The Soviet Union's Agricultural Biowarfare Programme: Ploughshares to Swords by Anthony Rimmington (review)

The Soviet Union's secret agricultural biowarfare program has largely existed in a black box. Historians have known of its existence, and of its products, but how the program operated has remained elusive. This is mostly due to a lack of credible sources coupled with an aggressive Russian disinformation campaign. Despite the same lack of formal archival sources as others before him, Anthony Rimmington, in his new book The Soviet Union's Agricultural Biowarfare Programme, constructs a compelling narrative of the Soviet agricultural biowarfare program known as Ekologiya. His access to firsthand knowledge of the program through interviews with former participants makes Rimmington's book an important contribution to understanding Soviet military operations related to harming farm animals and food crops.

According to Rimmington, Ekologiya was established in 1958, in order to develop anti-crop and anti-livestock pathogens. Its founding, Rimming-ton reminds readers, was at a time of a "great deal of momentum build-up" in the Soviet Union's agricultural sector after World War II (p. 22). By the 1970s, the program had a network of independent facilities scattered across the country with over 10,000 personnel working on its projects. Livestock disease was an early research goal, based on materials seized during the war from Germany's Insel Riems State Research Laboratory, where researchers had been focusing on weaponizing foot and mouth disease. Using the laboratory's research expertise as a launching point, the Soviets later studied a variety of zoological diseases, such as sheep pox and African swine fever, as well as crop diseases such as rice blast and late blight in potatoes.

As ambitious as the program aimed to be, Rimmington readily admits there is little evidence proving it was a dedicated weapon making operation. However, in his discussion of a rinderpest outbreak in 1963, Rimmington presents compelling circumstantial evidence to support the program's modest efforts. He points out that rinderpest, a highly contagious and lethal cattle virus, had been completely eliminated from the Soviet Union in the 1920s. The Soviets had access to rinderpest research, and an anti-livestock pathogen from the Riems facility they seized twenty years earlier. Rimmington relies on this kind of forensic historic sleuthing throughout the book.

After an overview of Ekologiya's structure and research objectives, Rimmington offers readers the most novel information through his discussion of what happened when many Ekologiya facilities fell into disarray and political limbo after the collapse of the Soviet Union. During that chaotic political time, Iranian officials sought to buy up the biological pathogen stores at the aging and defunct Ekologiya facilities. Such efforts were thwarted by officials at the U.S. Department of Energy, who infused aid money into Russia's state-run agricultural research institute to improve the security of the buildings in return for ceasing contact with Iran. In fact, the U.S. sent a delegation with then-Senator Barack Obama to ensure the money had been properly spent.

Rimmington makes clear that one of his goals is for post-Soviet states to understand this history so that they can carry out "civil-oriented commercial projects" without making the same mistakes as Ekologiya (p. 9). In support, he presents several positive aspects of Ekologiya, including the development of zoological vaccines that are produced commercially today. He also notes that a highly lethal fungal pathogen effectively eliminates heroin-producing poppy crops.

Unlike the two most prominent books in the field, one by Igor V. Domaradskii and another by Milton Leitenberg and Raymond A. Zilinskas, both of which are detailed and lengthy, Rimmington's overview of this overlooked aspect of Soviet history is an accessible 200 pages. One drawback of the book's condensed nature is that Rimmington spends little time explaining Soviet history, and readers unfamiliar with the material may find it hard to follow. Still, the richness and novelty of the information from his interview subjects will be a delight for advanced researchers...