One of the Soviets’ most successful biological warfare programs, Ken Alibek explains (in Biohazard), was created by the Ministry of Agriculture:
A special division was established to research and manufacture anti-livestock and anti-crop weapons. The division was given the uninspired title of Main Directorate for Scientific and Production Enterprises. The biowarfare program was code-named “Ecology.”
Scientists at the agriculture ministry developed variants of foot-and-mouth disease and rinderpest for use against cows, African swine fever for pigs, and ornithosis and psittacosis to strike down chickens. Like anti-personnel biological weapons, these agents were designed to be sprayed from tanks attached to Ilyushin bombers and flown low over a target area along a straight line for hundreds of miles.
This “line source” method of dissemination could cover large stretches of farmland. Even if only a few animals were successfully infected, the contagious nature of the organisms ensured that the disease would wipe out agricultural activity over a wide area in a matter of months.
Many of the ministry’s facilities were installed in the centers of towns and cities, to keep their military connection camouflaged. This suggests how little those who ruled our lives worried about our health.
Across the street from the apartment block where I grew up in Alma-Ata (now Almaty), the former capital of the Soviet Socialist Republic of Kazakhstan, a large, rusting factory served as a makeshift playground for children in the neighborhood. It was a fantastic world of hulking machinery and cavernous tunnels, made all the more alluring by the large Keep Out signs posted conspicuously on the property. We would crawl through the fence on afternoons after school and, shifting through piles of metal, would occasionally stumble on odd-smelling canisters, painted in army green. Luckily, we never managed to open them.
Many years later, going through some old reports, I discovered that the factory was used by the Ministry of Agriculture until the early 1960s to make anti-crop and anti-livestock agents. It was called Biokombinat.