Mass panic, government lies, attempts to hush up the tragedy and 64 victims.
Seven years before the disaster at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, a large-scale emergency occurred in the USSR, which the authorities managed to hide from the public and foreign countries. On April 4, an anthrax epidemic broke out near Sverdlovsk (now Yekaterinburg). Dozens of local residents were admitted to hospitals with similar symptoms: fever below 40 ° C, weakness, nausea, coughing and chills.
For 2-3 days the condition of the patients deteriorated sharply. Primary symptoms developed into chest pain, bloody vomiting, difficulty breathing, and shock. The body was covered with cadaveric spots. The doctors did not understand what they were dealing with. Relatives refused to take the bodies of the dead. Panic began in the Chkalovsky district of Sverdlovsk.
What was happening quickly attracted the attention of the world community - the USSR was suspected of violating the Convention on the Prohibition of the Development and Production of Biological Weapons. Nevertheless, for a long time, the authorities successfully concealed the nature of the epidemic. Then "they developed a whole program to misinform public opinion in the country and the world," within the framework of which the official version was voiced: the outbreak of anthrax occurred due to the meat of infected cattle.
An outbreak of the disease, panic in the city, a commission from Moscow and the official version
On April 4, residents of the Chkalovsky district began to apply to hospital No. 24 of Sverdlovsk. All of them presented with the same symptoms, their condition deteriorated sharply. The medical institution did not have a hospital, so a hospital with a therapeutic building for 100 patients was not ready for a sharp influx. The newcomers were put on gurneys and couches in the corridors. Soon people had to be sent to a nearby hospital.
“Such an influx of patients turned out to be completely unexpected, and we therefore took some of them to the G20,” says Margarita Ilyenko, head physician of hospital No. 24 in 1979. Soon the head physician of the “twenty” Yakov Klipnitser called her: “Listen, Ilyenko, two of yours have died here … It looks like pneumonia.” After a while - another call: “I'm in a panic: three more have died! Toxic pneumonia.
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Sverdlovsk, Vtorchermet area, 1979.
The doctors did not understand what kind of disease they faced, since at the first stages it had signs of pneumonia, but too quickly it turned into a severe form. People died of pulmonary hemorrhage or cerebral haemorrhage, even while on artificial ventilation under the influence of an increased dose of drugs.
On April 5, three hospitals admitted symptomatic patients. Up to five people died daily. Doctors were still unable to unequivocally name the cause of death or diagnose living patients. The city was seized by panic: relatives refused to take the dead from an unknown infection.
On April 10, in hospital No. 40, doctors performed the first autopsy of the dead from the disease. They diagnosed anthrax. This conclusion was confirmed by the pathologist Faina Abramova at the regional sanitary and epidemiological station, sending the body and tissue samples there.
As soon as the diagnosis was confirmed, an emergency commission from Moscow headed by academician Pyotr Burgasov arrived in Sverdlovsk. Together with her, people in civilian clothes appeared in the city. Now all patients with anthrax were collected in the hospital No. 40, where they prepared 500 beds in the infectious diseases building.
From 10 to 13 April the commission examined livestock - sheep and cows. Under the leadership of Burgasov, the experts decided that the addition of meat and bone meal contaminated with anthrax spores led to a massive disease in livestock.
Sverdlovsk-19. The epicenter of the infection was behind five-story buildings.
At the same time, the press reported on anthrax. On television every two hours a message was broadcast about the ban on buying beef in the markets and from hand. The newspapers described the symptoms and warned of the dangers of eating meat. On the streets, posters with a picture of a cow and the text: "Anthrax!" Among the dead there were many alcoholics and smokers - people with clearly weakened immunity.
“I remember two engineers, reserve officers, who were training in those days in one of the military units located in Sverdlovsk. Both died for the same reason. People who had nothing to do with meat were dying. And we observed the path of infection not food, but airborne. The rarest case! Where did he come from? I don't know,”adds Kozak.
Pathologists were told to list "sepsis" as the cause of death. In the documents, anthrax was coded as "sepsis 002".
Death certificate of a soldier called up for training in Sverdlovsk.
On April 21, two weeks after the first death, vaccination of the population began. According to the journal Science, 59,000 people were subject to vaccination. 80% of them have received at least one anthrax vaccine. Rospotrebnadzor of the region reported about 200 thousand residents who were vaccinated.
At the same time, disinfection of the Chkalovsky district began. Chemical brigades watered the roofs with cannons, removed asphalt in some areas and the top layer of soil. Utilities washed houses and asphalt. Most of the work was carried out at the Keramik plant and in the military town of Sverdlovsk-19, where, as it turned out later, there was a leak of anthrax spores.
Not all participants in the liquidation of the consequences of the emergency knew that they were working in a place affected by disputes. Some of the military were summoned to the Sverdlovsk region for training, without informing in what conditions they would find themselves. Apartments where the infected used to live were treated with bleach. Relatives of the dead and survivors were given antibiotics.
On June 12, the last death was recorded in the area of the epidemic. According to official figures, the total death toll is 64 people. Researchers say the figure is up to 100 people. Local residents and doctors talk about a thousand deaths, including patients diagnosed with sepsis and pneumonia. Most of the deaths occur in early April, the rest during the second clean-up outbreak.
Scientists note that most of the victims of the epidemic are men. There are no children and far fewer women among the victims.
The Soviet scientific journal reported to the whole country about individual cases of anthrax disease in Sverdlovsk only a year later - in May 1980.
International resonance
The message about the epidemic in the Soviet media attracted the attention of the world community. American scientists Gene Gillman and Matthew Meselson sent a request to the USSR. They wanted to talk to doctors and find out if the Soviet Union was violating the convention on bacteriological weapons.
The CCCP refused the Americans until 1986. Only then was Matthew Meselson allowed to come to Moscow and talk to four specialists who worked in the epidemic area in Sverdlovsk. Among them was Olga Yampolskaya, who will play an important role in history after the collapse of the USSR.
The American delegation was satisfied with what they heard. According to the results of the trip, they said that the words of the Russians sound convincing, but additional epidemiological and pathological studies are needed. In 1988, two doctors from the USSR spoke at a conference in the United States, where they told the same story.
The anthrax emission was officially attributed to low-quality meat, both domestically and internationally. The KGB officers tried to clean up their tails as much as possible: they took from the survivors the signature on non-disclosure of state secrets, confiscated medical records, held conversations with doctors and relatives of the victims.
Until the collapse of the USSR, the state of emergency in the Sverdlovsk region was not considered a man-made disaster.
The reason was our military development
President Boris Yeltsin returned history to the international agenda. In 1992, in an interview with Komsomolskaya Pravda, he said that the special services were to blame for the epidemic. “The KGB nevertheless admitted that our military developments were the reason. Andropov called Ustinov and ordered to liquidate these industries completely. I thought they did it. It turns out that the laboratories were simply relocated to another area, and the development of this weapon continued, Yeltsin said.
For the head of state, the topic of the Sverdlovsk epidemic was painful. In 1979, he worked as the first secretary of the regional committee and actually headed the region. He received a report from Academician Burgasov, who attributed the epidemic to infected meat. Burgasov also voiced to Yeltsin the version of sabotage, since the strains of ulcers found in the corpses, found in Canada and South Africa. Allegedly, they wanted to spoil the image of the USSR on the eve of the 1980 Olympic Games.
Then Yeltsin agreed with the conclusions of the commission and claimed that he did not know about the existence of a military laboratory in the town of Sverdlovsk-19.
According to Yeltsin, he doubted the commission's conclusions only after a personal meeting with Yuri Andropov. After the collapse of the USSR, the president returned to the topic of the Sverdlovsk epidemic and instructed his advisers to sort out the issue.
Before the events of 1979, Academician Burgasov was engaged in the development of means of protection against biological weapons - just in the military town of Sverdlovsk-19. Until the end of his life, he denied the laboratory's involvement in the incident.
American scientists Meselson and Gillman, having learned about the change in mood in Russia, sent a second request, which this time they were satisfied. Experts from the United States came to Moscow, talked with doctors who defended the version of the contaminated meat, and then went to the Sverdlovsk region.
Gillman and Meselson published their findings in the journal Science. Along with them, the authors of the article indicate the biochemist Alexander Langmuir (Harvard), Ilona Popova (Ural State University), Alexis Shelokhov (Salk Institute, San Antonio) and Olga Yampolskaya (Botkin Hospital).
Gene Gillman.
Jean Gillman interviewed family members and survivors, asking them to describe the course of the disease and daily routine, remember the movement from home to work. As she listened to the answers to the questions, Gillman made notes on the map. All cases occurred in a narrow oval-shaped zone, which included the military town of Sverdlovsk-19.
Anthrax affected area.
Then the scientists pulled up the meteorological data for 1979. In addition, they got access to the conclusions of the pathologists, which were not seized by the KGB officers. Records indicated that the anthrax was not a skin type, but a pulmonary one. Thus, the pathogen was not transmitted through meat, but spread through the air. In 1995, on the basis of these conclusions, Greenberg defended his doctoral dissertation.
Refining the details, Meselson and Gillman took notes from the admission rooms of hospitals and contacted cemetery services. They got hold of the medical records of five survivors who were probably missed by the KGB. Scientists have made a tablet that lists 77 patients. It reflects age, gender, disease dynamics, and patient locations at the expected ejection time.
Patient census by Jean Gillman and Matthew Meselson.
Most of the patients lived in the southern part of the city. Relying on their movements, Gillman and Mesells outlined an oval four kilometers long - from the microbiological laboratory of Sverdlovsk-19 to the southern border of the city. Based on the wind map, scientists from the United States decided that the cause of the epidemic was the release of an aerosol with an ulcer. Gillman and Meselson pointed out the place of the alleged release of the biological laboratory in Sverdlovsk-19.
Scientists from the United States concluded that the leak was small - if we draw analogies, then about a quarter of a teaspoon got into the air.
Negligence and filter not included
In an article for the Ural magazine, Sergei Parfenov, an employee of the Ural branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences, said that after the collapse of the USSR, officers who served in Sverdlovsk-19 began to call him. So he learned that in the military town the vaccination took place urgently and earlier than in the Chkalovsky district.
Once Parfenov received a letter that began with the words "at one time I signed secret order No. 010, the term for nondisclosure of military secrets has already passed, so I decided to tell you something."
Academician Peter Burgasov (center).
The author of the letter claimed that with the participation of Academician Burgasov, a strain of anthrax was bred in the laboratory, the spores of which can persist for up to 200 years. One spore that got on the mucous membranes or germinated on the skin was fatal.
“And at that time there were large containers with ready-made compressed spores nearby. If the accident affected them, then in the direction of the ejection there would be “scorched earth”, all vertebrates would die,”Parfenov quotes the text of the letter, noting that he is not sure whether this letter can be believed.
The version of the accidental leak was confirmed to Parfenov by another interlocutor - the former head of the Special Department of the Ural Military District, Andrei Mironyuk. He said that the incident was due to the negligence of the maintenance staff.
If the wind blew towards the city center, the number of cases would be much higher.
Sverdlovsk-19 today
On the thirteenth anniversary of the tragedy, Boris Yeltsin signed a law to improve the provision of citizens in whose families people died from anthrax. Thus, Yeltsin equated the Sverdlovsk accident with the Chernobyl accident and, in fact, acknowledged the responsibility of military bacteriologists for the death of innocent people.
Even after the president's recognition, military doctors defended the version of contaminated meat. The Defense Ministry was sued - Raisa Smirnova, a survivor of the infection, demanded 6 million rubles from the military to reimburse the costs of treating the consequences of anthrax.
Every year she suffered from pneumonia, because after the ulcer the body was very weak. She was given the status of a disabled person of the second group. A woman's pension, together with disability benefits, is 9,000 rubles.
Report on Smirnova's claim against the Ministry of Defense:
“I got in touch with other people affected by the release,” says Raisa Smirnova in an interview with Komsomolskaya Pravda. - 700 people have already joined me. Until 1979, we were all healthy people. And now we can write medical reference books according to our case histories. If we are not given a supplement to our pension, then let them at least pay compensation for moral damage."
The pensioner lost the court. On the day of the decisive meeting, she did not come to the trial, and her claim was left without consideration. Since then, she has not been in touch with the press. Sergei Parfenov, who wrote an article in the magazine "Ural" and a book about the epidemic, and the pathologist Lev Grinberg also do not want to discuss the state of emergency in Sverdlovsk-19.
15th section of the cemetery. The victims of anthrax are buried here.
The biological defense center in Sverdlovsk-19, where they were engaged in the production of domestic biological weapons, was disbanded.