Gorbachev came into office in March 1986, Ken Alibek explains (in Biohazard), determined to break up the corrupt bureaucratic fiefdoms of the Brezhnev era and to create a stronger, more cohesive government:
He was the reformer my generation had been waiting for. Nearly everyone under forty at Biopreparat considered him our best hope.
[…]
The Five-Year Plan, signed in his characteristic scrawl by Mikhail Gorbachev, outlined the most ambitious program for biological weapons development ever given to our agency. It included a three-hundred-million-ruble viral production plant (then equivalent to four hundred million dollars) at Yoshkar-Ola in the autonomous republic of Mordovia. The plan established a new military facility at Strizhi, near Kirov, for the production of viral and bacterial weapons and, most significantly, it funded the construction of a 630-liter viral reactor to produce smallpox at the Russian State Research Center of Virology and Biotechnology, a facility known within The System as Vector.
[…]
Vector’s prize acquisition was the expensive new viral reactor authorized by Gorbachev’s decree. Designed by one of our Moscow institutes and assembled at a special Biopreparat plant in western Russia, it was the first of its kind in the world. It stood about five feet high and was enclosed within thick stainless steel walls. An agitator at the bottom kept the mixture inside churning like clothes in a washing machine. Pipes led out in several directions, both for waste matter and weapons-ready material. A window on its convex roof allowed scientists to observe the viral culture at all times.
[…]
Considering that outsiders might be suspicious if they saw hundreds of people with the distinctive marks of fresh smallpox inoculations on their arms years after the Soviet Union had discontinued all immunization, we decided, after some deliberation, to issue a directive that workers be inoculated on their buttocks. We assumed this part of their anatomy was safe from prying foreign eyes.
[…]
In December 1990, we tested a new smallpox weapon in aerosol form inside Vector’s explosive chambers. It performed well. We calculated that the production line in the newly constructed Building 15 at Koltsovo was capable of manufacturing between eighty and one hundred tons of smallpox a year. Parallel to this, a group of arrogant young scientists at Vector were developing genetically altered strains of smallpox, which we soon hoped to include in this production process.