Biopreparat

The All-Union Science Production Association Biopreparat (, , ) was a Soviet agency created in April 1974, which spearheaded the largest and most sophisticated offensive biological warfare program known. It was a vast, ostensibly civilian, network employing 30–40,000 personnel and incorporating five major military-focused research institutes, numerous design and instrument-making facilities, three pilot plants and five dual-use production plants. The network pursued major offensive research and development programs with genetically engineered microbial strains to be resistant to an array of antibiotics. In addition, bacterial agents were created with the ability to produce various peptides, yielding strains with wholly new and unexpected pathogenic properties.

==History== ===Origins=== The origins of the Biopreparat network are closely connected with the creation in the 1950s, under the leadership of Nikita Khrushchev, of biological warfare mobilisation facilities hidden within newly built civil production plants. The construction of the first major dual-use plant, the Berdsk Chemical Factory, located 26 km south of Novosibirsk, began in 1957 in response to a decree by the USSR Council of Ministers on the development of the Soviet chemical and microbiological industry. A second dual-use facility, the Omutninsk Chemical Factory, located in Vostochnyi, 150 km north-east of Kirov, was created in accordance with a decree issued on the 2 August 1958 by the CPSU and the Council of Ministers. The idea behind the new plants was that in the event of wartime emergency they could switch from the output of civil microbiological products to the production of military biological agents. Both the Berdsk and the Omutninsk facilities were transferred to Biopreparat upon its creation in 1974.