Abstract
This chapter notes that this is the first academic study to be completed which focuses solely on the Soviet agency Biopreparat. It points to the global significance of the biological warfare programme which it pursued, employing 30–40,000 personnel and incorporating five major military-focused research institutes, numerous design and pilot facilities and five dual-use production plants. Under extraordinary levels of secrecy, the Soviet Union was able to keep Biopreparat effectively concealed within the USSR’s civil microbiological industry and to circumvent its obligations under the 1972 Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention (BTWC). The study draws on an array of newly available sources including Soviet documents held in the Russian archives, business correspondence and recently released Russian memoirs.
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Notes
- 1.
In August 1958, Khrushchev also launched an offensive agricultural BW programme embracing six institutes and placed it under the control of a secret department within the USSR Ministry of Agriculture. See Rimmington, The Soviet Union’s Agricultural Biowarfare Programme: Ploughshares to Swords, Palgrave Macmillan, 2021.
- 2.
The achievements of the Biopreparat programme with regard to the weaponization of bacterial and viral pathogens is fully documented in Leitenberg, M., Zilinskas, R.A., with Kuhn, J.H., The Soviet Biological Weapons Programme: A History, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2012.
- 3.
Rimmington, A., Stalin’s Secret Weapon: The Origins of Soviet Biological Warfare, Hurst & Company, London, 2018, p. 23.
- 4.
Raskryty smerty uchenykh-virusologov v tsentre “Vektor”, Angarskii Portal Novostei, 19 February 2020, https://xn%2D%2D38-6kcaak9aj5chl4a3g.xn%2D%2Dp1ai/raskryty-smerti-uchenyh-virusologov-v-centre-vektor/.
- 5.
Hoffman, D.E., The Dead Hand: The Untold Story of the Cold War Arms Race and Its Dangerous Legacy, Doubleday, London, 2009, p. 332.
- 6.
Vacroux, A., Regulation and Corruption in Transition: The Case of the Russian Pharmaceutical Markets, pp. 133–151 in Kornai, J., Rose-Ackerman, S., Building a Trustworthy State in Post-Socialist Transition, Palgrave Macmillan, New York, 2004.
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Rimmington, A. (2021). Introduction. In: The Soviet Union’s Invisible Weapons of Mass Destruction. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-82882-0_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-82882-0_1
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