Professor, Alumnus Shed Light on Russia’s Secret Bioweapons Program

British authorities have identified the poison used in the attack as Novichok, a nerve agent developed by Soviet scientists several decades ago, and have placed the blame on the Russian government. Zilinskas literally wrote the book on the Soviet biological weapons program, with Milton Leitenberg—The Soviet Biological Weapons Program: A History (Harvard University Press, 2012)—and served as a UNSCOM weapons inspector in Iraq. Russian President Boris Yeltsin had earlier admitted that the Soviet Union had a biological weapons program in violation of the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention, but Zilinskas was “surprised to learn how large it had been and how many thousands of people had been working on it.” Intrigued by what in 2012 seemed “puzzling activities related to the biosciences” in Russia, including the closing of military biological and anti-plague institutions to the outside world, Zilinskas began researching what became of the Soviet biological weapons program. The book he and Mauger co-authored, Biosecurity in Putin’s Russia, was published this February by Lynne Rienner Publishers.

On March 22, 2012, when President Vladimir Putin convened a meeting of his future cabinet, Minister of Defense Anatoly Serdyukov declared: “Mr. Putin, we have particularly paid attention to ‘The development of weapons based on new physical principles: radiation, geophysical wave, genetic, psychophysical, etc.’” A huge bureaucracy has since emerged to manage these efforts; Soviet biological warfare facilities have been refurbished; the Radiation, Chemical, and Biological Defense (RHkM) forces have been provided with sophisticated, modern equipment; and RHkM forces have conducted many large and realistic exercises throughout Russia. Russia has also reactivated “active measures,” such as falsely publicizing that the U.S. is conducting biological research and development that violates international law and directly threaten Russia.

The Zilinskas-Mauger collaboration began in 2015 when Mauger was still a student in the Institute’s nonproliferation and terrorism studies program. After having found and analyzed many hundreds of documents, interviews, and images, they were certain that Russia was spending billions and billions of rubles to develop weapons based on “new physical principles, including genetics,” as previously announced by Serdyukov, as well as funding a construction boom at over two dozen sites that used to be a part of the Soviet biological and chemical weapons infrastructure.

Zilinskas and Mauger’s book also documents a simultaneous rise in the Russian governments “active measures,” which promote misinformation about new threats from the United States and its supposedly own offensive biological weapons program. In a recent review in Nature, Gary Ackerman writes, “The scholarship and cogent analysis in Biosecurity in Putin’s Russia are formidable, as rigorous as any assessment of the country’s biological-warfare capability by the world’s best intelligence agencies. The book is overall a fascinating reflection of the complex web of interests and institutions that have converged to drive Russia’s current orientation towards biosecurity.”