The long, cloudy history of Moscow’s BW program

Abstract

On the surface, these three books by Anthony Rimmington promise a great deal; most any serious research into the murky world of the Soviet, and later Russian, biological-weapons (BW) programs deserves serious consideration. The Soviet BW program was not a focus of much scholarly attention until the early 1990s, with the defection of two prominent scientists from the Soviet Union’s BW enterprise (Biopreparat), Vladimir Pasechnik and Kanatzhan Alibekov (more commonly known as Ken Alibek), and the later publication of Soviet biological-weapons scientist Igor Domaradskij’s memoirs in 2003. Also of note is Soviet chemical-weapons scientist Lev Fedorov’s often-overlooked monograph on the subject, published in Moscow in 2005. Until Rimmington’s, the most recent scholarly work on this topic was Milton Leitenberg and Raymond Zilinskas’s magisterial 2012 work on the program, Zilinskas’s 2016 paper for the National Defense University (NDU), and his 2018 book with Philippe Mauger.