Red and White armies clashed from Siberia to the Crimean Peninsula, and by the time hostilities ended in 1921, as many as ten million people had lost their lives. The majority of the deaths did not result from injuries on the battlefield. They were caused by famine and disease.
The casualties inflicted by a brutal epidemic of typhus from 1918 to 1921 made a deep impression on the commanders of the Red Army.
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In 1928, the governing Revolutionary Military Council signed a secret decree ordering the transformation of typhus into a battlefield weapon. Three years earlier the fledgling Soviet government had signed an international treaty in Geneva banning the use of poison gas and bacteriological weapons. The weapons program was placed under the control of the GPU (the State Political Directorate), one of the predecessors of the KGB. It would continue to be supervised by state security organs until the early 1950s.
The 1928 decree represented a momentous decision. Bred in the unsanitary conditions of the battlefront or the slum, epidemic typhus has ravaged mankind for centuries. It is carried by lice from one infected person to another and cannot reproduce outside its host. Unlike typhoid fever, which is caused by salmonella bacteria, typhus is a rickettsial disease, carried by tiny rod-shaped microorganisms.
Once inside the body, the rickettsiae swarm through the blood, breaking down the cell walls of blood vessels as they multiply. Around seven to ten days after infection, victims will abruptly develop the first symptoms, beginning with throbbing headaches and a high fever. The stricken tissues become inflamed as they try to fight off the invaders, triggering a rash that spreads over the body. Spots of gangrene will sometimes appear on fingertips and other extremities as blood circulation slows down. Without treatment, the disease will send its victims into weeks of delirium and is fatal in 40 percent of cases.
Improvements in hygiene eradicated epidemic typhus from most of western Europe in the twentieth century, but it continues to afflict Africa, parts of South America, and Asia. A typhus vaccine was developed during World War II, though it is rarely used today, other than to immunize travelers to regions where the disease remains endemic. Administered in three separate doses over the course of five months, it provides almost complete protection from the disease. It was at one time also used for treatment, but it has been replaced in that capacity by antibiotics.
When the Soviet Union first turned to typhus, there was no known way to control or contain this relentlessly efficient killer. The question facing our scientists was how to harness that efficiency.
Infecting lice with typhus and spreading them among a target population was not practical. Eventually someone hit on the idea of breeding typhus in the labs and spraying it in an aerosol form from airplanes.
Early biological weapons work involved primitive methods. The pathogens were bred in chicken embryos or in live animals such as rats that were killed when the concentration of pathogens was highest and were liquefied in large blenders. The liquid was then poured into explosives.
I learned about the 1928 decree and the early typhus experiments from a set of old reports at the Ministry of Defense. Summaries of experiments and testing, they were purposefully short on detail. No one wanted to commit the full information to paper.
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The first attempts to cultivate typhus in the lab employed chicken embryos. Thousands of chicken eggs were sent each week to the Leningrad Military Academy—at a time when most Soviet citizens were lucky to get one full meal a day. By the 1930s, the Leningrad Academy had produced powdered and liquid versions of typhus, for use in a primitive aerosol.
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The Leningrad Military Academy sent some of its scientists and equipment one hundred miles north to the White Sea, a barren Arctic expanse flecked with tiny islands used to house political prisoners. By the mid-1930s Solovetsky Island, one of the largest, was the second major site of the Soviet biological warfare program.
At Solovetsky, a Soviet prison which later became the hub of Stalin’s “Gulag Archipelago” concentration-camp system, scientists worked with typhus, Q fever, glanders, and melioidosis (an incapacitating disease similar to glanders). Solovetsky’s large laboratory compound was built by prison labor. Many of the prisoners may also have been involuntary participants in our earliest experiments with biological agents.
The summary reports compiled by the Ministry of Defense describe several dozen cases of melioidosis from that period. The material I saw was intentionally vague as to whether humans were involved, but the way the case reports were arranged—with nineteen in one group, eleven in another, and twelve in yet another—suggested an irregular pattern not usually associated with animal testing. And the symptoms described could only have been experienced by human subjects. There have been repeated allegations in the West about Soviet germ warfare experiments on humans, but I have seen no other reports to indicate that these took place after the 1930s.
The research exacted a grim toll on our scientists. One account of a test with plague in the late 1930s ended with a cryptic note: “This experiment was not finished due to the death of the researcher.” Another from the same period reported that twenty workers had been infected with glanders during experiments. The report didn’t say where these experiments took place, or whether the workers had died, but in the days before antibiotics, death on exposure was virtually certain.
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The lieutenant colonel who told me about the tularemia production line at Kirov also suggested that an outbreak of Q fever among German troops on leave in Crimea in 1943 was the result of an attempt to use another one of the biological warfare agents developed by his facility. I was never able to investigate this further, but Q fever was practically unheard of in Russia prior to that outbreak.
