Soviet biological weapons program

The Soviet Union began a biological weapons program in the 1920s. During World War II, Joseph Stalin was forced to move his biological warfare (BW) operations out of the path of advancing German forces and may have used tularemia against German troops in 1942 near Stalingrad.

By 1960, numerous BW research facilities existed throughout the Soviet Union. Although the USSR also signed the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention (BWC), the Soviets subsequently augmented their biowarfare programs. Over the course of its history, the Soviet program is known to have weaponized and stockpiled the following eleven bio-agents (and to have pursued basic research on many more):

These programs became immense and were conducted at 52 clandestine sites employing over 50,000 people. Annualized production capacity for weaponized smallpox, for example, was 90 to 100 tons. In the 1980s and 1990s, many of these agents were genetically altered to resist heat, cold, and antibiotics. In the 1990s, Boris Yeltsin admitted to an offensive bio-weapons program as well as to the true nature of the Sverdlovsk biological weapons accident of 1979, which had resulted in the deaths of at least 64 people. Defecting Soviet bioweaponeers such as Colonel Kanatjan Alibekov confirmed that the program had been massive and still existed. An agreement was signed with the US and UK promising to end bio-weapons programs and convert BW facilities to benevolent purposes, but compliance with the agreement — and the fate of the former Soviet bio-agents and facilities — is still mostly undocumented.

The Soviet BW program began in the 1920s at the Leningrad Military Academy under the control of the state security apparatus, known as the GPU. This occurred despite the fact that the USSR was a signatory to the , which banned both chemical and biological weapons.

1928 - Revolutionary Military Council signed a decree about weaponization of typhus. The Leningrad Military academy began cultivating typhus in chicken embryos. Human experimentation occurred with typhus, glanders and melioidosis in the Solovetsky camp. A laboratory on vaccine and serum research was also established near Moscow in 1928, within the Military Chemical Agency. This laboratory was turned into the Red Army's Scientific Research Institute of Microbiology in 1933.

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