Biopreparat, the secret Soviet bioweapons program

Biopreparat was set up in 1973 to 1974 as a civilian agency for making vaccines and medicines, but its main purpose was secret: to develop and mass-produce biological weapons. The Soviet Union had signed the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention, which banned such weapons, and Biopreparat let the program continue under civilian cover alongside military labs. At its height it employed tens of thousands of people at dozens of sites, including the Vector virology center in Siberia and a large anthrax plant at Stepnogorsk in Kazakhstan. Scientists worked on weaponized anthrax, plague, smallpox and other agents, including strains engineered to resist antibiotics.¹²

Western governments had suspicions, sharpened by the 1979 anthrax outbreak at Sverdlovsk, but the scale became clear only when insiders defected. Vladimir Pasechnik, a Biopreparat institute director, fled to Britain in 1989, and Kanatzhan Alibekov, known in the West as Ken Alibek, the program's deputy chief, defected to the United States in 1992. That year Russian president Boris Yeltsin acknowledged the program and ordered it ended. How completely it was dismantled, and what became of its stocks and scientists, is still debated.¹²³