines as epidemiology, genetics, immunology, 

microbiology, virology, and plague protection.

Opinions differ as to how the decree was implemented. The findings of research 

conducted by Bojtzov and Geissler are the most trustworthy.13 Their research revealed that the BW program was headed by Ginsburg and initially focused on weaponizing Bacillus anthracis14 and Clostridium botulinum15 and developing efficient 

methods of disinfecting persons and equipment contaminated with pathogens. According to Fishman’s 1928 progress report, Ginsburg’s group attempted to enhance 

properties of B. anthracis spores, which already in their natural state are well suited 

for purposes of BW, being both virulent and hardy, but which conceivably could be 

made even deadlier by using classical microbiology techniques of mutation, selection, and propagation. Military scientists would expose natural pathogen strains 

to mutation-inducing chemicals or irradiation, then would recover mutants that 

possessed improved or enhanced characteristics related to infectivity, virulence, and 

hardiness, and would propagate promising mutants in mass. In this research, various types of animals were used as test subjects, including cats, rabbits, goats, and 

horses. The candidate BW agents either were injected into test animals or dispersed 

as aerosols in closed chambers that contained animals. Typically, test animals died 

within 2 or 3 days of exposure. Another dispersal method used explosives to spread 

a quantity of the BW agents. In this case, the explosion created an aerosol whose 

particles contained the microorganisms. Ginsburg’s laboratory also studied Vibrio 

cholerae16 and Yersinia pestis17 to ascertain whether they would be useful as BW 

agents; the latter eventually was weaponized.

In 1933, the RKKA established the Vaccine-Serum Laboratory in the village 

of Vlasikha, outside Moscow. Its objective was to develop and manufacture vaccines and sera against common infectious diseases. Professor Ivan M. Velikanov, 

then the head of the M.V. Lomonosov Moscow State University (MSU) microbiology department, was appointed director of the laboratory. Also in 1933, the 
7

The Soviet Biological Weapons Program

United State Political Administration (OGPU) set up a laboratory, named the 

Special Purpose Bureau, to research highly infectious diseases,18 located on the 

property of the former Pokrovsky Monastery in the small town of Suzdal in the 

Vladimir oblast.

19 The facility’s staff members lived in cells formerly occupied by 

monks and were not allowed to leave the grounds without special permission. The 

monastery’s chapel served as an animal facility, containing cages in which marmosets, guinea pigs, and rats were kept. In addition, sheep and two camels used as test 

subjects grazed in the monastery’s yard. Bureau scientists studied pathogens that 

cause cholera, plague, tetanus, and malaria.

In late 1933, the Vaccine-Serum Laboratory and the Special Purpose Bureau 

were combined to create the RKKA Military Medical Scientific Institute, which 

continued to be headquartered at Vlasikha. In 1934, the institute was renamed the 

RKKA Biotechnical Institute. An accident in 1937 led to its relocation to Gorodomlya Island, located on Lake Seliger in the Kaliningrad oblast,20 about 350 

kilometers northwest of Moscow. The reason for the move was that the deputy 

director of the institute, Abram L. Berlin, unknowingly infected himself with Y. 

pestis during an experiment to develop a new anti-plague vaccine. After being 

infected, but before he showed symptoms, Berlin traveled to Moscow to report 

on the vaccine’s progress. While there, he infected two other people, and all three 

died of bubonic plague. Fortunately, the local health authorities acted quickly and 

effectively, thereby preventing the disease from spreading.21 However, Kremlin 

officials concluded that the institute had endangered Moscow’s population and 

therefore ordered it to be relocated far away from the city. Berlin was the first 

known Soviet BW research scientist to be killed by a pathogen under study.

The RKKA Biotechnical Institute was renamed the Medical-Technical Institute of the RKKA (STI) in 1940. Soon after the German invasion that began in 

June 1941, Soviet authorities feared that the Kaliningrad oblast would be overrun 

by German forces, and ordered the institute relocated to Saratov; it was renamed 

the Scientific Research Institute of Epidemiology and Hygiene. As the Battle 

of Stalingrad raged from August 23, 1942 to February 2, 1943, the Luftwaffe 

mounted air attacks on nearby cities, including Saratov. To safeguard the institute, 

it was moved to Kirov City, where it was headquartered in an old hospital, and 
8 

CSWMD Occasional Paper 11

where it remains to this day.22 For convenience in this paper, it is henceforth called 

the Kirov Institute.

Many able microbiologists fell victim to Stalin’s purges in the late 1930s, 

including Fishman, the founder of the Soviet Union’s BW program.23 Of more 

importance to this study, the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs (NKVD) 

arrested many microbiologists to secure expertise that it could exploit at small 

cost. As has been vividly described by Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, the NKVD often 

placed imprisoned scientists and engineers in groups called sharaga and allowed 

them to work much as they did in their “free” days.24 For example, N.A. Gaysky, a 

specialist on Francisella tularensis, was ordered to work as a member of a sharaga

developing a vaccine against tularemia at the Third Experimental Laboratory of 

the Red Army.25 Similarly, an expert on rickettsiae, P.F. Zdrodovsky, worked in a 

sharaga while imprisoned, as did L.A. Zilber, who had proposed that viruses are 

the cause of some cancers. After their release, some of these scientists continued 

to work willingly at the institutions where they had been imprisoned. Despite the 

decimation of Soviet scientists by Stalin, presumably a sufficient number of them 

survived for the Soviet Union to have maintained an active BW program until 

World War II and beyond.

On February 22, 1938, the world learned that the Soviet Union possessed 

both biological and chemical weapons. In a speech reported by Western media, 

Marshal of the Soviet Union Kliment Y. Voroshilov stated:

Ten years ago or more the Soviet Union signed a convention abolishing the use of poison gas and bacteriological warfare.26 To that we 

still adhere, but if our enemies use such methods against us, I tell you 

that we are prepared—fully prepared—to use them also and to use 

them against aggressors on their own soil.27

The civilian leaders in the Kremlin considered Voroshilov’s remark to have 

been a gross indiscretion. If he had stated that the USSR “reserves the right” under 

the Geneva Protocol to reply in kind, he probably would have had no problems 

with his superiors, but by asserting that “we are prepared—fully prepared—to use 
9

The Soviet Biological Weapons Program

them,” he in effect was telling the world that the Soviets possessed both chemical 

and bacteriological weapons. This was contrary to the image that the Soviet Union 

was trying to project: that only ruthless capitalist states possessed these weapons 

while the Soviets only sought to defend against them.

In the interwar years, Western intelligence agencies knew very little about 

the Soviet BW establishment. However, German forces that invaded the Soviet 

Union in 1941 almost immediately captured several hundred thousand prisoners of war (POWs), some of whom in peacetime had worked in various military facilities. German intelligence agencies set up units to interview POWs who 

could be expected to have knowledge of various Soviet activities. Two Wehrmacht 

intelligence officers, Walter Hirsch and Heinrich Kliewe, specialized in gathering information on Soviet chemical and biological warfare programs. Both were 

captured by American forces in 1945, and then willingly provided huge amounts 

of information that had been collected from Soviet POWs. Some of this information proved to be erroneous, but much was worthwhile. According to information 

gathered by Kliewe,28 by the time World War II broke out, three institutes were 

involved in offensive BW activities in the Moscow oblast: Ginsburg’s institute, the 

Moscow Chemical-Pharmaceutical Institute, and the Saratov Institute for Microbiology and Epidemiology. In the Leningrad oblast, four institutes were supposedly involved in BW research and development: the Zlatogorov-Maslokovich 

Laboratory at the Leningrad Veterinary and Zoological Technical Institute, the 

Bacteriological Institute of Leningrad, an unnamed facility at the Kronstadt naval base,29 and an unnamed research station on the shore of Lake Ladoga. These 

institutions largely focused their efforts to weaponize B. anthracis and Y. pestis, 

although they did some work to develop BW agents against cattle, including the 

virus that causes foot-and-mouth disease.

The Soviets established three open-air test sites before World War II. The 

first, in 1925, was at Tomka (renamed Staryye Shikhany, in 1933), near Volsk 

on the Volga River. Called the Central Chemical Proving Ground (Tsentralny 

Khimichesky Poligon, or TsKhP), or more simply the Volsk Polygon, it covered 

approximately 100 square kilometers. During the time of the German-USSR 

accord in the 1920s, military units from both sides trained there together, and 
10 

CSWMD Occasional Paper 11

conducted exercises involving the use of both conventional and chemical weapons. The other two open-air test sites were located on islands. Gorodomlya Island 

had a 10-square-kilometer site on which weapons containing pathogens causing 

foot-and-mouth disease, leprosy, plague, and tularemia were tested.30 The second 

island, which was to become the favored site for large-scale open-air testing of 

biological agents and weapons, as well as defensive equipment and measures, was 

Vozrozhdeniye Island in the Aral Sea. The facility there, code-named Aralsk-7, 

became fully operational in 1936, but was closed down during World War II. It 

was reopened in the 1950s, after which it was the only open-air test site in the 

Soviet Union for the realistic testing of weapons armed with all the different 

types of pathogens weaponized during both the first and second generations of 

the Soviet BW program. The extreme isolation of Aralsk-7 kept its activities far 

away from prying eyes and afforded a high level of biosafety for open-air tests.

For the sake of comparison, by the time World War II commenced, Japan was 

the only major nation with an offensive BW program approximating the size and 

status of the Soviet Union’s.31 The major Japanese military unit dedicated to developing biological weapons, Unit 731, was headquartered at Ping Fan in Manchuria, 

only a few hundred kilometers from the Soviet border. France’s small program, 

which was active in the 1930s, was terminated when German armies were close to 

occupying that country in 1940.32 The United Kingdom (UK) had started a BW 

program in 1937, but it did not reach full maturity until the early 1940s and never 

reached anything near the size of the Japanese and Soviet programs.33 Canada had 

also begun considering BW in the late 1930s and, in cooperation with the UK 

and the United States, was to have a full-scale program by the mid-1940s.34 The 

United States began to consider establishing a BW program in 1942 and did so 

in 1943.35 Germany,36 Italy,37 and Poland38 had no offensive BW programs and, at 

most, rudimentary defensive programs.

In 1939, Stalin placed his Minister of Internal Affairs, Lavrenty P. Beria, 

in overall command of the Soviet BW program. In practice, the Main Military 

Medical Directorate of the Red Army, headed by Colonel-General Yefim I. 

Smirnov,39 had responsibility for its day-to-day operations. Smirnov, described 

in a Russian publication as being “a distinguished organizer and theorist of 
11

The Soviet Biological Weapons Program

military and civilian health,”40 was at that time a rising star in the military medical establishment, and from the late 1940s through the early 1980s was one of 

the main planners and proponents, perhaps the main one, for the development 

of biological weapons (see appendix for a biography of Smirnov).41

The Soviet Union had not only an extensive offensive BW program, but also 

a substantial program to defend against both biological weapons and natural infectious diseases. The offensive and defensive BW programs were conducted side 

by side, often in the same institutions. The Soviet defensive research program had 

seven objectives: 

◆ to develop and improve vaccines against BW agents that enemies might use

◆ to develop methods and protocols for immunization utilizing vaccines and 

other protective substances

◆ to develop protocols for the emergency treatment of soldiers exposed to BW 

agents, including diagnosis

◆ to develop methods, means, and regimes for disinfecting personnel and 

equipment contaminated by BW agents

◆ to develop methods for identifying BW agents and clarifying indications of 

biological attacks

◆ to develop and test field detection systems for BW agents

◆ to assess the possible damage of the various “recipes”42 that an enemy might 

employ against the Soviet Union.43

It is not known exactly when these objectives were formulated, but they continued 

to guide such research until the USSR dissolved in 1991.

The major defense efforts in the 1930s and leading up to World War II at 

the Kirov Institute and its predecessors sought to develop live vaccines against 

anthrax, plague, tularemia, brucellosis, and tuberculosis.44 However, the highest 

priority was to develop an efficacious anthrax vaccine. The major R&D to this end 

was conducted by military scientists at the Research Institute of Epidemiology 

and Hygiene starting in 1935. Orlov wrote that this vaccine R&D was deemed so 
12 

CSWMD Occasional Paper 11

important that Smirnov was personally required to report on its progress to Beria 

and Stalin.45 By 1940, Soviet microbiologists had developed two avirulent strains 

of B. anthracis, named STI-146 and No. 3, which were derived from virulent parent strains. When used as a trial vaccine in animals, the STI-1 strain protected 

60 percent of guinea pigs, 70 percent of rabbits, and 97 percent of sheep that had 

been deliberately infected by virulent strains of B. anthracis. Based on these good 

results, more than 2 million domestic animals were vaccinated with the STI-1 

strain of vaccine during World War II. After the war, many more animals were 

vaccinated—38.4 million in 1947, increasing to 140 million in 1960. As a result, 

the number of domesticated animals that died from anthrax in the USSR decreased from 30,500 in 1947 to just 3,500 in 1960.47

The same Kirov Institute scientists who had developed the animal anthrax 

vaccine developed a similar vaccine for use in humans. The vaccine proved safe 

when administered to volunteers in May 1943 using the technique of scarification.48 In 1944, with the Red Army poised to liberate Rumania, Soviet military 

epidemic intelligence determined that there was a substantial threat of anthrax in 

that country that might affect not only animals, but humans. Accordingly, 9,000 

men from the units assigned to invade Rumania were vaccinated against anthrax.49

Orlov asserts that none of these contracted the disease. (Orlov does not say how 

many of the non-vaccinated troops were stricken with anthrax.) The Ministry of 

Health licensed the scarification vaccine for general use against anthrax in 1953 

and an improved injectable vaccine in 1959.50 Other vaccines were also developed 

by military scientists, such as those against plague and tularemia.

From the activities discussed in the preceding paragraphs, it appears that during World War II the Soviets concentrated more on developing defenses against 

natural infectious diseases that threatened its soldiers and draft animals than on 

their offensive BW program. This situation changed as the Soviet offensive BW 

program was given a boost in the late 1940s for three reasons. First, Soviet leaders 

learned of the large, brutish Japanese program. After the Red Army invaded Manchuria on August 8, 1945, and moved quickly toward the Pacific Ocean, it overran 

Ping Fan where Unit 731 was headquartered. As they advanced, Red Army troops 

captured scientists and medical doctors who had staffed the unit’s laboratories and 
13

The Soviet Biological Weapons Program

test facilities.51 Interrogations revealed the appalling record of the Japanese BW 

program,52 the extent and sophistication of which likely gave Soviet leaders an 

indication of how powerful biological weapons could be and provided them with 

additional knowledge and know-how. The Soviets also learned, probably for the 

first time, that in the late 1930s, on “orders of the Japanese Kwantung Army, Detachment 100 had systematically sent bacteriological parties to the borders of the 

Soviet Union, where they contaminated water sources.”53 There is no information 

on the success or failure of these attempts at biological sabotage. Perhaps of more 

consequence, the Soviets were informed of the Kan-Toku-En Plan for the Japanese 

attack on the Soviet Union, which was approved in 1941 but never implemented. 

This plan included the deployment of units that would disseminate plague-infested 

fleas against the Red Army and conduct sabotage behind its positions.54

Second, the influential American scientist Theodor Rosebury wrote an article 

and book shortly after World War II that had the unanticipated effect of convincing Soviet civilian and military leaders of the utility of biological weapons.55 Some 

of the BW scientists interviewed by Leitenberg and Zilinskas stated that Rosebury’s article and book were the main determinant of the Soviet government’s 

decision to bolster its BW program in the 1950s.56 Ten years later, a former U.S. 

general published two works that served to reinforce Soviet officials’ belief in the 

power of biological weapons.57

Third, soon after World War II ended, the Soviet government learned of the 

joint BW programs of the United States, UK, and Canada.58 Soviet authors described in great detail the large size of these programs, the intent of these states 

to use biological weapons in tandem with nuclear and chemical weapons, and the 

perversity of the United States not having joined the Geneva Protocol (which 

prohibits the use of bacteriological weapons).59 Soviet leadership might have been 

motivated to build a BW program in order to match these capabilities.

In 1947, the Main Military Medical Directorate of the Red Army was renamed the Main Military Medical Directorate of the Armed Forces of the USSR, 

with Y.I. Smirnov as its head.60 However, soon thereafter he was promoted to 

Minister of Health, a post he kept until December 1952.61 At that time, for unknown reasons, Stalin lost confidence in Smirnov and he was demoted to a low 
14 

CSWMD Occasional Paper 11

staff position. But sometime after Stalin’s death, on March 5, 1953, the USSR 

Council of Ministers transferred the responsibilities of the Main Military Medical Directorate to the MOD’s 7th Directorate of the General Staff, and in August 

1953 appointed Y.I. Smirnov as its head. About the same time, the Kirov Institute 

was designated as the lead agency for all Soviet BW-related R&D.

Orlov writes that, having recognized the growing threat of BW, the Soviet 

leadership accelerated “development of means to protect the population and the 

army against biological weapons.”62 It appointed the Marshal of the Soviet Union, 

Ivan Kh. Bagramyan, as head of the domestic defensive program and Y.I. Smirnov 

and General Piotr N. Burgasov as his deputies.63

As part of capability building, the MOD decided to construct and equip two 

new research units. The first was an institute dedicated to the study and weaponization of viruses and Rickettsia. This came about after an internal assessment 

concluded that the Soviet army’s need for a “bacterial component” was “covered,” 

but not the “virological component.”64 The assessment noted that the country “had 

only a single recently organized [within the past 5 years] civilian virology institute 

of the USSR Academy of Medical Sciences.” Further, “for a number of reasons, 

the latter [civilian virology institute] naturally could not engage in assessing the 

threat of viruses being used for military purposes.”65 The new virology institute 

was established near Zagorsk (now Sergiyev Posad); henceforth it is called Zagorsk Institute in this paper.

The second new research unit was an institute whose stated purpose was to 

conduct research on military hygiene. The MOD took over the former CherkassySverdlovsk Infantry School in Sverdlovsk (now called Yekaterinburg) and rebuilt 

it, so in actuality it housed development laboratories and biological production 

equipment. The first group of scientists and technicians to staff the new plant began working in 1949. In 1960, this branch was separated from the Kirov Institute 

and renamed the Military Technical Scientific Research Institute (henceforth, 

Sverdlovsk Institute).66 The institute was located within Military Compound 19 

and its major function was to mass-produce pathogens used to arm biological 

weapons. In 1979, it became infamous when an accident at one of its production 

facilities led to the escape of a large number of Bacillus anthracis spores that were 
15

The Soviet Biological Weapons Program

carried by prevailing winds over parts of Sverdlovsk and then to six villages outside the city. Shortly thereafter, the production plant was closed and its production 

function was moved to Stepnogorsk in Kazakhstan.67

In addition to MOD institutes dedicated to biological weapons and biological 

defense, the ministries of Agriculture, Internal Affairs, and Health each operated 

BW-related R&D units.68 Further, both the USSR Academy of Sciences (USSRAS) and the USSR Academy of Medical Sciences provided expert assistance to the 

offensive and defensive BW programs. Next to nothing is known about the activities or involvement of these agencies with BW during the pre-1970 era.

The Soviet BW program appears to have been energized in the period immediately following World War II mainly by the infusion of practical information 

gained from the Japanese BW experience, including the reopening and substantial build-up of Aralsk-7. As a result, a number of pathogens were weaponized, 

including B. anthracis, F. tularensis, Y. pestis, Coxiella burnetii, Brucella suis, Venezuelan equine encephalitis virus, and botulinum neurotoxin (see table 1). Perhaps the most powerful of the biological weapons generated at this time by the 

first-generation BW program was one based on the variola virus (the cause of 

smallpox). The first-generation BW program experienced a second accident at 

the Aralsk-7 test site in 1972, when variola virus escaped during an open-air test 

of biological weapons and was carried by the prevailing wind to a research ship 

where a scientist was infected. When the ship reached its homeport in Aralsk, the 

infected person had spread the virus to 11 others, 5 of whom died.69

For unknown reasons, the Soviet BW program seemed to be treading water 

in the late 1960s, with no breakthroughs or significant advances. Biopreparat scientist Igor Domaradskij claimed that the program in this period was conducted 

in a desultory way and was so unproductive that the Soviet military command 

considered terminating it.70 This assessment was supported by former intelligence 

analyst and Soviet specialist Raymond Garthoff, who noted:

On August 17, 1967, a top secret joint decree issued by the Central 

Committee-Council of Ministers of the Soviet Union reviewed 

the evidence for what was seen as an extensive and successful U.S. 
16 

CSWMD Occasional Paper 11

program in the field of chemical and biological warfare [CBW]. 

The decree called for corresponding Soviet CBW preparations. Although my attempts to obtain this decree in the Russian archives 

have so far been unsuccessful, I was able to track down a reference 

to it in the index of the still-closed files of the Central Committee.71

There are two probable explanations for why the Soviet BW program faltered. 

First, most of the MOD’s highest officials came to believe that nuclear weapons 

far superseded other capabilities, including chemical and biological weapons, so 

these programs lost support. The BW program of the late 1960s in particular was 

small in size when compared to nuclear, chemical, missile, and conventional arms 

programs. Further, none of the defense industrial ministries was involved in modern biotechnology; nor were any of the scientific research institutes and scientific 

production conglomerates. It is reasonable to conclude that the relatively modest 

Bacteria Disease caused by

Bacillus anthracis Inhalation anthrax

Brucella melitensis (Brucella suis?) Brucellosis (undulant fever)

Coxiella burnetii Q fever

Francisella tularensis Tularemia

Rickettsia prowazekii Epidemic typhus

Yersinia pestis Pneumonic plague

Virus

Variola major Smallpox

Venezuelan equine encephalomyelitis 

virus

Encephalitis

Toxin

Botulinum neurotoxin Botulism

Table 1. Soviet First-Generation Biological Warfare Agents

Source: Milton Leitenberg and Raymond A. Zilinskas, The Soviet Biological Weapons Program: A History

(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), 46.
17

The Soviet Biological Weapons Program

cadre dedicated to maintaining the BW program had little influence among those 

shaping high-level policy decisions on military force–building.

Second, and perhaps more important, applied microbiology for BW purposes, and likely for civilian purposes as well, was unproductive in the 1960s 

due to the negative influence of agronomist Trofim Lysenko on the biosciences. 

Beginning in the 1930s, by using doctored data, Lysenko convinced Stalin that 

when an agricultural technique he had developed, termed vermalization, was 

used on a large scale, it would double or triple the crop yields of Soviet agriculture.72 Since Nikita Khrushchev, Stalin’s successor in 1953, also was a Lysenko 

adherent, Lysenko held sway until Khrushchev was removed as First Secretary 

in 1964. But until that year, Stalin and Khrushchev both made political decisions that gave full state support to vermalization and forbade the application 

of other practices by Soviet agriculture. Even worse, during what came to be 

called a “lost generation of genetics,” vermalization was the only theory that 

was permitted to be taught and practiced by agricultural scientists, as well as 

by biologists generally, which meant that rational theories such as the Mendelian theory of inheritance and the Darwinian theory of natural selection were 

banned from Soviet science. In effect, Lysenko was responsible for convincing 

Stalin and Khrushchev to suppress the correct bioscientific underpinnings of 

genetics. Lysenkoism was repressed by the Soviet government after 1964, but 

its influence continued to some extent in the form of scientists who through seniority maintained leadership positions in laboratories and institutes. For these 

reasons, in the early 1970s most Soviet microbiologists did not understand molecular biology and, even less so, how to apply genetic engineering for either 

basic research or bioindustrial applications.

Well-founded genetics and microbiology did not completely disappear during the Lysenko era. There were brave directors of institutes dedicated to chemistry and physics who were strongly anti-Lysenko and who would hire bioscientists, 

including geneticists, to work in their laboratories under false pretenses. After Lysenkoism was discarded, the bioscientists who had labored in secret were instrumental in establishing institutes that became leaders in biotechnology R&D. For 
18 

CSWMD Occasional Paper 11

example, the Institute of Molecular Genetics, which became a leading biological 

research center, was an offshoot of the Kurchatov Institute of Atomic Energy.73

The 1972 Decision to Acquire a Second-Generation 

Biological Warfare Program

As discussed in detail by Leitenberg and Zilinskas,74 two individuals were 

responsible for promoting the establishment of the Soviet Union’s “new” offensive 

second-generation BW program: the exceedingly bright bioscientist academician 

Yuri A. Ovchinnikov and Colonel-General Yefim I. Smirnov. 

The Key Role of Ovchinnikov

Yuri A. Ovchinnikov was born in Moscow in 1934 and graduated in 1957 

from the most prestigious university in the USSR, the Moscow State University, 

with a candidate degree in chemistry.75 In 1960, he secured a research position at 

the Institute of Chemistry of Natural Compounds, which had been founded a year 

earlier by one of the Soviet Union’s most famous chemists, Mikhail M. Shemyakin. 

The institute investigated compounds derived from living beings, such as antibiotics, peptides, toxins, and vitamins.

As Ovchinnikov had extensive contacts in the West, it is likely that he learned 

from them about the revolutionary developments that led to the discovery of recombinant DNA in the late 1960s and its spinoff technology of genetic engineering in early 1970s.76 One of Ovchinnikov’s colleagues at the USSR-AS was the 

prominent Soviet bioscientist Aleksandr A. Baev. In 1972, Baev was instrumental 

in establishing the first Soviet laboratory of molecular biology and the genetics of 

microorganisms at the Institute of Biochemistry and Physiology of Microorganisms in Pushchino. Baev’s description of how he came to recognize the importance of the new developments in the West was probably similar to Ovchinnikov’s 

experience:

Scientific events were continuing to develop, however, and my period of genetic engineering began. The works of P. Berg, S.N. Cohen, 

and H.W. Boyer (1972‒1973) heralded the beginning of the era of 
19

The Soviet Biological Weapons Program

recombinant DNAs. Even before this, however, my attention was 

drawn to J. Beckwith’s publication in Nature (vol. 224, p. 768, November 22, 1969) on the isolation of lactose operon. I was similarly 

affected by the news that the Congress of the USA had granted 10 

million dollars from the 1971 budget to support genetic scientists, 

represented by J. Lederberg. At that time I had already sensed that 

there were more important events on the horizon in biology, and I 

began to prepare my research into molecular biology, starting with 

prokaryotes.77

On the basis of his excellent publication record and the high esteem with 

which he was regarded by colleagues, Ovchinnikov was elected as a corresponding 

member of the USSR-AS in 1968 and just 2 years later was elected full academician of the Division of Biochemistry, Biophysics, and Chemistry of Biologically 

Active Compositions.78, 79

While most Soviet scientists believed it was a waste of time for them to participate in Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) activities, some realized that one had to be an enthusiastic party member in order to move up in the 

management sector of the science establishment. With very few exceptions, all 

directors and deputy directors of research institutes were members of the CPSU. 

Ovchinnikov must have understood this while young, because in parallel to his 

scientific career, he made a political career. Joining the CPSU in 1962, at the age of 

28, he advanced rapidly, becoming a candidate member of the CCCP and a member of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the Russian Republic of the Soviet 

Union in 1973. Without doubt, Ovchinnikov toed the party line, as evidenced by 

a statement he made in 1985:

The Communist Party considers scientific-technical progress as a 

key factor in the acceleration of the Soviet Union’s socio-economic 

development. This was clearly and convincingly underlined by the 

resolution adopted by the Plenum of the Central Committee of the 

Communist Party of the Soviet Union in April of this year. These 
20 

CSWMD Occasional Paper 11

resolutions made Soviet science responsible for a critical task of historical significance. Through these resolutions, Soviet science was instructed to concentrate its forces on the most important of courses, to 

mobilize its entire creative potential to the greatest extent possible, 

and to support the Soviet Union in its entry into key areas of science 

and technology. Naturally, this encompasses the very new and rapidly developing field of biotechnology.80

To understand Ovchinnikov’s success in persuading top civilian and military 

decisionmakers that genetic engineering was a key enabling technology, it is necessary to be aware of the relationship between the Soviet state and Soviet science. 

Nikolai Krementsov described the relationship in his 1996 book, Stalinist Science:

The key feature of Stalinist science was the total dependence of science 

on its sole patron, the party-state bureaucracy. . . . Thus, the state apparatus and the scientific community each strove to acquire what it 

most wanted from the other. The state provided scientists with funds, 

resources, and great public prestige; the scientific community gave the 

state expertise and legitimacy in industry, agriculture, and medicine. 

Each developed various tactics to deal with its partner. The state established strict administrative control over institutional structures, 

scientific personnel, research directions, and scholarly communications. For their part, scientists cultivated patrons among the higher 

party-state bureaucrats and skillfully played upon their constantly 

changing policies and objectives.

Although the Soviet scientific community and the state control 

apparatus have often been treated as separate entities, the actual 

boundaries between them were frequently blurred. Their symbiosis 

resulted in their institutional integration and individual co-option. 

At their apex, the control apparatus and the scientific community were 

blended and overlapping. Not only did scientists occupy key positions 

within various state agencies, but also some scientific institutions, 
21

The Soviet Biological Weapons Program

such as the presidiums of Soviet academies, were in fact key elements 

of the party-state control apparatus itself. Moreover, all appointments 

to top positions in the scientific hierarchy had to be approved by the 

highest party officials. In such circumstances, it is hardly surprising 

that the development of the various Soviet scientific disciplines was 

greatly influenced by the personal relations between particular disciplinary spokespersons and their powerful party patrons.81

Krementsov also succinctly explains how science was controlled in the Soviet 

Union by the CCCP:

The main instrument of party personnel policy in general was the 

system of nomenklatura. Nomenklatura was, literally, a list of posts 

that could be occupied or vacated only with permission from the appropriate party committee. All party committees, from the Central 

Committee to the smallest one in the countryside, established personnel departments, whose main function was to approve candidates for 

appointment to any post included in their own nomenklatura. Initially devised for the personnel of party organs and agencies, the system was expanded in the early 1930s into the scientific community.

The nomenklatura system was strictly hierarchical—the higher 

the post, the higher the party committee controlling its personnel. The 

posts of president, vice-president, and scientific secretary of such central institutions as the USSR Academy of Sciences and VASKhNIL 

[V.I. Lenin All-Union Academy of Agricultural Sciences] were 

in the nomenklatura of the Politburo. The posts of institute director and editor-in-chief of a journal were in the nomenklatura of 

the Central Committee Secretariat. The position of laboratory head 

belonged to the nomenklatura of the regional party committee. Even 

the post of librarian in a scientific institute was in the nomenklatura 

of the local party committee. . . . Thus, to occupy any administrative 

post in a scientific institution, a scientist had to obtain permission 
22 

CSWMD Occasional Paper 11

from the party apparatus. . . . Nomenklatura thus became the main 

means of party control over the scientific community.82

While some aspects of the complex relationship between the party-state 

and the scientific community changed in the post-Stalin era—for example, some 

nomenklatura positions in scientific institutions no longer absolutely demanded 

that the candidate be a member of the CPSU—in the Brezhnev era the system 

largely functioned as Krementsov describes it. This background allows certain 

conclusions to be drawn about Ovchinnikov’s influence within the USSR-AS 

and government.

In 1967, Ovchinnikov was appointed director of the protein chemistry laboratory at the Institute of Chemistry of Natural Compounds. This position most 

likely belonged to the nomenklatura of the Moscow regional or city party committee, one of the most powerful committees in the USSR. Before approving 

Ovchinnikov for this position, committee members undoubtedly learned about 

him and liked what they saw. A year later, Ovchinnikov was elected as a corresponding member of the USSR-AS. His selection was probably more about 

academy business than that of the party; nevertheless, such an election would have 

been unlikely without approval by Moscow CPSU officials, which would have 

given Ovchinnikov more visibility among important politicians. Then, in 1970, 

Ovchinnikov was elected full academician of the USSR-AS and honored with 

the Lenin Prize.83 This combination of honors could not have happened without the approval of the Politburo. It is reasonable to believe that before being 

accorded these honors, Ovchinnikov would have met with Politburo members, 

including CPSU General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev. According to one of his 

former graduate students, “Ovchinnikov impressed Brezhnev with his imagination and knowledge.”84

Because of his prominence in the scientific community, in the early 1970s 

Ovchinnikov was chosen as one of only two scientific advisors to the Politburo. He 

also served as a scientific advisor to the Military-Industrial Commission (VPK) of 

the USSR Council of Ministers.85 He thus was in a favorable position to explain the 

importance of modern biotechnology for military and, probably, civilian applications 
23

The Soviet Biological Weapons Program

to Brezhnev and other government officials. Aware of the USSR’s inferiority in the 

biosciences and fearing that the already wide gap between Western and Soviet capabilities in this field would grow into a chasm, Ovchinnikov likely concluded that 

the only way to quickly gain support from decisionmakers for a program that aimed 

to match Western developments was to promote its military benefits. He could do 

so by convincingly arguing to civilian and military decisionmakers that the U.S. Department of Defense was likely to apply genetic engineering to create new deadly 

pathogens for weapons applications.

According to Vladimir A. Pasechnik, the first defector from the Soviet BW 

program, as part of his campaign Ovchinnikov wrote a memorandum to the 

CCCP sometime in 1970 or early 1971 on the necessity of applying modern 

biotechnology to develop biological weapons. He reportedly used as a model a 

memorandum written in 1938 by a physicist addressed to Stalin on the necessity of acquiring nuclear weapons. That memorandum proposed establishing a 

large nuclear weapons program to be carried out in secret nuclear cities. While 

Pasechnik never read Ovchinnikov’s memorandum, his friends in the USSR-AS 

recounted to him the essence of its contents. In particular, Ovchinnikov was 

said to have stressed the need to solve scientific problems related to BW using 

new biotechnology techniques and that doing so was vital to national defense. 

In order for the Soviet Union to undertake the program Ovchinnikov proposed, 

it would need to make a long-term commitment and back it up with large state 

resources, in much the same way that the country supported its World War II–

era nuclear program. Pasechnik was certain that Ovchinnikov could not have 

written and submitted his memorandum without first having secured strong support from highly placed academicians, including the President of the USSR-AS, 

Mstislav V. Keldysh.86

Ovchinnikov is credited with having said, “At the Central Committee of the 

Communist Party, if we offer ten drugs nobody would support us. Nobody would 

give us money for medicine. But offer one weapon and you’ll get full support.”87

Whether this quote is accurate or apocryphal, there is a near-consensus among 

former BW scientists who were interviewed by Leitenberg and Zilinskas that 

Ovchinnikov was their “big man”—the most influential person in garnering the 
24 

CSWMD Occasional Paper 11

support from the Soviet political and military systems that led to the Soviet government’s decision sometime during 1969‒1971 to establish a new, very large offensive BW program.

Recently, the current director of the institute that Ovchinnikov once directed, the Shemyakin-Ovchinnikov Institute of Bioorganic Chemistry, was interviewed on the status of his institute and took the opportunity to idolize his 

old boss:

It was he who convinced the country’s leadership of the need for serious 

work on the problem of our country’s biosecurity and being prepared to 

ward off all threats—both natural and competitive. . . . Ovchinnikov 

was a genius at communication, and after he succeeded in convincing 

party leaders and government at the time of the need for biosecurity 

programs, the machine was put into motion. Three joint Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and USSR Council of Ministers decrees were approved (in 1973, 1981, and 1985), 

according to which all the work proceeded. . . . Five institutes of the 

USSR Academy of Sciences system, including our institute, as well as 

an entire series of institutes, institutions, and enterprises (including 

the Ministry of Health, Main Directorate of the Microbiological Industry, Ministry of Agriculture, and others) were chosen as the principal executors of these decrees. It was a deeply echeloned, well-conceived 

effort with strong material and financial support.88

Several scientists interviewed by Leitenberg and Zilinskas said that Ovchinnikov was not personally interested in BW-related R&D; to him it was merely 

a means to become more politically powerful and to be able to disperse funding 

to those he favored in the Soviet scientific establishment. Whatever his ultimate 

objective, as a result of Ovchinnikov’s influence the Soviet government in 1971 

designated biotechnology as a field of critical importance in the civilian sphere, as 

well as in the secret military sphere. In the military sphere it enabled the creation 

of by far the world’s largest and most sophisticated BW program, which operated 
25

The Soviet Biological Weapons Program

in violation of international law for more than 20 years. However, as the next section of this paper makes clear, while Ovchinnikov’s influence was vital, it had to be 

directed at the MOD’s General Staff, which was the ultimate arbiter of decisions 

related to military force–building involving advanced technologies. And within 

the General Staff, the major proponent for BW was Smirnov.

The Geopolitical Context

Decisionmaking in the Soviet era was informed by the continuous analysis 

of the USSR’s standing in relation to other countries, as well as appraisals of the 

most important factors that defined the Soviet Union’s status. In the times that are 

most relevant to this study, the late 1960s and early 1970s, the term “correlation of 

forces” was frequently used by civilian and military leaders at all levels of government, as well as by writers whose books and articles dealt with Soviet internal and 

external politics, to describe these assessments. One of the best Western analysts 

of the Soviet system, Michael J. Deane, describes the concept as follows:

The calculation of the correlation of forces takes into consideration 

numerous economic, military, political, and international factors. In 

speaking of the correlation of forces, Soviet spokespersons appear to 

differentiate two levels of analysis: (1) the general, worldwide level, 

and (2) a level of individual factors and/or regions. Assessment on 

the first level is essentially an intuitive process in which the correlation of forces is based upon a “feel” for world events. With respect to 

individual factors or geographic regions, analyses are made more systematically because of the far fewer elements to be assessed at a given 

moment. Therefore, whereas the overall correlation of world forces 

may intuitively show the trend of the international situation, a more 

specific calculation of individual factors (e.g., economic, military, etc.) 

or in a separate geographic region is needed in order to assist in the 

formulation of foreign policy actions.89
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From the perspective of the General Staff, the correlation of forces in the 

early 1970s heavily favored the United States.90 This period was characterized by 

Colonel-General Andrian A. Danilevich, Senior Special Assistant to the Chief 

of the MOD’s Main Operational Directorate and one of the most credible authorities on Soviet military strategy, as a time of struggle for strategic superiority, 

where the Soviets continued to lag in key areas such as the quality of missiles, 

multiple independently targetable reentry vehicles (MIRV) technology, nuclear 

command and control, and naval strategic systems.91 This assessment led to the 

launch of a rapid development program for intercontinental ballistic missiles. 

It also led to deception efforts as a way to convince U.S. planners that Soviet 

capabilities were more advanced than was the case. As an example, successful 

deception led senior U.S. officials to become very concerned about the Soviets’ 

presumed superiority in chemical weapons. Harold Brown, U.S. Secretary of Defense (1977‒1980), asserted that “the Soviet Union was likely to use chemical 

weapons.” He expected the USSR to employ chemical weapons (CW) even if the 

North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) did not and even in the absence of 

nuclear exchanges.92 In a similar vein, as Zbigniew Brzezinski, the National Security Advisor to the President (1977‒1980), stated, “the Soviets had significant 

chemical weapons capabilities and they used CW in exercises. In a serious war, 

they would probably resort to CW, and they might even employ CW in the absence of nuclear use.”93 In reality, the Soviet military appears to have designated 

a minor role for chemical weapons in both its tactical and strategic doctrines. As 

Danilevich noted:

Chemical weapons were considered to be a secondary means of armed 

conflict, since with the advent of nuclear weapons chemical weapons 

had lost their significance. Although chemical weapons are a means of 

mass destruction, it is incomparable in its consequences with nuclear 

weapons. It does not lead to the death of humanity, but it does carry 

enormously tragic consequences. But they are limited and localized 

in nature. They were developed primarily as a secondary means in 

the conduct of armed conflict. Despite the relative unimportance of 
27

The Soviet Biological Weapons Program

chemical weapons, the Soviet Union could not concede to the U.S. 

superiority in this field and matched all U.S. means, including delivery and agents used. We could deliver it by means of aircraft bombs, 

and rockets, in sufficient amounts. The arsenals were on the order of 

1,000s of tons.94 So we were ready for chemical warfare, but only as 

a retaliatory means.95

As the Politburo allowed the General Staff to take the lead in decisionmaking 

regarding military systems, its assessment of the correlation of forces vis-à-vis the 

United States would have been of the highest importance in informing a decision 

on whether to initiate a new BW program. Likewise, with China, where a period 

of turbulent political relations led to a significant buildup of armed forces along 

the border and a running series of military skirmishes, culminating in the border 

conflict of 1969, the General Staff ’s assessment also would have been of the highest importance. While Soviet forces were far superior qualitatively and included 

tactical nuclear systems, China’s willingness to engage these forces appeared to 

reflect, in the words of a 1969 Central Intelligence Agency memorandum, “a distinctly Maoist method of deterrence. By assuming a hard line posture, Peking was 

demonstrating to Russia [sic] that despite its pre-occupation with internal problems it was determined to resist Soviet pressures and to defend China’s territorial 

rights, while at the same time calling world attention to the Soviet ‘threat.’”96

A second memorandum in 1970 suggested how Moscow might react to China’s hardline stance:

Soviet protests over the continuing border clashes contained hints of 

military action against China; and prominent Soviet leaders, such 

as party chief Brezhnev and Foreign Minister Gromyko, publicly 

attacked Mao and his regime. By late summer, Soviet pressure took 

a more ominous turn. Soviet officials began soliciting reactions to the 

possibility of Sino-Soviet hostilities, including a Soviet pre-emptive 

strike against China’s atomic installations.97
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The significance of these developments is that the Soviets were considering “more severe military measures” against China and informing the world of 

this possibility. In April 1970, two high Soviet officials, including Kosygin’s sonin-law, told Americans that in their opinion “eventually it would be necessary 

for the USSR to destroy China’s nuclear arsenal, even if it meant using nuclear 

weapons.”98 In June, an Izvestiya editor asked an unnamed U.S. official “what the 

American response would be to a Soviet attack on China.”99 It is probable that 

when these threats reached the Chinese leaders, it led them to ratchet down their 

border provocations and agree to bilateral talks in September 1970. After the Soviet Union dissolved, more was learned about the General Staff ’s thinking during 

the border conflicts with China in the 1960s. As Danilevich observed:

The Soviet MOD was forced to create groupings of forces in the Far 

East. In the late 1960s and early 1970s the only area that demanded 

significant force buildup was along the Chinese border. China represented a major diversion of resources and attention. For every one 

General Staff exercise carried out in the West, three were done in the 

Far East.100

It must have been difficult for the Soviets to assess the correlation of forces vis-à-vis China in this period. It was obvious that the USSR was superior at 

the strategic level, given the disparities in the two sides’ nuclear capabilities, and 

in terms of the quality of conventional forces. Nevertheless, a large number of 

China’s huge population could be deployed by Mao along the 4,300-kilometer 

Sino-Soviet border. This possibility was made vividly clear in the summer of 1966 

when an estimated 2 million Chinese converged along the length of the border to 

demonstrate support of Chinese territorial claims. If a border war was imminent, 

it would force the Soviets to deploy large numbers of troops to protect against 

possible intrusions at many sites that could occur at any time. In this kind of situation, the use of nuclear weapons might not be an efficient solution and also ran 

significant political risks. This uneasy situation would not abate, from the General 

Staff vantage point, until the late 1970s when it felt increasingly confident that the 
29

The Soviet Biological Weapons Program

correlation of forces indeed favored the Soviet Union for several reasons, including China’s limited military-industrial capacity and infrastructure to support the 

projection of power toward the USSR. Moreover, the Chinese did not appear to 

have any intention to attack the Soviet Far East.101

Soviet Distrust of Nixon’s 1969 Executive Order

An important factor shaping Soviet decisionmaking was distrust of the U.S. 

decision in November 1969 to terminate its offensive BW program. Nixon’s executive order to this end was implemented during 1970‒1972 and the disposal 

operation that rid the United States of all its BW agents and munitions was witnessed by members of the U.S. and foreign press. However, the Soviets were to all 

appearances not impressed. In August 1972, a team of four Soviet officials led by 

Minister of Health Boris Petrovsky visited former U.S. BW facilities that were in 

the process of being converted to National Cancer Institute laboratories. As Science

reporter Nicholas Wade noted at a press conference held after the visit, “Petrovsky 

complained about the ‘superficiality’ of his visit.” Wade further observed: 

The Russian party saw the building much as the Army had left it, as 

the conversion to cancer research had hardly begun. But if the Russians were impressed by the significance of the switch [conversion], 

they failed to show it. Maybe they suspect that offensive biological 

warfare research still continues.102

When Leitenberg and Zilinskas were interviewing former Soviet scientists 

who had worked in secret BW laboratories, they learned that all of them had to 

attend Committee for State Security of the Soviet Union (KGB) briefings during 

which they were told that the United States was conducting offensive BW R&D 

and therefore the Soviet Union had to do the same. Although some found these 

briefings to be tendentious and a crude appeal to patriotic duty, military scientists 

or military planners might have believed what they heard. Their sources of information typically would be TASS (the Telegraph Agency of the Soviet Union), 

Pravda, Izvestiya, and technical journals published by government print shops, 
30 

CSWMD Occasional Paper 11

while classified information was provided to them by the KGB and the Main 

Intelligence Directorate (GRU). Undoubtedly, highly placed KGB and GRU 

directors would have had access to raw intelligence and therefore would know 

that the United States had divested itself of the offensive BW program, but this 

data would not necessarily have been passed to lower ranked soldiers and civilian 

decisionmakers. There are many known examples of the GRU providing vastly 

exaggerated figures on U.S. military capabilities to the General Staff, which in 

turn would so inform members of the Politburo and thereby secure funding for armament projects favored by the military-industrial complex and their supporting 

generals.103 Lacking information to the contrary, it would be difficult or impossible for Soviet decisionmakers to dispute assessments that indicated a continuing 

U.S. BW program. The scenario used then, as now under the Putin administration, 

is that U.S. Government laboratories and facilities where BW R&D was conducted were indeed closed or converted, but that subsequently, BW-related projects 

whose intent violated the Biological Weapons Convention (BWC) cleverly were 

assigned to academic institutions and biotechnological and chemical industries.

The Military-Technical Rationale and the Decisionmaking Apparatus

As indicated in the figure, the structure that supported force-building decisions as it existed during the 1970s integrated policy input from a variety of 

sources in the military-industrial and scientific complex.104 We understand the 

broad output of this process concerning the large, sophisticated BW program initiated sometime during 1969‒1971, but there are many gaps in our knowledge 

of specific decisionmaking in the biological field, especially when compared to 

what is known about other top secret programs such as the nuclear, chemical, and 

missile programs. For example, the study done by Hines et al. is based largely on 

information on strategic planning and intentions provided by former high-level 

Soviet planners and analysts. The interviews that generated this information took 

place during 1990‒1993. The author’s estimate is that approximately 90 percent of 

this information deals directly or indirectly with nuclear weapons and their means 

of delivery. The remainder addresses chemical and conventional weapons and their 

means of delivery. The words “biology” or “biological” are not found anywhere in 
31

The Soviet Biological Weapons Program

the two volumes containing the results of the study. This is the case despite the 

fact that Vladimir Pasechnik, the first defector from the Soviet BW program, 

defected in March 1989 and had undergone extensive debriefings by British and 

American intelligence officials—a fact that must have been known by some of the 

individuals interviewed by Hines et al. (although perhaps not by the interviewers). 

Furthermore, an encompassing book by Andrei A. Kokoshin, one of Russia’s best 

Communist Party

Central Committee

Defense

Industrial

Department

MOM

Ministry of General Machine 

Building (Strategic Missiles)

Military-Industrial

Commission

Center for

Operational-Strategic Research

Central Defense

Policy-Making Body

Massive substructure for each Ministry

MoD, General Staff Directorates and services

all had several NIIs. Well over 40 total.

9 Defense Industrial Ministries

NIIs, OKBs, NPOs NIIs

NII-6 GRU support

TsNII-4

SRF support

TsNIIMash

Strat. missile

production support

General

Sta

Ministry of Defense

Policy Coordination

Policy Determination

Policy Implementation

Research, Design, and Production

Academy 

of Sciences

Defense

Council

Politburo

Council of 

Ministers TsOSI

VPK

Policy Input

Policy Input

Policy Input

Policy Input

Policy Input

Key:

NII - Scientific Research Institute (large basic R&D and analytical organization)

NPO - Scientific Production Conglomerate (very large enterprises - 10,000–45,000 pers.)

OKB - Experimental Design Bureau (generator of specific line of weapons associated with specific Chief Designer)
32 

CSWMD Occasional Paper 11

known analysts of Soviet military strategy and thinking, makes no mention of 

anything biological.105

The main reason for this was that all classified programs in the Soviet Union 

were compartmentalized to an extreme degree, which makes it highly likely that, 

even within the General Staff from 1969‒1971, only a few individuals knew anything about the first-generation BW program, or that its upgrade and expansion 

were being considered. The BW program had a higher classification level than even 

the nuclear program because it was about to be deemed illegal under international 

law, which was not the case with other WMD systems. By signing the Biological 

and Toxin Weapons Convention in April 1972,106 the Soviets committed to the 

global ban on biological and toxin weapons, even though they were already violating 

its most important provisions. For this reason, the Soviet BW program could not be 

acknowledged in any way. After the second-generation BW program was instituted, 

those requiring access to it were accorded F clearance, which was somewhat akin to 

the U.S. Sensitive Compartmented Information clearance. From 1969‒1971, very 

few civilian officials and military officers were accorded F clearance.

Furthermore, none of the defense industrial ministries was involved in modern biotechnology; nor were any of the scientific research institutes and scientific 

production conglomerates. It is reasonable to conclude that the relatively modest 

cadre dedicated to maintaining the BW program had little influence among those 

shaping high-level policy decisions on military force–building. It was not until 

Ovchinnikov decided, for reasons described above, to apply his considerable influence to the task, and was able to convince Smirnov of its worth, that the enhanced 

BW program became reality.

In turn, as the program was based on newly discovered biotechnologies that were 

largely unknown to the organizations typically involved in force-building decisions, 

many of them were excluded from the policy determination. This would be true even 

of key organizations such as the Defense Industry Department of the Communist 

Party and the Military-Industrial Commission, though the latter came to assume 

important responsibilities for advancing the second-generation BW program once it 

was established, so much so that Leitenberg and Zilinskas conclude that its role was 

crucial to the existence and maintenance of the Soviet BW program.107
33

The Soviet Biological Weapons Program

The Politburo, of course, was the supreme decisionmaking body of the Soviet 

state. But as Hines et al. report, the Politburo tended to give little attention to 

military-technical matters. Danilevich told Hines:

Brezhnev showed very little interest in the military area and was 

“very weak” in the area of military decision-making. In exercises he 

would become very nervous and agitated even thinking about nuclear weapons and would physically tremble when required to make 

an exercise decision with respect to their use. Because of his aversion 

to thinking about military questions, he ceded control over military 

decisions to the Minister of Defense. He also gave carte blanche to the 

Minister of Defense in terms of defining force requirements. Marshal Grechko, the Minister of Defense until 1976, focused on planning strategic force deployments.108

These observations were seconded by Dr. Vitaly Nikolayevich Tsygichko, a 

senior analyst at the All-Union Scientific-Technical Institute for Systems Studies, 

USSR-AS:

[In] the Brezhnev era the Politburo delegated all military matters 

to the Ministry of Defense to include all force procurement decisions. 

Threat definition was also a military function carried out within the 

General Staff by the Main Political Directorate. There was essentially 

no political oversight over the force-building process and no serious 

challenge from the Politburo to what was clearly a decision situation 

in which there were serious conflicts of interest. This “hands-off ” 

attitude of the Brezhnev Politburo and the mindless nuclear forcebuilding that resulted was strongly confirmed by General-Colonel 

Danilevich. . . . Brezhnev and the Politburo left military doctrine to 

the professionals and gave the military great reign in determining 

resource allocation and threat definition.109
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It seems reasonable to conclude from these observations that a decision on 

genetic engineering and its possible applications for warfare was not made directly 

by the Politburo but was delegated to the Soviet MOD and, within it, to the General Staff. As there were important civilian considerations concerning the priority 

to be accorded modern biotechnology in light of its potential benefits for agriculture, pharmaceuticals, and public health, it is likely that the USSR-AS had powerful influence on Brezhnev and probably other Politburo members. One of Hines 

et al.’s findings was that “personalities were as important, if not more important, 

than institutional or bureaucratic competition in determining Soviet military and 

force-building policy and clearly played a more immediate and decisive role than 

did expert analysis.”110 

If this was the situation in military force–building, it would have been similar in 

what one might call civilian force–building that focused on a powerful technology 

that could have significant positive effects on the Soviet economy. As noted earlier, 

Ovchinnikov had substantial influence on Brezhnev and, quite likely, the Politburo 

as a whole, and this would have led to the “there is an opinion” phenomenon. That 

is, once Brezhnev made known that he was in favor of a course of action as spelled 

out in an edict, officials serving in agencies that would be implementing that edict 

would understand that “there is an opinion” and, accordingly, do what was necessary 

to realize the edict’s objectives without questioning it. In this case, once Brezhnev 

had recognized the importance of modern biotechnology for Russia and made this 

known, two edicts were drawn up. The first was issued in 1971 and was top secret. 

It ordered that high priority be given to developing modern biotechnology in the 

military sphere and that the Biopreparat be established.111 The direction of military 

force–building was to be decided by the military. The second edict, issued in 1974, 

was “On the Measures for Accelerating the Development of Physical-Chemical 

Biology and Biotechnology and the Use of Their Achievements in Medicine, Agriculture, and Industry,” which in effect established a complex program for applying 

biotechnology throughout the USSR’s civilian sphere.

The General Staff was engaged in biological warfare issues through its 7th Directorate, headed since 1954 by Y.I. Smirnov, certainly the most important military 

decisionmaker in the Soviet BW program.112 He directed the BW program until 
35

The Soviet Biological Weapons Program

1972, as well as its successor, the 15th Directorate, until his retirement in 1985. 

Smirnov was one of the principal, and perhaps the most important, of the MOD’s 

BW ideologists, and is also believed to have been the main strategist of biological 

weapons applications. The Biopreparat scientist Domaradskij called him “the ideologue par excellence of Soviet bioweapons research from the 1950s to the 1980s” 

and “our apologist for biological warfare.”113

With respect to advancing the BW program to leverage new scientific developments, Smirnov had two concerns. First, as Domaradskij describes, in the late 1960s 

he had to confront the faction in the MOD that believed the BW program to be 

ineffective because it was not “solving problems.” These officials also believed there 

was no need for biological weapons in view of the Soviet’s growing strength in the 

nuclear area. This view might have been strengthened by the U.S. decision in 1969 

to close down its offensive BW program because “BW lacked military usefulness.”114

Smirnov’s second concern centered on advances in biotechnology and their 

possible application by the United States for military purposes as hypothesized by 

Ovchinnikov. This concern was, oddly enough, first publicly aired by two retired 

Soviet generals in a 1977 article published in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, 

although its underlying meaning probably was not understood by American readers. The authors noted that R&D in the area of “genetic weapons” had been going 

on “for a long time” in the United States.115 The authors provided two specific 

examples. First, by 1962, the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) allegedly had 

confirmed that it was sponsoring research “whose solution would permit discovery 

of a mechanism which determines the fundamental changes of bacterial cells.” 

Second, in the 1960s, DOD supported a 5-year plan that was said to have “obtained practical results” in transforming a microorganism that gives rise to plague 

so as to obtain a new strain of this pathogen that was “resistant to antibiotics and 

does not require a complex nutrient medium for growth.”116 The authors said that 

they had obtained this information from U.S. Department of Defense Appropriations documents from 1963 and 1970, respectively.117

Even earlier than the 1977 article, in 1970 a journal for command-level military personnel published by the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College 

featured as its lead article “Ethnic Weapons,” which outlined the history, desirability, 
36 

CSWMD Occasional Paper 11

and possibilities of engineered biological pathogens that would affect only those races which historically have no natural defense against certain “enzyme inhibitors.”118

Its author, a medical doctor, explains that many of the chemical activities and functions within the human body are caused by the interactions of enzymes. One of the 

more significant activities enabled by enzyme chemical reactions is the contraction 

and relaxation of muscle tissue. If the activities of these enzymes are blocked, the 

victim will be paralyzed, even to the point of death by asphyxiation.

Undoubtedly, the two articles had been passed to Smirnov and, given his 

medical background and, presumably, Ovchinnikov’s expert explanation of genetic 

engineering’s revolutionary applications, he would have understood their implications for biological weaponry. As is made clear by the interviews conducted by 

Hines et al., the Soviet military was keen on learning about and acquiring new 

American technologies. This attitude was rooted in an enduring belief in American technological and scientific omnipotence. In addition, the military is likely 

to have been affected by a type of mirror imaging; were a similar publication to 

appear in the USSR, it almost always would signal official approval of the idea or 

development that is being described.119

Being an advocate for retaining and, likely, expanding the Soviet BW program, 

Smirnov probably acted to exploit this development. He would have sought to make 

clear that while the U.S. Government had publicized closing its offensive BW program in 1969, in reality it had lied and simply transferred the program from the 

Defense Department to private companies and university laboratories charged with 

developing new biological weapon agents.120 As noted earlier, the GRU would have 

been helpful in this regard given its practice of routinely exaggerating U.S. threats to 

the USSR. Confronted with intelligence that the United States was applying revolutionary advances in biotechnology to produce powerful new weapons—information that, however false, would be difficult to dispute—senior General Staff officers 

who were against continuing the BW program could more easily be persuaded to 

change their views.

It is possible that Brezhnev may have welcomed the Ovchinnikov and 

Smirnov initiative to apply genetic engineering in an expanded and improved 

BW program for internal political reasons in light of improving relations with the 
37

The Soviet Biological Weapons Program

United States. Since 1969, Moscow and Washington had been working toward 

the “détente” that after the Nixon-Brezhnev summit of May 1972 came to characterize a period of reduced tensions and greater cooperation. In response to internal 

opposition to détente, Brezhnev is quoted as telling a 1971 Politburo meeting, 

“We communists have to string along with the capitalists for a while. We need 

their credits, their agriculture, and their technology. But we are going to continue 

massive military programs and by the middle of the 1980s will be in a position to 

return to a much more aggressive foreign policy designed to gain the upper hand 

in our relations with the West.”121

The newly empowered BW program would have fit well into this strategy as 

a major military program that would employ “their technology” and thus serve as 

a concrete demonstration of Brezhnev’s commitment to gain military superiority 

over the West. It was also realistic to foresee demonstrable military gains from the 

new BW program by the “middle of the 1980s.” Such thinking would have been 

consistent with the broader and highly urgent imperative in Soviet military planning to keep pace with and respond to American advances in military technology. 

This issue comes up repeatedly in the Hines et al. volumes. Interviewees peppered 

their comments with statements such as the following:

◆ “Qualitative technological advances and R&D efforts were largely conditioned by competition with the U.S. and, in the eyes of the Soviets, were reactive 

and imitative in most instances.”122

◆ “The Soviet military leadership was particularly intent on responding to 

technological advances in U.S. weaponry.”123

◆ “The military wanted a mix and quantity of weapons that supported the 

General Staff ’s operational strategy, weapons that embodied the most advanced 

technologies with which to counter a technologically advanced Western enemy.”124

◆ “There is evidence that [in the early 1960s] the VPK and the Central 

Committee’s Defense Department as a matter of policy stressed the need of 

the Soviet Union copying of foreign technologies and systems, rather than supporting domestic R&D. Almost all sources stated that during the period in 
38 

CSWMD Occasional Paper 11

question, new systems were developed primarily in reaction to developments in 

the U.S.”125

◆ “The Soviets followed the U.S. lead in many technological areas, including 

MIRVs, missile accuracy, early warning systems and command and control, neutron weapons, low frequency, enhanced EMP [electromagnetic pulse], and other 

exotic weapons [emphasis added].”126

Thus the Soviet military seemed predisposed to acquire and adapt for its 

own purposes almost any new Western technology. This propensity would have 

been even stronger concerning modern biotechnology because of a convergence 

of several factors: possibly the brightest Soviet bioscientists had made clear that 

genetic engineering could be used to develop new, powerful pathogens for military 

purposes; a top general highly regarded for his knowledge of military medicine 

favored instituting a second-generation BW program; articles published in the 

West by eminent authors strongly indicated that the United States was pursuing 

bioweapons R&D, something GRU intelligence served to confirm; and senior 

leaders were probably hearing about the huge potential of genetic engineering 

from prominent scientists and academicians. It was in this context that the General Staff decided to eliminate the 7th Directorate, which was in charge of the 

first-generation BW program, and establish the 15th Directorate for the purpose 

of directing the new second-generation BW program. Of course, the MOD has 

never announced or published its reasons for making this change, but it could 

reflect the fact, as noted above, that the first-generation BW program had by the 

end of the 1960s stagnated and become unproductive. Perhaps it was viewed as 

necessary to create a new organization in order to underscore the importance of 

and give greater impetus to the new BW program.

There probably were discussions in the General Staff on how biological weapons might be useful in the Soviet force structure. If a strong argument could be 

made that acquiring and deploying advanced biological weapons would substantially strengthen the Soviet military, it would be easier to convince doubters, if 

any, to go along with establishing the second-generation BW program. When 

interviewing former Soviet BW scientists, Leitenberg and Zilinskas always posed 
39

The Soviet Biological Weapons Program

questions on how biological weapons were to be used. As noted above, none of the 

interviewees possessed the high clearance level required to have had access to the 

information needed to provide concrete answers. Nevertheless, they had opinions 

based on information and ideas they received from military colleagues that allowed them to provide educated conjectures.127 According to these scientists, the 

General Staff conceived of five types of war:

◆ an instantaneous, full-scale nuclear war in which strategic nuclear forces 

play the principal role

◆ a protracted nuclear war involving all the armed forces

◆ a major war in one or several theaters of military operations involving the 

restricted use of nuclear weapons

◆ a major conventional war

◆ a local war involving conventional weapons.128

Any of these would be characterized by three levels of military operations—

tactical, operational, and strategic, although these could overlap. Tactical refers to 

engagements between small units at the local level. Operational refers to the enemy’s rear areas containing vital facilities such as harbors, airports, supply depots, 

and assembly areas. Strategic refers to wide-ranging military actions designed to 

win wars. Since the Soviets did not develop tactical biological weapons, only biological weapons designed to be used at the operational and strategic levels need to 

be considered. It is not obvious what a protocol for the use of biological weapons 

in any of the five types of war would look like or at which level of warfare they 

would be used and under what circumstances. However, some ideas can be developed using the correlation-of-forces discussions presented above, especially those 

that focused on the United States and China.

The General Staff ’s greatest concern was war with the United States. During 

the years that are of most direct interest to this paper, 1969‒1971, the prevailing view was that if a war were to break out, it would be of the worst kind—an 

instantaneous, full-scale nuclear war that would feature massive exchanges of 
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intercontinental missiles, as well as intermediate-range missile exchanges between NATO countries and the Soviet Union. The correlation-of-forces analysis 

pointing to U.S. strategic superiority suggested that after such a conflict, the 

Soviet Union would be in far worse condition than the United States in terms of 

military and economic power, public health, and other measures. If, however, the 

Soviet Union could effectively deliver deadly and contagious pathogens over a 

few population centers in North America, it possessed at least a theoretical capability to initiate a pandemic that would kill or seriously sicken a large proportion 

of Americans who had survived the nuclear holocaust.

Two pathogens that the first-generation BW program had already weaponized and that would be appropriate for this purpose were the variola virus (which 

causes smallpox) and Y. pestis (which causes pneumonic plague). In nature, smallpox has a fatality rate of about 30 percent and pneumonic plague of about 80 

percent if untreated. However, there was at the time an effective vaccine against 

smallpox, and Y. pestis is susceptible to antibiotics and, unless protected, its cells 

die soon after they are released into the open air. To sell a second-generation 

BW program to generals, scientists like Ovchinnikov could propose to develop 

variola virus strains that were more deadly than the viral strains found in nature 

by inserting genes taken from hemorrhagic fever virus and, similarly, to insert 

genes into Y. pestis cells that make the bacterium resistant to common antibiotics. 

These are only examples of what actually was done by the second-generation BW 

program to enhance the infective, virulence, and hardiness properties of bacteria 

and viruses.129

In the second type of war, a protracted nuclear war, Warsaw Pact and NATO 

forces likely would be involved, supporting a similar argument for BW use. That 

is, biological weapons would be used against survivors of nuclear exchanges. As 

the Soviet BW program also developed biological weapons to sicken animals and 

plants, these weapons could also be employed were the war expected to continue 

for a protracted period. The dispersal, for example, of foot-and-mouth disease or 

African swine fever virus would cause horrendous damage to surviving American 

and European livestock, while there are several bacterial and fungal pathogens 

that could be used to destroy barley, maize, rice, rye, wheat, and other crops. It 
41

The Soviet Biological Weapons Program

bears noting that all NATO countries would have been poorly prepared to defend themselves against an onslaught of weapons bearing these pathogens, even if 

nuclear weapons had not been used.

Were the third type of war to occur—one involving several theaters of military operations but restricted use of nuclear weapons—there would be very good 

reasons for the Soviet Union to use both chemical weapons for tactical purposes 

and biological weapons at the operational level. Lethal biological weapons likely 

would be employed against military strongholds away from urban areas and containing few civilians, so as to reduce the risks of nuclear escalation. Alternatively, 

incapacitating weapons would be used, for example, to sicken defenders of airfields, ports, storage depots, and the like without killing civilians in nearby urban 

areas and leaving facilities and stores intact so that they would be of immediate 

use to advancing Soviet forces.

When Leitenberg and Zilinskas asked Soviet weapons scientists about their 

views on how biological weapons were to be used, a significant proportion of them 

answered that China would be the target. In their view, China’s huge population 

advantage would have necessitated the use not only of nuclear weapons, but also 

biological weapons.130 Since no ocean separates the two countries, it would be imperative to avoid the use of contagious pathogens, such as variola viruses, which 

could spread easily to countries bordering China. While the Soviet population was 

almost completely protected by vaccination against smallpox, the vaccination rate 

was much lower in Afghanistan, Burma, Nepal, Pakistan, and other nearby countries (the rate for China was not known). Instead of a contagious pathogen, it 

would make more sense to employ a noncontagious agent, such as Marburg virus, 

which is highly virulent with a morality rate of over 80 percent and for which there 

is no vaccine or effective treatment. The second-generation BW program, in fact, 

weaponized the Marburg virus and developed a method for its mass production.

In wars of the fourth and fifth types, involving only conventional weapons, 

biological weapons probably would not have been used. This supposition is not 

certain though. For example, a conventional war with China that went poorly for 

the Soviets could lead them to use nuclear and/or biological weapons to restore 

their position and gain the upper hand. A similar scenario could also occur in the 
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CSWMD Occasional Paper 11

context of a conventional war with NATO. Soviet military thinking along these 

lines likely will not be known with any fidelity until MOD archives are opened 

to scholars, which is not likely to occur while Putin and leaders like him remain 

in power.

To summarize the foregoing discussion, one can see the military and technological arguments underpinning a final judgment supporting the establishment of 

a second-generation BW program: that by possessing powerful biological weapons that no other country, especially its major potential adversaries, were aware of 

and therefore could not defend against, the Soviet Union would gain strategic and 

operational superiority and thus shift the correlation of forces in its favor. Crucial to this was the ability to inflict a major technological surprise on the United 

States in nuclear war scenarios, providing the Soviet Union with an advantage in 

postwar recovery. An additional consideration could have been that the appropriate biological weapon might have been capable of decimating China’s population.

What’s Past Is Prologue

Understanding the Decision

While the precise deliberations of the Politburo are unknown, it is well known 

by now that in the end the Politburo decided to expand and update its biotechnology programs in the military sphere, utilizing modern biotechnology techniques, 

in particular genetic engineering, to create unique strains of bacteria and viruses 

for weapons purposes. A careful reading of available sources indicates six factors 

underpinning this decision:

1. The Soviet Union’s first-generation BW program, dating to 1928, provided 

the necessary foundation for advocating and institutionalizing the second-generation BW program. Even if this program was viewed by some military leaders as 

ineffective, it served as an institutional-bureaucratic base from which champions 

of adopting genetic engineering could make their case for instituting an enhanced 

BW program.

2. The large civilian biotechnology industry that used classical applied microbiology techniques to produce pharmaceuticals, dietary supplements, and single-
43

The Soviet Biological Weapons Program

cell proteins was well-placed to provide a “legend”—or legitimate industrial cover—for a new entity called Biopreparat that ostensibly was a civilian institution 

but that in fact reported to the 15th Directorate and whose role was to direct the 

very large civilian component of the second-generation BW program that secretly 

conducted both offensive and defensive BW R&D.

3. Influential bioscientists in the USSR Academy of Sciences convinced 

members of the Politburo, including Brezhnev, of the need to import new biotechnology techniques for the purpose of using them to research and develop unique 

pathogenic bacterial and viral strains that could be used as weapons. This was 

necessary, they claimed, to respond to similar U.S. efforts. While the bioscientists 

were not particularly interested in biological weapons, they knew that “playing the 

military card” was the best tactic to gain Politburo agreement for the large investment required. As biotechnology is dual-use, once the decision was made by the 

military to acquire modern biotechnology, it inevitably was broadcast to civilian 

R&D institutes whose scientists were conducting unclassified investigations. The 

1974 edict noted above made that possible.

4. The Soviet military was predisposed to acquire new military technologies 

whenever they were developed in the West and in the Brezhnev era was given 

ample funding to acquire infrastructure and human capital to exploit them. There 

probably was no opposition within the General Staff or VPK to the possibility of 

gaining new, unique weapons via modern biotechnology.

5. The General Staff ’s military analysis of the correlation of forces reinforced 

the rationale to acquire the capability to produce modern biological weapons. 

Such weapons were seen as a potentially decisive factor in the types of nuclear and 

conventional wars against the United States and China envisioned by the General 

Staff at that time.

6. There was a high probability that the program could be kept secret. Concealing and denying the program enhanced the prospects of technology surprise 

directed at adversaries, but also meant foregoing the deterrence value of openly 

possessing biological weapons. The latter, however, was not an option after Moscow signed the BWC. Successfully keeping its BW program secret allowed Moscow to appear to be in compliance with the treaty. In fact, it was not until 1989, 
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CSWMD Occasional Paper 11

and more so in 1992, when the Soviet BW program was revealed to the world, 

that the treaty’s weaknesses with respect to verification, investigation of alleged 

violations, and sanctioning of violators were widely understood.

The Legacy of the Soviet Biological Warfare Program in Russia Today

In 1992, Russia’s President Boris Yeltsin admitted that the USSR had operated an offensive bioweapons program in violation of the BWC.131 He then 

attempted to close the program but was undermined by the MOD, which kept 

its biological research institutes operating and their work programs secret. In September of 1992, Russia, the United States, and the United Kingdom signed a 

trilateral statement by which Russia pledged to allow its Western counterparts 

access to these bioweapons facilities. But Moscow failed to deliver on this promise, 

so the military biological institutes remain as secret today as they were in Soviet 

times. Further, Yeltsin’s 1992 admission was reversed by Vladimir Putin after he 

became acting president in 1999, and Russia’s official position since then is that 

the USSR never had an offensive bioweapons program and had only conducted 

defensive research as permitted by the BWC. 

We cannot know whether new biological techniques, based on genetic manipulation developed since the Soviet BW program supposedly closed in 1992‒1993, 

have been applied by scientists working in the three top-secret MOD biological 

institutes to create new or improved weaponized strains of bacteria and viruses. In 

particular, these techniques could be applied by weapons scientists to develop substances that interfere with genes that control behavior or immunological defense 

systems. Work to this end was at an advanced stage of development at the time of 

the Soviet Union’s dissolution in December 1991 and could have been continued 

even during Yeltsin’s administration, which ended in 1999.

In February 2012, the Moscow newspaper Rossiiskaya Gazeta published a 

long essay authored by then–Prime Minister Vladimir Putin titled “A Smart Defense against New Threats” that included the following passage:

What is the future preparing for us? . . . In the more distant future, 

weapon systems based on new principles (beam, geophysical, wave, 
45

The Soviet Biological Weapons Program

genetic, psychophysical and other technology) will be developed. All 

this will, in addition to nuclear weapons, provide entirely new instruments for achieving political and strategic goals. Such high-tech 

weapon systems will be comparable in effect to nuclear weapons but 

will be more “acceptable” in terms of political and military ideology.132

After Putin was elected president for the second time in March 2012, he 

chaired a meeting attended by a select group of his ministers. During this obviously staged event, the ministers took turns explaining what their organizations 

would do to implement 28 tasks that Putin had stated in the February Rossiiskaya 

Gazeta article. Then–Minister of Defense Anatoly Serdyukov stated, “Mr. Putin, 

we have thoroughly studied your article and prepared a plan for implementing the 

tasks set there for the Defense Ministry.”133 In particular, Serdyukov promised to 

implement Task 4—to create weapons systems that use different physical principles.134 It bears noting that the official Web site of the Russian MOD has an 

encyclopedia that defines “genetic weapons” as:

a type of weapon able to damage the genetic (hereditary) apparatus 

of people. It is assumed/expected that some viruses can/may serve 

as the active principle. These viruses are in possession of mutagenic 

activity (with the capability to cause hereditary changes) and can 

introduce into a chromosome cells that contain deoxyribonucleic acid 

(DNA) and even chemical mutations, taken from natural sources by 

chemical synthesis or biotechnological methods. The primary result of 

the use of genetic weapons is damage/injury and changes to basic/

primary structure of DNA, which can lead to serious diseases and 

their hereditary transmission.135

In the days directly following Serdyukov’s remarks, comments on them appeared on Russian Web sites and in mass media. Some supported the implementation of Task 4 on the grounds that such weapons were being developed by the 

United States, as they claimed, and that Russia therefore had to do the same. 
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Foreign reactions differed. For example, articles written by David Hoffman in 

Foreign Policy and Raymond Zilinskas in Nature Medicine made clear that it is 

difficult to conceive of a weapon based on “genetic” principles that would not be 

a violation of the BWC’s core provisions.136, 137

There is great cause for concern that well-resourced secret Russian institutes 

with access to modern microbiology techniques will provide the basis for the Putin administration to establish a third-generation BW program—for two specific reasons. First, cultures of pathogens that were weaponized by the first- and 

second-generation BW programs presumably are stored in the cell culture collections of secret MOD facilities. These would include genetically engineered strains 

whose infective and virulence properties have been enhanced to make them more 

Bacteria Disease caused by

Bacillus anthracis Inhalation anthrax

Brucella melitensis (Brucella suis?) Brucellosis (undulant fever)

Burkholderia mallei Glanders

Burkholderia pseudomallei Melioidosis

Coxiella burnetii Q fever

Francisella tularensis Tularemia

Legionella pneumophila Legionnaire’s disease

Yersinia pestis Pneumonic plague

Virus

African swine fever virus African swine fever (panzootic)

Capripoxvirus Goatpox, sheeppox (panzootic)

Foot-and-mouth disease virus Foot-and-mouth disease (panzootic)

Marburg virus Marburg virus disease

Rinderpest virus Rinderpest (panzootic)

Variola major Smallpox

Venezuelan equine encephalomyelitis 

virus

Encephalitis

Table 2. Soviet Second-Generation Biological Warfare Agents

Source: Milton Leitenberg and Raymond A. Zilinskas, The Soviet Biological Weapons Program: A History

(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), 79–250.
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The Soviet Biological Weapons Program

suited for use as weapons than strains recovered from nature (see table 2 for a listing of pathogens weaponized by the second-generation BW program).

Second, it is reasonable to assume that recipes generated by the second-generation BW program that specify how to develop, test, and produce biological 

weapons are deposited in government archives.138 These recipes could be adapted 

to develop payloads consisting of third-generation weaponized pathogens. It is 

also reasonable to assume that the enhancement of existing second-generation 

weaponized pathogens through the application of modern genetic techniques is 

easier than starting from scratch with a nonweaponized microorganism.

At this time, there are no signs that Russia intends to scale back the biological 

institutes that once directed the Soviet bioweapons program or to destroy related 

culture collections. In this light, Putin’s 2012 statement is ominous. Having been 

forewarned, it is imperative that the United States and other Biological Weapons 

Convention state parties try to impress upon the Putin government the need to 

practice transparency by opening its closed bioweapons institutes to outside access, and to acknowledge the illegal Soviet BW program of the past by revealing 

its accomplishments—including weaponized pathogens—and then taking the 

necessary steps to publicly destroy them and the associated recipes. Unfortunately, 

given its past behavior on bioweapons-related issues, the Russian government is 

unlikely to take any of these steps. Still, by applying this kind of political pressure, 

it may be less likely that a third-generation BW program will be realized.
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Appendix. Biography of Colonel-General Yefim Ivanovich 

Smirnov

Yefim Ivanovich Smirnov139 was born in 1904 and died in 1989. In 1932 he 

graduated from the Military Medical Academy in Leningrad, and in 1938 from 

the Frunze Military Political Academy. From 1932 to 1937 he worked as a military doctor. During 1938‒1939 he headed the medical service of the Leningrad 

military district, and from 1939 to 1946 he worked in the military service of the 

Red Army as head of the Main Military-Medical Directorate on Questions of 

Organization and Tactics of the Military Service. Thanks to the work of this Directorate, many thousands of lives were saved during World War II and millions 

were returned to duty.140 For his important work, he was the only physician in the 

history of Soviet military medicine to be awarded a general’s medal (the Kutuzov 

Order) for organizing the evacuation of the entire army of wounded from Kharkov 

City before it was captured by German troops. The uniqueness of this operation 

lay in the fact that it was accomplished by using empty railroad cars and motor 

transport returning from the front under almost continuous bombing. When the 

question of withdrawing troops from Kharkov was discussed at the Supreme High 

Command headquarters, it was informed that approximately 100,000 wounded 

soldiers were lodged in the city. The Command called Smirnov, who reported that 

all the wounded could be evacuated in empty returning vehicles. After this was 

successfully accomplished, Stalin suggested that Smirnov be awarded the general’s 

medal because “Indeed, he saved an entire army.” Stalin ended the meeting at the 

headquarters by saying that, in his opinion, Smirnov should also receive a Lenin 

Order for his level-headed initiative. Naturally, there were no objections.

After World War II, on February 17, 1947, Stalin appointed Smirnov Minister of Health. Fortunately, fate proved kind to him during the period of repressions that swept the country in the mid- to late 1940s. Later, it became known 

that Beria asked Stalin several times for permission to arrest Smirnov after he had 

been removed from the post of Minister of Health in connection with the affair of 

the doctors-poisoners in the Kremlin. Stalin ordered Beria to leave Smirnov alone 

and not to approach him regarding this matter again.
49

The Soviet Biological Weapons Program

After Stalin’s death in March 1953, Smirnov served in several different leadership positions in the Soviet army including head of the 7th Main Directorate of 

the Ministry of Defense (MOD) and, after it was disbanded, head of the MOD’s 

15th Main Directorate (codenamed Post Office Box A-1968).141 Starting in 1975, 

he was a member of the Interagency Council on Molecular Biology and Genetics 

under Glavmikrobioprom (later renamed the Ministry of Medical and Microbiological Industry). In essence, Smirnov was one of the main Soviet ideologues, if 

not the main ideologue, in the development of biological weapons and strategies 

of biological warfare. Naturally, this side of his work was always kept secret.

Smirnov was the head editor of the Encyclopedic Dictionary of Military Medicine (1949‒1950) and numerous installments of “Experience of the Soviet Military during the Great Patriotic War” (1946–1956). He was a member of the editorial board and the editor of the section on military medicine in the second edition 

of the Great Medical Encyclopedia.

According to his biography, both the Medical and Surgical Society of Canada 

and the Royal Medical Society of Great Britain elected him as a Distinguished 

Member. A selection of his works include Issues of Organization and Tactics of the 

Medical Service (Moscow, 1942); Military Medicine and Nikolai Ivanovich Pirogov

(Leningrad, 1945); Soviet Military Doctors in the Great Patriotic War (Moscow, 

1945); Special Tasks of the Ministry of Health of the USSR, Soviet Medicine, no. 

8, 1947; “Military Medicine” in Forty Years of Soviet Health (1917‒1957) ed. M.D. 

Kovrigina (Moscow, 1957), 309; Contemporary Meanings of the Basic Propositions 

of N.I. Pirogov, with A.M. Geselevich (Moscow, 1960); “Some Issues of Military 

Epidemiology,” Military Medical Journal, no. 12, 1960, and Military Medical Journal, no. 1, 1961; War and Military Medicine, 1939‒1945 (Moscow, 1976 and 1979); 

“Problems of Immunology in the System of Anti-Epidemiological Defense of 

Military Force in the Great Patriotic War,” with N.S. Garin, Immunology, no. 3, 

1980; Epidemiological Process (Problems and Resolution) (Moscow, 1980); Wars and 

Epidemiology, with V.A. Lebedinskiy and N.S. Garin (Moscow, 1988).

Among others, Smirnov’s honors include the following: academician of the 

USSR Academy of Medical Sciences, designated Hero of Socialist Labor, recipient 
50 

CSWMD Occasional Paper 11

of the Order of Lenin, recipient of the Third Order of Red Medal, and recipient of 

First Commanding Kutuzov Order.
51

The Soviet Biological Weapons Program

Notes

1 Jonathan B. Tucker and Erin R. Mahan, President Nixon’s Decision to Renounce the 

U.S. Offensive Biological Weapons Program, Case Study Series 1 (Washington, DC: Center 

for the Study of Weapons of Mass Destruction, National Defense University, October 

2009).

2 Milton Leitenberg and Raymond A. Zilinskas, The Soviet Biological Weapons Program: A History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012).

3 John G. Hines, Ellis M. Mishulovich, and John F. Shull, Soviet Intentions 

1965‒1985, Volume I: An Analytical Comparison of U.S.-Soviet Assessments During the Cold 

War (McLean, VA: BDM Federal, Inc., September 22, 1995); Hines, Mishulovich, and 

Shull, Soviet Intentions 1965‒1985, Volume II: Soviet Post-Cold War Testimonial Evidence

(McLean, VA: BDM Federal, Inc., September 22, 1995).

4 A biological weapon has four components: a quantity of pathogens that cause disease, a formulation that protects the pathogens while in storage and after being released 

into open air, a munition that contains the quantity of formulated pathogens, and a 

dispersal mechanism that disseminates the formulated pathogens over a targeted population. The Soviet decision to establish Biopreparat and operate Ferment and Ekology was 

to conduct research, develop, and test (weaponize) pathogens that arm biological weapons.

5 V.N. Orlov, ed., We Defended Russia [in Russian] (Moscow, 2000). Orlov was a colonel on the staff of the Directorate of the Radiological, Chemical, and Biological Defense 

Forces Command, Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation.

6 Ken Alibek with Stephen Handelman, Biohazard: The Chilling True Story of the 

Largest Covert Biological Weapons Program in the World—Told From Inside by the Man Who 

Ran It (New York: Random House, 1999).

7 Alfredo Morabia, “‘East Side Story’: On Being an Epidemiologist in the Former 

USSR: An Interview with Marcus Klingberg,” Epidemiology 17, no. 1 (2006), 115.

8 Ibid.

9 Valentin Bojtzov and Erhard Geissler, “Military Biology in the USSR, 1920‒45,” 

in Biological and Toxin Weapons: Research, Development, and Use from the Middle Ages to 

1945, ed. Erhard Geissler and John Ellis van Courtland Moon (Stockholm: Stockholm 

International Peace Research Institute, 1999), 153‒167.

10 According to H.L. Gilchrist, chemical weapons killed 56,000 and wounded 

419,340 Russians in World War I. See H.L. Gilchrist, A Comparative Study of World 

War Casualties from Gas and Other Weapons (Edgewood Arsenal, MD: Chemical Warfare 

School, 1928).

11 Alibek with Handelman, 33.

12 Bojtzov and Geissler, 156‒157.

13 Ibid.
52 

CSWMD Occasional Paper 11

14 Bacillus anthracis (B. anthracis) is the causative bacterium of the disease called 

anthrax.

15 Clostridium botulinum is the bacterium that produces botulinum toxin, which is the 

most toxic substance known to science.

16 Vibrio cholerae is the bacterium that causes cholera.

17 Yersinia pestis (Y. pestis) is the bacterium that causes plague.

18 Article 61 of the new USSR constitution gave the United State Political Administration the responsibility “to unite the revolutionary efforts of the Union Republics in the 

struggle against political and economic counter-revolution, espionage, and banditism.” See 

Simon Wolin and Robert M. Slusser, “The Evolution of the Soviet Secret Police,” in Wolin 

and Slusser, eds., The Soviet Secret Police (Santa Barbara, CA: F.A. Praeger, 1957), 10.

19 This person might have been M.M. Faybich, who later was recognized for his work 

in developing various vaccines.

20 An oblast is an administrative unit akin to a province.

21 Igor V. Domaradskij and Wendy Orent, Biowarrior: Inside the Soviet/Russian Biological War Machine (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2003). In the era before antibiotics, a person who contracted plague usually died.

22 Kirov is located approximately 500 kilometers northwest of Moscow.

23 Bojtzov and Geissler.

24 Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, The First Circle, trans. Max Hayward, Manya Harari, 

and Michael Glenny (London: Harvill Press, 1968).

25 Gaysky was the inventor of the Gaysky Live Vaccine, which is a preparation of 

Francisella tularensis holarctica, Strain 15; new versions of this vaccine are still in use in the 

former Soviet Union.

26 The “convention” Voroshilov is referring to is the 1925 Geneva Protocol, which 

forbids the use of bacteria in warfare.

27 W. Duranty, “Soviet Threatens to Use Gas in War,” The New York Times, February 

23, 1938, quoted in The Problem of Chemical and Biological Warfare, Volume I: The Rise of CB 

Weapons (Stockholm: Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, 1971), 287.

28 J.W. Barnes, C. Henze, W.J. Cromartie, and J.W. Hofer, A Review of German Activities in the Field of Biological Warfare, Intelligence Report No. B-C-H-H/305 (Washington, DC: War Department, ALSOS Mission, 1945).

29 Possibly Fort Alexander I, which was the home of a plague laboratory before 1917.

30 Walter Hirsch, Soviet BW and CW Preparations and Capabilities: The Hirsch Report 

(Washington, DC: U.S. Army Chemical Intelligence Branch, May 1951).

31 Kei’ichi Tsuneishi, The Germ Warfare Unit That Disappeared: The Kwantung Army’s 

731st Unit (Tokyo, 1982); Peter Williams and David Wallace, Unit 731: The Japanese 

Army’s Secret of Secrets (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1989); and Sheldon H. Harris, 
53

The Soviet Biological Weapons Program

Factories of Death: Japanese Biological Warfare 1932‒45 and the American Cover Up (London: Routledge, 1994).

32 Olivier Lepick, “French Activities Related to Biological Warfare, 1919‒45,” in 

Biological and Toxin Weapons, ed. Geissler and van Courtland Moon, 70‒90.

33 Gradon B. Carter and Graham Pearson, “British Biological Warfare and Biological 

Defence, 1925‒45,” in Biological and Toxin Weapons, 168‒189.

34 Donald Avery, “Canadian Biological and Toxin Warfare Research, Development 

and Planning, 1925‒45,” in Biological and Toxin Weapons, 190‒214.

35 John van Courtland Moon, “U.S. Biological Warfare Planning and Preparedness: 

The Dilemmas of Policy,” in Biological and Toxin Weapons, 215‒254.

36 Erhard Geissler, “Biological Warfare Activities in Germany 1923‒45,” in Biological 

and Toxin Weapons, 91‒126.

37 Biological and Toxin Weapons.

38 Ibid.

39 Y.I. Smirnov should not to be confused with L.V. Smirnov, who was head of the 

Military-Industrial Commission.

40 Orlov.

41 Igor V. Domaradskij, personal communication, 1999.

42 The term “recipe” refers to the written procedures followed by weapon scientists to 

research, develop, test, and produce a particular pathogen for weapons use.

43 Orlov.

44 E.N. Shlyakhov and E. Rubinstein, “Human Live Anthrax Vaccine in the Former 

USSR,” Vaccine 12, no. 8 (1994), 727‒730; Orlov.

45 Orlov.

46 It was the custom in the USSR, and in other countries, to name an important 

strain after the institute where it was first developed.

47 Orlov.

48 Scarification involves the injection of the vaccine by puncturing the outermost 

layer of the skin (ectoderm) with a needle, but without drawing more than a minimum of 

blood. This causes a local infection that stimulates antibody production by the immunological defense system of the recipient of the vaccine.

49 Orlov.

50 Shlyakhov and Rubinstein.

51 V.V. Tomilin and R.V. Berezhnov, “Exposure of the Criminal Activities of the 

Japanese Militarists in Preparations for the Use of Bacteriological Warfare” [in Russian] 

(1985).

52 Union of the Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), Materials on the Trial of Former 

Servicemen of the Japanese Army Charged with Manufacturing and Employing Bacteriological 

Weapons (Moscow: Foreign Language Publishing House, 1950).
54 

CSWMD Occasional Paper 11

53 Ibid., 26.

54 Ibid., 25‒28.

55 Theodor Rosebury and Elvin A. Kabat, “Bacterial Warfare,” Journal of Immunology 56 (1947), 7‒96; Theodor Rosebury, Peace or Pestilence: Biological Warfare and How to 

Avoid It (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1949).

56 Rosebury headed the Airborne Pathogen Laboratory at Camp Detrick during 

World War II. Among other accomplishments, he had directed experiments to test Serratia marcescens, Bacillus globigii, Brucella suis, Malleomyces mallei, and Pasteurella tularensis for use as biological weapons agents or simulants. Rosebury’s work and ideas were 

important in early U.S. postwar decisionmaking on biological weapons research projects 

requirements. His writings make clear that several bacterial species could be applied for 

BW purposes and therefore posed dangers to all of humanity.

57 Jacquard H. Rothschild, “Germs and Gas: The Weapons Nobody Dares Talk 

About,” Harper’s Magazine 218, no. 1309 (1959), 29‒34; and Jacquard H. Rothschild, 

Tomorrow’s Weapons: Chemical and Biological (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964).

58 George W. Merck, “Biological Warfare: Report to the Secretary of War by George 

W. Merck, Special Consultant for Biological Warfare, January 3, 1946,” Military Surgeon, 

no. 98 (1946), 237‒242.

59 A.M. Arkhangelsky, A.M. Kamorsky, and I.D. Nuzhdin, Bacteriological Weapons 

and How to Defend Against Them [in Russian] (Moscow, 1967) and L.A. Belikov, The Bacteriological Weapon and Methods of Protection From It [in Russian] (Moscow, 1960).

60 The epithet “Red Army” was officially discontinued in 1944.

61 “A High Reward” [in Russian], Voenno-Meditsinskiy Zhurnal, no. 4 (1978), 80‒82.

62 Quoted in Roza N. Lukina and Yevgeniy P. Lukin, eds., The 50 Years of the Ministry 

of Defense’s Virology Center Deserves Recognition [in Russian] (Sergiev Posad: Ves’ Sergiev 

Posad, January 10, 2004), 69.

63 Burgasov was a military microbiologist who in his younger days had worked on a 

project to weaponize botulinum neurotoxin. From 1965 through 1986, he held the dual 

position of Deputy Minister of Health and Chief Sanitary Physician of the USSR, which 

is a position akin to that of the U.S. Surgeon General.

64 Lukina and Lukin, 69.

65 Ibid.

66 Its current name is Russian Federation Ministry of Defense Center for Military 

Technical Problems in Antibacteriological Defense under the Scientific Research Institute of Microbiology.

67 V.P. Nepranov et al., “The Analysis of Biological Terrorism Cases (for the Last 10 

Years) and Disinfection Actions on Liquidation of Their Consequences,” in Advanced 

Disinfectants and Safety Techniques Applied in Pathogen Treatment, ed. G.N. Lepeshkin, 
55

The Soviet Biological Weapons Program

Proceedings of International Workshop (Kirov: Racem Ltd., 2006), 215‒228; available at 

<www.racem.org/>.

68 Gulbarshyn Bozheyeva, Yerlan Kunakbayev, and Dastan Yeleukenov, Former Soviet 

Biological Weapons Facilities in Kazakhstan: Past, Present and Future, Occasional Paper No. 

1 (Monterey, CA: Center for Nonproliferation Studies (CNS), 1999); available at <http://

cns.miis.edu/pubs/opapers/op1/index.htm>.

69 Jonathan B. Tucker and Raymond A. Zilinskas, eds., The 1971 Smallpox Epidemic 

in Aralsk, Kazakhstan, and the Soviet Biological Warfare Program, Occasional Paper No. 9 

(Monterey, CA: CNS, 2002).

70 Domaradskij, personal communication.

71 Raymond L. Garthoff, “Polyakov’s Run,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 56, no. 5 

(September/October 2000), 38.

72 Lysenko repudiated Mendelian genetics and instead applied vermalization, which 

was based on the Lamarkian notion that structural changes in animals and plants brought 

about by environmental or agricultural forces are transmitted to offspring. This notion 

fitted Soviet concepts on how society can be changed, so it became state dogma avowed 

by Stalin and Khrushchev.

73 “History of the Institute of Molecular Genetics,” Russian Academy of Sciences, 

available at <http://old.img.ras.ru/hist_e.htm>.

74 Leitenberg and Zilinskas, 52‒60.

75 A candidate degree is equivalent to a Ph.D. in the United States.

76 Genetic engineering had its origins during the late 1960s in experiments with 

plasmids, which are small, free-floating rings of DNA found in bacteria. A key discovery, 

made by Swiss microbiologist Werner Arber in 1968, was restriction enzymes, which are 

able to cut DNA into fragments during replication. The first experiments to combine 

DNA molecules from different sources were performed in Paul Berg’s laboratory in the 

early 1970s and published in 1972. He shared the 1980 Nobel Prize in chemistry for this 

work. This was the birth of genetic engineering.

77 Aleksandr A. Baev, “The Paths of My Life: Autobiography,” Comprehensive Biochemistry 38 (1995), 439‒479.

78 Scientists who make significant contributions to science could be honored by being 

elected to membership in the USSR Academy of Sciences (USSR-AS). There were three 

types of membership: corresponding members, full members (academicians), and foreign 

members. Being elected to membership was considered very prestigious. In 1974, the 

Academy had 237 full members and 439 corresponding members. After 1991, the USSRAS was converted to the Russian Academy of Sciences (RAN); See Answers.com, Russian 

Academy of Sciences, 2011, available at <www.answers.com/topic/russian-academy-ofsciences-1>.
56 

CSWMD Occasional Paper 11

79 By the time of his death from cancer on February 17, 1988, Ovchinnikov was a 

vice president of the USSR-AS, recipient of the Lenin Prize, named Hero of Socialist 

Labor, and recipient of the State Prize of the USSR.

80 [Yuri] A. Ovchinnikov, “Biotechnology in the Forefront of Scientific-Technical 

Progress” [in Russian], Kommunist ( July 1985), 20.

81 Nikolai Krementsov, Stalinist Science (1996), 4‒5.

82 Ibid., 40‒41.

83 Ovchinnikov was awarded the anniversary medal: “For exemplary work. In commemoration of the 100th anniversary of the birth of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin.”

84 Anonymous, personal communication, 2001.

85 Anthony Rimmington, “The Soviet Union’s Offensive Program: The Implications 

for Contemporary Arms Control,” in Biological Warfare and Disarmament: New Problems/New Perspectives, ed. Susan Wright (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002) 

103‒148.

86 An indication of Ovchinnikov’s influence may be realized from what Joshua 

Lederberg wrote after having met him in June 1985: “Ovch. told me he had gotten 

Brezhnev’s personal backing to modernize Soviet biology through molecular genetics, 

[fairly explicitly to get over the Lysenko blight] for its indispensable values for medicine and agriculture.” See Joshua Lederberg, “Observations from Lederberg during His 

Presence at the Joint U.S.-U.S.S.R. CISAC Meeting in Moscow in June 1985 [ June 12, 

1985],” National Library of Medicine: The Joshua Lederberg Papers.

87 Mark Williams, “Interview with Serguei Popov,” at George Mason University 

( January 3, 2005). A variation of this quote was written by William Kucewicz, “Lead 

Scientist in a Scourge Search,” Wall Street Journal, May 1, 1984: “If we bring the Central 

Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union vaccines, nobody will pay attention to it. But if we bring a virus, oh, then this will be recognized by all as a great victory.”

88 Interview of Vadim Tikhonovich Ivanov, “On the Threshold of Artificial Life” [in 

Russian], Zavtra Online, September 19, 2013.

89 Michael J. Deane, The Soviet Concept of the “Correlation of Forces,” Stanford Research 

Institute, Strategic Studies Center, SSC-TN-4383-1, May 1976, iv.

90 Hines et al., Vol. I, 23.

91 Ibid., 23.

92 Hines et al., Vol. II, 13.

93 Ibid., 16.

94 This is a gross underestimate; Russia declared having a stock of 40,000 tons of 

weapons when it joined the Chemical Weapons Convention, but even that number was 

much lower than the Soviet Union’s stockpile.

95 Ibid., 34.
57

The Soviet Biological Weapons Program

96 Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), “Intelligence Memorandum: Sino-Soviet 

Border Talks: Problems and Prospects,” No. 2618/69, November 10, 1969, 8 (Secret).

97 CIA, “Intelligence Report: The Evolution of Soviet Policy in the Sino-Soviet 

Border Dispute,” No. ESAU XLV/70, April 28, 1970, 9 (Top Secret).

98 Ibid., 57.

99 Ibid. The newspaper Izvestiya was in effect the mouthpiece of the Soviet government.

100 Hines et al., Vol. II, 23.

101 Ibid., 154.

102 Nicholas Wade, “Russians Reserve Doubts: Is Fort Detrick Really De-tricked?” 

Science 177 (August 11, 1972), 500.

103 Vitaly Shlykov, “Fatal Mistakes of the U.S. and Soviet Intelligence: Part One,” 

International Affairs (Moscow) 42, nos. 5‒6 (1996), 159‒168.

104 Hines et al., Vol. I, xv.

105 Andrei A. Kokoshin, Soviet Strategic Thought, 1917‒1991 (Cambridge, MA: MIT 

Press, 1998).

106 United Nations Office of Disarmament Affairs, “Convention on the Prohibition of the Development, Production, and Stockpiling of Bacteriological (Biological) 

and Toxin Weapons and on their Destruction”; available at <http://disarmament.un.org/

treaties/t/bwc/text>.

107 Leitenberg and Zilinskas, 565.

108 Hines et al., Vol. II, 23.

109 Ibid., 138, 142.

110 Hines et al., Vol. I, 7.

111 Leitenberg and Zilinskas, 564‒571.

112 The 7th Directorate, and subsequently the 15th Directorate, were responsible for the 

offensive BW work carried out by the Soviet Union. The 15th Directorate was established 

in accordance with a June 25, 1973, decision of the CCCP (no. 444-138) and a Soviet 

Ministry of Defense decree of January 11, 1973 (no. 99).

113 Domaradskij and Orent, 131 and 134.

114 “New Technology and Biological Warfare. Testimony by Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Negotiations Policy Douglas J. Feith before the Subcommittee on 

Oversight and Evaluation of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, 

August 8, 1986,” Defense Issues 1, no. 60 (September 8, 1986), 1.

115 M.A. Milstein and L.S. Semejko, “U.S. Military R&D Through Soviet Eyes,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 33 (1977), 33‒38.

116 Ibid., 36.

117 Ibid., 38.
58 

CSWMD Occasional Paper 11

118 Carl A. Larson, “Ethnic Weapons,” Military Review 50, no. 11, November 1970, 

3‒11.

119 Mikhail Tsypkin, personal communication, September 2, 2014.

120 There was a basis for this claim. In a report to Congress, the Department of 

the Army wrote that substantial support had been provided to the pre-1969 U.S. BW 

program by non-DOD institutions. Specifically, “288 contracts were placed with 73 

educational institutions and 440 contracts were awarded to 181 industrial firms.” See Information for Members of Congress: U.S. Army Activities in the U.S. Biological Warfare (BW) 

Program (Washington, DC: Office of the Secretary of the Army, March 8, 1977).

121 Gus W. Weiss, “Duping the Soviets: The Farewell Dossier,” Center for the Study 

of Intelligence, available at <www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/

kent-csi/docs/v39i5a14p.htm>.

122 Hines et al., Vol. I, 7.

123 Ibid., 11.

124 Ibid., 49n224.

125 Ibid, 65‒66.

126 Hines et al., Vol. II, 33.

127 Leitenberg and Zilinskas, 301‒309.

128 Kokoshin, 126.

129 See Leitenberg and Zilinskas, 698‒710.

130 Ibid., 207.

131 Viktor Litovkin, “Yeltsin Bans Work on Bacteriological Weapons. This Means: 

Work Was Under Way, and We Were Deceived” [in Russian], Izvestiya, April 27, 1992.

132 Original article [in Russian] was reprinted by the following source: Vladimir Putin, “Being Strong: National Security Guarantees for Russia,” Rt.com, February 20, 2012, 

available at <http://rt.com/politics/official-word/strong-putin-military-russia-711/>.

133 “Prime Minister Vladimir Putin Holds a Meeting on the Tasks He Set in His Articles as a Presidential Candidate,” transcript, March 22, 2012, Archive of the Official Site 

of the 2008–2012 Prime Minister of the Russian Federation Vladimir Putin, available at 

<http://archive.premier.gov.ru/eng/events/news/18490>.

134 Putin fired Serdyukov on November 5, 2012, for alleged fraud and appointed 

Moscow Regional Governor Sergei Shoigu to replace him. Unless information is received 

to the contrary, the 28 tasks are assumed to be in force and guiding the Ministry of Defense’s future activities.

135 Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation, Encyclopedia: Weapons on New 

Physical Principles [in Russian], n.d., available at <http://encyclopedia.mil.ru/encyclopedia/dictionary/details.htm?id=13770@morfDictionary>.

136 David Hoffman, “Why Did They Do It?” Foreign Policy.com, June 18, 2012, available at <http://hoffman.forgeignpolicy.com/posts/2012/06/17/why_did-they-do_it>.
59

The Soviet Biological Weapons Program

137 Raymond A. Zilinskas, “Take Russia to ‘Task’ on Bioweapons Transparency,” 

Nature Medicine 8, no. 6 ( June 2012), 14.

138 Leitenberg and Zilinskas, 282‒322.

139 The material in this biography is abstracted from two sources: (1) a eulogy written 

by Sergei I. Prigoda and inserted in the book edited by Roza N. Lukina and Yevgeniy 

P. Lukin, The 50 Years of the Ministry of Defense’s Virology Center Deserves Recognition [in 

Russian] (Sergiev Posad: Ves’ Sergiev Posad, January 10, 2004), 28‒29; and (2) A.M. 

Shelepov, I.T. Leonov, and H. Veselov, Marshal of Military Medicine [in Russian] (Kirov: 

Kirov Military-Medical Academy, 2008).

140 Smirnov has described the work of the Medical Corps during World War II in 

an article he wrote in English; see Yefim Smirnov, “The Medical Corps in Red Army 

Operations: Its Tasks and Their Fulfillment,” British Medical Journal 1, no. S19 (February 

10, 1945), 4388‒4390.

141 The USSR had many secret institutes and agencies that commonly were called 

“post office box institutes” because their classified names were P.O. Box numbers. The 

codename for the 15th Directorate was Post Office Box A-1968.
60 

CSWMD Occasional Paper 11

About the Author

Dr. Raymond A. Zilinskas directs the Chemical and Biological Arms Nonproliferation Program at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at 

Monterey, where he is also a Research Professor at the Graduate School of International Policy and Management. He is also a consultant to the National Defense 

University in Washington, DC.

Previously, Dr. Zilinskas worked for 15 years as a clinical microbiologist in 

acute care hospitals in the Los Angeles area. However, he became interested in 

policies affecting science and technology and enrolled at the University of Southern California. His doctoral dissertation addressed policy issues generated by 

recombinant DNA research, including the applicability of genetic engineering 

techniques to biological weapons development. After graduating, he worked at the 

U.S. Office of Technology Assessment, the United Nations Industrial Development Organization, the University of Maryland Biotechnology Institute, and, as 

an Adjunct Associate Professor, the School of Hygiene and Public Health at The 

Johns Hopkins University.

In 1993, Dr. Zilinskas was appointed Foster Fellow at the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, which seconded him to the United Nations Special Commission, where he participated in two biological warfare inspections in 

Iraq encompassing 61 biological research and production facilities. In 1999, Dr. 

Zilinskas secured a position at the Monterey Institute of International Studies, 

where he concentrates on chemical and biological nonproliferation. In 2003, the 

U.S. Defense and Threat Reduction Agency appointed him as a consultant to 

manage research projects being undertaken in three Russian research institutes 

that once had been dedicated to biological weapons research and development. 

This provided a basis for a long-term study of the history of the Soviet biological warfare program, whose results can be found in the book The Soviet Biological 

Warfare Program: A History, published by Harvard University Press in 2012. He 

currently is conducting a study of the Putin administration’s views on biodefense 

and biosecurity.
Center for the Study of Weapons of Mass Destruction

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Countering Weapons of Mass Destruction: 

Looking Back, Looking Ahead 

Paul I. Bernstein, John P. Caves, Jr., and W. Seth Carus

October 2009

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please contact the Center directly at WMDWebmaster@ndu.edu or (202) 685-4234 or 

visit the Center’s Web site at http://wmdcenter.ndu.edu.