There is practically nothing to learn about the development of biological weapons in the USSR from official sources. Nevertheless, information about this exists. And looking through the closed archival materials of the Soviet years, you understand why it was hidden from the public.
Outlaw
In June 1925, the Geneva Convention on the Prohibition of the Use of Biological Weapons was adopted. But already two months later, in the USSR, under the Red Army, the Military Chemical Directorate was organized to create biological attack weapons. The seriousness of the enterprise is evidenced by the fact that many prominent Soviet doctors, chemists and biologists were invited to work there.
It is believed that attempts to use bacteriological weapons existed back in the Civil War. Then, allegedly, the Chekists in places of concentration of the White Guards spread pathogens of typhoid and typhus. According to this version, the commander of the Southern Army, General Nikolai Ivanov (who in March 1917 tried to organize a punitive campaign against Petrograd) became one of the victims of infection.
Soviet bacteriologists did not receive the results immediately. According to the scientist-chemist Lev Fedorov, the author of the book "Soviet biological weapons: history, ecology, politics", only by 1940 the USSR was able to create a real biological weapon. Its effectiveness, according to the writer, has been proven by numerous tests on animals, as well as people - prisoners in prisons and camps.
A solid approach
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The development of biological weapons as a response to imperialist aggression began in 1926. The Soviet authorities were convinced that the West intended to use bacteria as a military weapon against the young socialist state.
In the Moscow laboratory of Ginsburg, experiments began to increase the damaging capabilities of anthrax bacteria. At the same time, in Perkhushkovo near Moscow, they were engaged in issues of protection against biological attacks. Similar secret institutions appeared in Leningrad, Sverdlovsk, Suzdal, Stepnogorsk. We were going to organize a biochemical laboratory even on Lake Baikal, but changed their minds.
In the early 1930s, an institute was opened on Gorodomlya Island (Seliger), officially engaged in obtaining a vaccine against foot and mouth disease. But soon his staff switched to the development of biological weapons. It was decided to move the Institute away from the eyes - to the island of Vozrozhdenie lost in the Aral Sea.
On a grand scale
Nowhere is it reported about purposeful experiments on people in the process of creating biological weapons, although researchers in the archives of the Military Chemical Directorate found a record from which it is clear that there were no fundamental objections to this. Either way, there were victims of unsuccessful laboratory tests. Possibly random.
On January 4, 1934, the head of the Military Chemical Directorate, Fishman, reported to Kliment Voroshilov that a weapon codenamed "substance 49" based on anthrax was ready and could be used by the army. And a few days before that laboratory assistant Lomova, an employee of the department where "substance 49" was developed, died as a result of poisoning.
Lev Fedorov claims that the tests of new types of bacteriological weapons in the USSR were of a large-scale nature, in particular, the aviation and the navy were involved in them. According to the scientist, containers filled with tularemia, plague, cholera bacteria were dropped from aircraft - this is how the Red Army was preparing for biological war, as reported by the People's Commissar of Defense Kliment Voroshilov on February 22, 1938.
Let's hit with bacteria
According to researchers, for the first time the USSR used biological weapons at Stalingrad, on the eve of the Soviet counteroffensive. However, the experience was unsuccessful. The victims of the bacteriological attack were not so much Wehrmacht soldiers as rodents, who began to en masse to run across to the location of the Soviet troops.
“The ten days leading up to the counteroffensive proved to be dramatic for the 16th Air Army. In the first half of November, we were warned about the invasion of mice. In addition, the rodents were sick with tularemia. The most unlucky thing was the army headquarters. Penetrating into houses, mice contaminated food and water, people got sick,”recalled the future Air Marshal Sergei Rudenko.
Accidental victims
After the war, the creation of biological weapons in the USSR continued. The experiments were carried out in a closed area on Vozrozhdenie Island, called Aralsk-7. Here, as before, "promising battle strains" - from anthrax to bubonic plague - were sprayed from planes.
Mostly monkeys were used as experimental subjects, since their respiratory system is similar to that of humans. Alas, not without human casualties. In 1971, a sudden gust of wind brought an infected cloud into the Aral Sea, killing about 50 people on the research vessel from the virus.
In the spring of 1979 a tragedy befell Sverdlovsk. At that time the secret bacteriological laboratory No. 19 was located there. As it was established, due to the accidental spores of the causative agent of some disease, 64 people died, according to unofficial data, over 500. Then everything was blamed on the CIA.
Locked topic
After the collapse of the USSR, all development of biological weapons in our country was curtailed, and secret laboratories were closed, in particular, all the employees of Aralsk-7 were taken out of the danger zone, they were transferred to other work. In 1997, the American military was allowed in here to convince the US authorities that the laboratory no longer exists, and that the burial grounds, teeming with dangerous pathogens, were safely mothballed.
According to official data, today Russia does not possess bacteriological weapons. In 1992, B. Yeltsin issued a decree according to which the creation and implementation of biological weapons programs are prohibited in our country.
Taras Repin