The Soviet Biological Weapons Program
throughout its existence the Soviet Union secretly built the largest most sophisticated biological weapons program ever known to be created its complete decommissioning was never confirmed in this video let us take a look back at the Soviet biological weapons program largely two events influence the founding of the Soviet biological weapons program the first was World War One in 1915 the Germans gave microbial cultures including Anthrax and glanders a horse disease to various secret agents those agents were sent to infect sheep horses and mules in five countries including the then neutral United States the results of these secret sabotage campaigns are uncertain there's no hard evidence that the Germans ever attempted to spread disease amongst humans regardless rumors and confirmed facts swirling around these programs were a compelling motivation for the Soviets to start their own such programs the second influence was a devastating outbreak of epidemic typhus that claimed two to three million lives from 1918 to 1922. typhus is transmitted through infected body lice it engulfed the whole country during the Russian Civil War spreading out of the Cities into the rural areas typhus took as many soldiers as did the actual fighting hitting both sides with devastating effect the typhus epidemic was obviously tragic Lenin called it a desperate crisis and cursed its existence but its virulence also apparently impressed Red Army commanders at some point they began studying its potential usefulness as a weapon let's start off with a note the Soviet Union was Infamous for its redundant and duplicative structures this was due to exaggerated secretiveness a desire to hoard resources and build internal Empires as well as Fierce bureaucratic rivalries for instance one of my favorite bits that didn't make it into my video about the Soviet computer industry was that the Soviet Academy of Sciences Department of informatics computer technology and automation had 12 sub-institutes four out of those 12 sub-institutes existed for the sole purpose of copying and edging out rivals in the ministries of radio industry electronic industry Electro technical industry and Communications equipment industry the early days of the Soviet biological weapons program are no different with multiple lineages working in parallel some more well documented than others I'm going to do my best to keep the main line straight for you after the war the Soviets set up three programs to study biological weapons let us discuss the oldest the military chemical agency in 1925 the Red Army set up the military chemical agency its director was Yakov M Fishman a hardened Soviet communist with more political fervor than technical skill as the name indicates the agency's job was to develop and integrate chemical weapons into the Red Army biological weapons were considered part of that a year after that Fishman sets up a small bacterial lab to grow study and weaponize Anthrax this place was somewhat ironically named the scientific Research Institute of Health progress reports detail experiments in which the lab infected rabbits cats and a horse with an extremely virulent form of Anthrax animals exposed to a haze of the bacteria for longer than two to three minutes passed away within 24 hours they filled artillery shells and air bombs with Anthrax and fired them they concluded that this can be a viable way to spread the disease because Anthrax spores are very Hardy and the explosions created aerosols that people can breathe in they also combine biological weapons with chemical ones animal experiments discovered that mixing Anthrax with mustard gas allowed the former to penetrate the skin in 1928 Fishman submits a four-part progress report to his boss Clement voro shulov Clement served as the people's commissar for military and Naval Affairs the central body for military command and control for the Soviet Armed Forces this 1928 report is the first hard evidence of the Soviet Union's real interest and progress in biological weapons in it Fishman describes their experiments concluding that Anthrax can be a compelling weapon for Warfare while botulinum can be used for sabotage he requested more staff as well as land and financial resources for expansion fearful of the country's military defense capacity and looking to modernize the Revolutionary military Council issued a secret decree formally initiating a program under Fisherman's leadership the small six-person scientific research institute of health is later expanded reorganized and renamed to the ninth Department we should pause here to briefly discuss modern biological weapons in order to Be an Effective Warfare agent the weapon needs two things at scale a biological agent and a system to disseminate it preferably the agent must spread via aerosol it has to be extremely virulent disabling or killing its victims with few treatment options it should have a short and predictable incubation period we also need to be able to produce it at scale and have available a way to protect our own people from it even for an organization with considerable resources getting these is hard the most notable illustration of this is Japan's aom shinriko cult in 1990 they looked at botulinum toxin and Anthrax to fulfill their Twisted apocalyptic Vision however they encounter considerable technical challenges for instance Anthrax has many cousins which look similar but are harmless the bacteria then also needs to be transformed into a Spore which requires it to be subjected to stress in a certain way finding the right Anthrax and producing its spores at scale requires a great deal of experience and skill furthermore the dissemination even if you manage to produce a lot of Anthrax spores you need to deliver them in dry particles about one to five microns wide too small and they don't stick in the lungs too big and they get filtered out by the body this in particular is a major technical challenge weather conditions also challenge dissemination exposure to sunlight and air destroys botulinum toxin at a rapid pace which is partly why modern biological weapons programs don't use it Anthrax spores are quite Hardy but windy conditions break apart the aforementioned aerosol Spore particles disintegrating them and the Spore reacts to light so if you try to disperse Anthrax during the day the Spore Cloud Rises into the atmosphere and becomes harmless these are major hurdles so despite hundreds of millions of dollars a sophisticated network of front companies and reasonably talented people the program failed and so the cult turned to using the chemical weapon sarin it has been said that biological weapons are the poor man's weapon of mass destruction this is nowhere near the truth effective biological weapons programs have to be developed over many stages and require infrastructure know-how security technical sophistication and great political will this is why significant biological weapons programs tend only to be pursued by nation states if you recall I mentioned that there were three significant initiatives during the early years of the Soviet biological weapons program the military chemical agency was the first now let us bring the other two in the second laboratory was the vaccine serum lab established in 1930 within the Red Army located in the town of laska 30 miles west of Moscow we know little about this lab most of their work apparently involved genuine research for vaccines and other treatments but the staff was also known to have researched new strains of tularemia or rabbit fever finally we have our third laboratory in July 1931 the ogpu the Soviet Secret Police which preceded the more Infamous nkvd seized a waldorf former Monastery Church in the town of suzdal about 130 miles Northeast of Moscow the following year in 1932 they set up the special purpose Bureau which studied plague tetanus malaria and aerosolized cholera it was staffed with political prisoners from research institutes from the old Russian Empire like the Moscow Institute of epidemiology and microbiology a 1992 Russian newspaper article has an interview with an elderly lady who claims to have worked there as a lab assistant she said that the convents Gates were wrapped in thick felt and soaked in Lysol disinfectant rats guinea pigs sheep and camels were kept on the grounds for testing they also experimented on people the former lab assistant describes times when she was ordered to sprinkle cholera bacteria onto a political prisoner's breakfast and lunch if the quote unquote rabbit survived they were sent to a camp for further study another incident describes one of the scientists deliberately infecting himself with tetanus he died horribly after which his body was experimented on by his cohorts disgruntled with their work in the ninth Department various lab members wrote memos appealing for new leadership Stalin reads them in April 1934 he calls a high-level meeting for an update members from both the vaccine serum lab and the ninth Department are called to give a short 15-minute presentation to Stalin and the politburo the former talked about inoculating horses with botulinum the latter presented their work in anthrax Stalin and his cohorts grilled the two for six hours at the end of the meeting Stalin concludes it is clear that all institutes working on the problems a bacteriological war must be combined into a single powerful Institute all of the country's biological warfare facilities are placed under the purview of the Red Army and its military chemical agency by now named the ninth Department shortly thereafter the vaccine serum lab and the ogpu's special purpose Bureau are combined together to create what is later named The kirov Institute despite widespread political purges and executions due to the great Terror the program expanded in secret throughout the 1930s on the eve of World War II its size would be rivaled only by Japan's Infamous Unit 731 with one possible exception there is not much evidence that the Soviets deployed biological weapons against the Germans both Germany and the Soviets had earlier acceded to the Geneva protocol which constrained their use furthermore the larger Soviet biological warfare programs were disrupted by their evacuation in the face of the German invasion the program's most notable recorded achievements were on the defensive side producing vaccines for Anthrax plague and the like most prominently the independent synthesis and industrial production of the antibiotic penicillin at the time considered a state secret in the West for whatever reason Hitler himself prohibited biological weapons throughout the conflict the Nazi leadership would discuss and revisit it but he largely stuck to this prohibition I do want to note though that this did not preclude the Nazis from taking advantage of natural disease outbreaks in some cases they even encouraged them so to serve as diversions during the later retreat Soviet partisans for their part did try to trigger individual outbreaks of their own accord one partisan delivered typhus carrying lice to A POW Camp infecting 28 of the 51 guards there eight succumbed to the disease not sure what happened to the pows the aforementioned possible exception involves a claim by Soviet defectors that the Soviets used biological warfare to trigger an outbreak of rabid fever amidst the German troops as they March towards Stalingrad in the fall of 1942. this accusation is disputed the Germans for their part noted that there had already been an ongoing outbreak of Rapid fever within the civilian populace at the time on the whole we can make the Nuance claim that the Germans and the Soviets did not widely deploy biological weapons against each other the same can't be said about the Japanese Unit 731 and its counterpart unit 100 remain a deplorable stain its details which include human experimentation are beyond the scope of this video but I recommend you look into it after the war ended the Soviets captured various scientists from units 100 and 731 they were sentenced but strangely and quickly released within four to seven years the most likely reason for such and there is testimony in support of it is that the Japanese bioweapons scientists shared their learnings so the Soviets in exchange for a more lenient sentence it is said that their findings influence the Soviets later extensive work with anthrax after Stalin's death the program's leadership passed to the secret police chief leventry Beria after barriers arrest it is settled into the hands of the powerful Colonel General FM Ivanovich Smirnoff a passionate believer in the power of biological weapons through the 1960s the program built up its capacity spurred on by fears of falling behind in the biological weapons race the United States and its Western allies ran sophisticated offensive biological weapons programs of Their Own by 1969 the U.S had seven bioagents targeting different aspects of their enemies this includes Anthrax and Rapid fever for infecting personnel and fungi for infecting crops but in 1969 after several embarrassing public incidents including one that resulted in the deaths of 6 000 sheep president Richard Nixon reviewed and unilaterally renounced the American offensive biological and toxin weapons programs this paved the way for the 1972 biological and toxin weapons convention which banned the development and production of such weapons both the U.S and the Soviet Union signed it end of the story right wrong over in the west the 1970s heralded a new age of recombinant DNA and genetic engineering in 1971 the U.S Congress granted 10 million dollars to support genetic science and Advance the future of molecular biology on this front the Soviet Union was hopelessly behind Stalin's great Terror specifically targeted party scientists with foreign experiences lysengoism in particular held back the country's genetic and biological progress for many years The prominent scientist Yuri of chinikov member of the USSR Academy of Sciences became alarmed by this massive and widening Gap he and his peers sought ways to reverse it they reached out to the aforementioned Colonel General Smirnoff who saw an opportunity to reboot the Soviet biological weapons program Smirnoff lobbied senior decision makers in the party telling them that the 1969 American renunciation was a hoax and that in reality the Americans were using these new genetic engineering techniques to create a new generation of biological weapons and if the Americans are doing it the Soviets should too thusly from 1971 to 1974 the public Bureau created a new quote-unquote civilian Organization for acquiring modern biological weapons its secret work would be concealed behind legitimate r d in biotechnology ultimately LED and controlled by the ministry of defense this organization would come to be known as the biopreparate meaning biological preparation the biopreparate represents a new stage in the biological arms race natural strains of Anthrax plague and such are certainly dangerous but so far as weapons of war go they generally fall short of military expectations previously however the only way to enhance these strains favorable traits was to use traditional inefficient methods like mutation and natural selection kind of like breeding for a vegetable trait genetic engineering makes it possible to recombine various pathogens to produce mutant microbes more befitting of a military weapon in other words genetically modified foods but for terrifying pathogens the program was sprawling with special focus on modifying traditional agents like Anthrax smallpox and Legionella to make them resistant to vaccines and antibiotics one example was coding the rabbit fever bacteria in a special protein to protect it from being ingested by human white blood cells physical and genetic engineering methods were both researched the latter with uncertain results as is required the program also developed new methods to produce disseminate and defend against these powerful agents as they were weaponizing rabbit fever they were also developing new vaccines against it at the same time the program also tackled a wide variety of exotic viruses like Lassa fever machupo virus and the Philo viruses major r d went into the weaponization and production of Marburg and Ebola virus with some successes accidents were not unknown in 1979 there was an Anthrax Spore release incident at a military Research Institute in the city of due to a faulty air handling system it supposedly resulted in the deaths of 66 people though records here are sparse and in April 1988 a virologist named Nikolai eustanov was accidentally infected with Marburg virus while injecting a guinea pig he received treatment but eventually died similar infections have also occurred at its height the biopreparate employed 50 000 civilian and Military researchers in 52 locations across the Soviet Union because this was all illegal civilian scientists and technicians could not know the ultimate purpose of their research to keep them in the dark the Soviet government created a set of elaborate plausible cover stories called Legends there were levels of Legends told to those with higher security clearances almost all of them were completely fabricated with the intention to deceive even so Colonel General Smirnoff had objected to Bringing civilians into the fold true the most talented and knowledgeable workers were civilians but the civilians were also more likely to defect with what they knew Smirnoff turned out to be right in the late 1980s and early 1990s several civilian scientists affected to the West with accounts of what they worked on this includes Dr Ken alabeck in 1992 and Vladimir posechnik in 1989. thanks to
their testimonies we have a decent idea of what went on in the biopreparate by contrast the biopreparate worked in parallel with the military's biological weapons program called the 15th directorate there have not been any defectors from this program and we know very little about it despite these defectors the Soviet Union's highest authorities continued denying the program's existence and resisted pressures to close it down Gorbachev knew the program existed but repeatedly lied to then U.S President Bush and UK prime minister Thatcher about it in the early 1990s the Soviet Union fell into financial insolvency and eventual dissolution the biopreparate lost the majority of its funding its facilities fell into disrepair and its scientists started leaving for better pastures abroad this brain drain has alarmed authorities finally in 1992 the U.S forced then Russian president Boris Yeltsin to admit the program's existence Yeltsin attempted to close the program down but was undermined by the ministry of Defense facilities in post-soviet countries including a significant one at a former Island on what was the ROC in Kazakhstan were eventually disassembled with external help and financial aid Russia has since recanted yeltsin's admission and retains the official position that there was never an offensive biological weapons program thus many questions remain and there is a lot that we don't know about what currently still exists inside Russia all right everyone that's it for tonight thanks for watching subscribe to the Channel Sign up for the newsletter and I'll see you guys next time
2022-12-29 16:08
