By Eliana Zhang
“No nation would be so stupid as to locate a biological warfare facility within an approachable distance from a major population center.”
--U.S. clinical microbiologist Raymond Zilinskas in a 1980 report on the Sverdlovsk accident
In November 1979, just months after deaths started to occur, the story went public: as many as one thousand people had died from a deadly bacteria accidentally released from a military facility in the city of Sverdlovsk. If true, it was definitive proof that the USSR violated the Biological Weapons Convention (BWC) treaty, a biological warfare ban established in 1972. Moscow strongly denied these accusations, claiming that Sverdlovsk merely experienced a natural outbreak of anthrax, but investigations decades later left no doubt that the accusations were truthful. Later referred to as the “Sverdlovsk anthrax leak”, this incident came to be known as one of the worst bioweapon disasters on record-- and because of a massive cover-up that extended well into the 90s, the world nearly never knew about it.
1. The Soviet biological weapons program (or, how a biological warfare facility found itself active in the heart of a major population center in the first place)
In spite of having signed the BWC, the USSR was far from shutting down its bioweapon research facilities. Harboring suspicions that the United States was also breaching the treaty, Soviet leaders from Leonid Brezhnev to Mikhail Gorbachev personally authorized the augmentation of what eventually became the world's largest and most sophisticated biological weapons program.
The program’s main directorate, “Biopreparat,'' operated under the guise of civil biotechnology research. This allowed it to circumvent military restrictions on obtaining biological research and production equipment. Employing more than 50,000 people in its prime, Biopreparat expanded to cover over 40 facilities across the country. Alarmingly, many factories were located adjacent to or inside cities to disguise their true nature from Western Allied intelligence. Sure enough, Western officials doubted that such a factory was being used for bioweaponry, believing that no nation would jeopardize their citizens in such a nature.
The Soviet Union did, however, jeopardize its citizens in such a nature. With the constant production and stockpiling of biowarfare agents like anthrax bacilli and smallpox virus, accidents were bound to happen. For instance, it is now suspected that a bioweapons research center on a small island in the Aral sea was to blame for smallpox, plague, and glanders outbreaks near the city of Aralsk in the 70s. Despite their questionable circumstances, the Western world was hardly wary about it. Suspicions only arose when an accident at Sverdlovsk sparked Russian political exiles in Germany to publicly accuse the USSR of concealing a bioweapons production factory in the city. It may have sounded like just another eccentric conspiracy theory at the time, but Western government officials took it seriously. They were right to do so.
2. Bacillus anthracis (and the events of a particular 1979 weekend)
First, here is what happens to victims of anthrax.
The disease takes one to five days to incubate in the human body. The true nature of it will not be clear even after the first symptoms show up; although fatigue, joint pain, nasal stuffiness, and a dry cough accompany Bacillus anthracis, the causative agent of anthrax, they also resemble the onset of a common cold or flu. Certainly nothing that warrants a trip to the doctor. If the victim simply made contact while handling an infected product, they are in luck. Cutaneous anthrax, which occurs when spores meet abraded skin, leaves nasty sores but rarely ever results in death. If the victim had breathed in anthrax spores, however, a diagnosis here will be crucial for survival. In this first stage, pulmonary anthrax infections can be treated with antibiotics. High doses of penicillin injected at short intervals would almost always guarantee that the victim would survive. But the early symptoms are unremarkable, and few physicians would jump to the conclusion of “anthrax” when faced with such a situation. This makes it incredibly likely that no treatment will be given and the disease will progress, leaving the victim to suffer a much more dreadful fate.
In the absence of antibiotics, initial discomfort will fade after the flu-like symptoms recede, but the danger is far from gone. Bacteria begin to engulf the “headquarters” of the body’s disease protection system: the lymph nodes. In a matter of hours, the bacteria will have taken over the entire lymphatic system. From there, they enter the bloodstream, and soon they will release a toxin. It is this toxin that ravages the body, binding to the protective membranes of target cells and crippling white blood cells’ protective abilities. Antibiotics can do little to protect the victim at this point. Within twenty-four hours, the skin will begin to turn faintly blue. Every breath will become more painful than the last. Although the toxin attacks all organs, it is particularly harmful to the lungs, filling them with liquid and gradually cutting off the victim’s supply of oxygen. Death comes in over 90% of cases and usually very suddenly-- some victims have died in the middle of a conversation.
Being easily manufactured and remaining stable for years, anthrax is the ideal biological weapon. It only takes a microscopic quantity to infect someone with it.
Sverdlovsk’s anthrax drying facility was the busiest biological arms production plant in the USSR. Machines near-constantly grinded fermented anthrax cultures into a fine powder, and there was always anthrax in the air. Employees were regularly given vaccinations to keep them from getting sick, but the factory’s work had to be kept secret from outsiders; civilians in the bustling city passed by with no clue of the formidable bacteria being cultivated and with no vaccine to protect them from it either. Run-of-the-mill air filters on the exhaust pipes were the only measures that stood between the spores and the outside world.
After each shift, large anthrax drying machines had to be briefly shut down for maintenance checks. On Friday, March 31, 1979, one technician found that an air filter was clogged-- not an unusual occurrence, but one that had to be addressed immediately. He left a quick note for his supervisor before going home for the weekend: “Filter clogged so I’ve removed it. Replacement necessary.”
Maybe the supervisor in question, Lieutenant Colonel Nikolai Chernyshov, was in a hurry to get home. Maybe the importance of the technician’s note didn’t register in his mind. Maybe he was just tired. In any case, he should have recorded the defective filter in the logbook for the next shift, but he didn’t. When the night shift manager came on duty, he scanned the logbook and found nothing unusual. The machines were started back up again, and absolutely nothing stood in the way when fine, spore-carrying dust swept through the exhaust pipes into the night air of the city. Eventually, a worker noticed the missing filter and the machines were shut down. But it was too late-- several hours had passed already.
The plant across the street had been in the path of the northerly wind that night. Over the course of the next few days, every single one of its workers fell ill, and nearly all died within a week. Patients from various areas of the city were admitted to nearby hospitals, all having worked in the “wind zone” extending from the military facility to the city’s southern limit. Had the night wind originated in the South and blew in the direction of the city center at the time, anthrax would have been spread to hundreds of thousands of people. It was a miracle that only 66 people had died-- or so the Soviet Union reported while feigning that the outbreak was natural. Accounts from scientists at the Sverdlovsk facility put the death toll at 105. We may never know for sure how many victims there were, but one thing is certain: this was the worst outbreak of the dreadful inhalational anthrax on record for the 20th century.
The situation went from bad to worse. It might seem as though this was a quick, one-time exposure that could be mopped up and cleaned, but officials soon grew worried that they were unable to contain the disaster. Hospitals reported deaths for a month and a half after the release. This was no longer just a medical emergency-- it was a small epidemic. How could this happen?
The truth was, the officials had brought it upon themselves. Their cover-up of the Sverdlovsk leak was what had fanned the flames of the outbreak.
3. Veiling the accident (sponsored by the USSR):
Telling the public that the anthrax had stemmed from a bioweapons facility would be admitting to a violation of the international BWC treaty, so it is no surprise that Soviet officials fervently set about concealing the leak from Western intelligence.
Many of the nation’s leaders were also unaware of the secret. The local Sverdlovsk Communist Party leader was told that there had merely been a leak of hazardous material from the military plant, so he ordered city workers to scrub and trim trees, spray roads, and hose down roofs. He did not know that he was dealing with spores that would only be agitated by this movement. The rapid clean-up effort spread the anthrax further through “secondary aerosols,” as spores that had settled after the initial Friday night release were again stirred up by the city workers. Anthrax dust drifted throughout the city for the second time, and new victims arrived at hospitals, this time with black ulcerous swellings on their skin: anthrax contracted not by inhalation, but by skin contact. This outbreak of cutaneous anthrax could be credible since it occurs naturally in rural areas with herds of domestic cattle and sheep, but no one could explain why so many urban factory workers were suddenly sick, or why so so many previous victims-- who had breathed in spores instead of touching them-- had died. That is, until Moscow published their official statement.
On June 12, 1980, the official Soviet news agency TASS declared, “Cases of skin and intestinal forms of anthrax were reported in people, because dressing of animals was sometimes conducted without observing rules established by veterinary inspections,” adding that all of the patients had been successfully treated in local hospitals. Sverdlovsk residents were told that the deaths were all caused by a truckload of contaminated meat sold on the black market. People began to see fliers that advised them to stay away from “unofficial” food vendors, and to add verisimilitude to the cover story, several black-market vendors were arrested on charges of selling contaminated meat. At the same time, military sentries were posted near the plant to keep intruders away, and KGB officials visited victims’ families with falsified death certificates. Victims’ corpses were bathed in chemical disinfectants, and much of the documentary evidence-- hospital records and pathologists’ reports amongst them-- was destroyed. It was the perfect way to hide the accident: you didn’t need to explain pulmonary anthrax victims if no one was aware of them; the cutaneous anthrax group would be made up of butchers who handled the “contaminated meat”, actual victims’ professions notwithstanding; and as for gastrointestinal anthrax, well, the KGB was no stranger to falsifying evidence-- and there you have the meat-consuming victims.
Despite the reasonable cover story, the Reagan administration continued to seize on the outbreak to criticize the USSR for apparently contravening the bioweapons ban. In response, the Soviet press maintained that Washington was ready to use any Soviet tragedy to its political advantage. Admittedly, the United States had slipped up before: In 1981, the U.S. alleged that Asian communist forces used “Yellow Rain” mycotoxins, an allegation that was soon widely discredited. With this in mind, some U.S. scientists were inclined to believe the official Soviet explanation of the event.
Seven years after the accident, Soviet authorities allowed one such scientist-- Dr. Meselson of Harvard University-- to travel to Moscow and interview several senior Soviet health officials about the outbreak. Dr. Meselson later issued a report agreeing that the outbreak was caused by a contaminated meat processing plant with the conclusion that the official explanation was "plausible and consistent with what is known from medical literature and recorded human experiences with anthrax.”
Nine years after the accident, a group of Soviet medical experts travelled to the United States by invitation of Dr. Meselson to reveal the “truth” about what happened in 1979. With a stack of doctored autopsy reports and photographs, they demonstrated how all of the victims had contracted either intestinal or cutaneous anthrax. After such a thorough obfuscation of the actual incident was placed in front of their eyes, many Western scientists were persuaded that what happened at Sverdlovsk was just an embarrassing slip-up of the Soviet public health system. Soon after the tour, the Science journal published an account of the doctors’ trip, declaring: “Sverdlovsk’s ‘mystery epidemic’ of 1979 lost much of its mystery this month. For eight years, U.S. officials have voiced suspicions about an unprecedented outbreak of anthrax that occurred in April 1979 among the people of Sverdlovsk; [but] people had become sick [...] from eating bad meat they bought from ‘private’ butchers. Three Soviet officials came to visit the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, D.C., on 11 April… [they] gave the same explanation as in 1980, but provided many more details, convincing some long-time doubters that the account was true.”
4. Unveiling the accident (sponsored by the West):
It was only after the fall of the Soviet Union that the truth got out.
In a Komsomolskaya Pravda interview published on May 27, 1993, fourteen years after the accident took place, Russian president Boris Yeltsin told the reporter, “Our military developments were the reason [for the Sverdlovsk outbreak],”-- a frank admissal that dragged out international treaty violations decades in the hiding. He added that he had asked then-KGB chairman Yuri Andropov and Defense Minister Ustinov to close down the bioweapon facility as soon as he heard about the anthrax release. When the reporter asked why he had been silent for so long, Yeltsin simply said, "Nobody asked me."
Following the announcement, Wall Street Journal reporter Peter Gumbel obtained permission to travel to Sverdlovsk for interviews of local families, hospital workers, and various officials. Gumbel soon confirmed Yeltsin's comments. A team of Western inspectors led by Dr. Meselson gained access to the region in 1992; with a list of 68 known anthrax victims in the city, they were able to visit surviving relatives of those who had died. Through this method, the researchers ascertained both where the victims had been living and where they had been when anthrax dust was supposedly released in the city. When the housing locations were plotted on a map, there was no geological pattern to be noticed; however, their working-hour locations indicated that they had all been directly downwind when the spores were released. Although Dr. Meselson originally contended that the outbreak was natural and the Soviets did not have an active, offensive biowarfare program, the information uncovered in the investigation made it clear that both stances were horribly wrong. “Bad meat does not go in straight lines 50 kilometers long,” Dr. Meselson stated in his 1994 Science paper, refuting his earlier viewpoint. “Wind can do that.”
5. Legacies
In the aftermath of Sverdlovsk’s “biological Chernobyl,” an estimated 100-or-so people had died. This raises a question that everybody is thinking but will not voice: “Is that it?” There’s no denying that disease is always calamitous, but the anthrax outbreak had only killed a fraction of what one would consider to be a “huge” disaster. It pales in the face of the incident that its nickname invokes-- Chernobyl and its 4,000+ death toll.
The number of victims claimed, however, is not all that marks Chernobyl as the tragedy it is. Regardless of the precise number of victims it claimed, the disaster is a warning that looms over all nuclear pursuits. Likewise, the Sverdlovsk incident serves as a cautionary tale about the inherent destructiveness of biological weapons. The very nature of their production put the Soviet people in danger, and the reckless competition of biological warfare -- the shadow of which could be seen in the philosophy of the Soviet bioweapons program -- would transform every battle into Stalingrad. The truth of what happened at Sverdlovsk tells us all that it is sincerely in the collective interest of all nations to adhere to the ban on biological weapons… though it is unlikely that any nation will listen.
What did you learn?
How terrible is anthrax? Since it is a bacteria, the disease may be treated by penicillin, but only in its earliest stages; the toxin that is eventually released is unreceptive to antibiotic treatments and is what kills the victim in the end. Skin-contracted anthrax-- cutaneous anthrax-- may leave nasty sores but it is rarely fatal. If you inhaled it, however, you have a 90% chance of death, and your survival hinges on receiving penicillin before the bacteria starts releasing toxins. This is unfortunately a struggle because in the first stage, anthrax’s symptoms are your typical fever, cough, and discomfort. After that, the disease will destroy your organs and flood your lungs. So how terrible is anthrax? Very, if you inhaled it. How terrible is anthrax as a bioweapon? With its stability and easy cultivation, it is frightfully good at being a bioweapon, which is to say that anthrax bombs would be terrible for the victims they are dropped on.
What did the Soviet Union do to cover up the Sverdlovsk accident? First, they did not tell the local Communist Party boss about it, which meant that his clean-up efforts only led to worsening the outbreak. After that, Soviet officials blamed local black market meat for spreading anthrax. This explanation only explained skin-contracted and ingested anthrax victims, so evidence of inhaled anthrax-- which is the deadliest of all and accounted for the vast majority of the dead-- had to be either modified or destroyed. Death certificates were doctored and autopsy reports were faked, then all of the new evidence of the cover story was presented to the Western world at large.
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