Re-Evaluating Russia's Biological Weapons Policy, as Reflected in the Criminal Code and Official Admissions: Insubordination Leading to a President's Subordination

Abstract

Half-heartedly acknowledged by the Russian Federation, the Soviet Union ran the world's largest offensive program for biological weapons, breaching the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention. Russia criminalized biological weapons in 1993 only to decriminalize them in 1996, but in 2003 president Putin partly re-criminalized them. None of these changes were declared within the Convention. Several well-known official statements, when reviewed in their context, turned out to admit to neither an offensive program nor a breach of the Convention. Thus, the Russian biological weapons policy is more ambiguous than usually depicted, and various policy shapers can be discerned.

Keywords :

• Russia
• Security Policy
• Biological Weapons
• Legislation
• The Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention
• BTWC
• Admissions
• Denials
• Decision Making
• Policy Shapers

Notes

¹The Soviet BW program is reviewed in more detail in the following: Roffey et al. 2003; Rimmington 2000; Leitenberg 1998.

²Considering that in the late 1990s most Russian officers had not even heard of the Geneva conventions of 1949, this seems highly likely (see Kudryashov, 1999). The full text of the Convention and many related documents are found at http://www.opbw.org/

³(Berstejn 1987; Parfenov 1990; A.N. pseudonym for Zotovaya 1990; Chelikova 1991; Mironyuk 1991; Kosarev and Klochkov 1998; Petrov and Supotnitsky 2001; to mention a few).

⁴Article IV.

⁵Russian Soviet Federal Socialist Republic.

⁶State Duma deputy Valery Pavlovich Vorotnikov, who presented the reform for the parliament, explained that it was necessary to omit the words biological weapon since the USSR already in 1975 had ratified the BTWC and fulfilled all its conventional obligations so that there simply could not be any kind of biological weapons to guard in Russia (Transcripts from the evening plenary session of the State Duma 2001).

⁷An official admission of a breach of a BW convention is defined as a statement from the ruling institutions or by an official in charge of activities related to a BW convention describing acts, which constitute such a breach. Hence, we do neither relate statements made by retired officials nor by experts without official affiliation to such activities.

⁸Yevstigneev's statements are discussed further in “Admissions reassessed as denials” below.

⁹The status of this official admission is strengthened by the fact, that the legal department of the parliament had no objections to this article (Zaklyucheniye Pravovogo upravleniya Gosudarstvennoi Dumy po proyektu federalnogo zakona O promishlennoj utilizatsii vooruzheniy, voennoj tekhniki, imushchestva i sooruzheniy 1999).

¹⁰Pasechnik went public on BBC:s “Newsnight” in 1993 (story retold by Newsweek 1993). A translation of Newsweek's article including a map of the Soviet BW facilities was published in a Russian paper in 1997. Early 1998 Alibek gave a press conference in New York, which inter alia resulted in an article in the Sunday Telegraph 1998, and triggered Russian writings on the subject.

¹¹Grant No. 98-03-042216 from the Russian Humanitarian Scientific Foundation (RGNF).

¹²The RGNF continued The RGNF continued to found Levina's research in the history of Soviet medical science, see inter alia http://www.rfh.ru/p2-18-02-2002.asp; http://www.rfh.ru/p1-19-02-2004.asp; http://www.rfh.ru/p2-19-02-2003.asp to found Levina's research in the history of Soviet medical science, see inter alia http://www.rfh.ru/p2-18-02-2002.asp; http://www.rfh.ru/p1-19-02-2004.asp; http://www.rfh.ru/p2-19-02-2003.asp

¹³The Institute of Experimental Hygiene in Kirov, The Institute of Microbiology of the Russian Ministry of Defence situated in Yekaterinburg and The Scientific Research Institute of Bacteriology of the Ministry of Defence situated in Sergiev Posad.

¹⁴

¹⁵In 1992, Yeltsin did acknowledge a leak at the military facility in the city as the cause of the outbreak (Washington Post 1992). However, the Russian Delegation at a meeting of the BTWC States Parties in Geneva in March 1997 presented a statement to the effect that the cause was contaminated meat (Tucker 1997). Here it is important to differentiate between these statements. Yeltsin is the foremost official representative of Russia but his statement in an interview does not carry the same weight as the statement in Geneva that was developed and endorsed by the Russian government. The latter—that meat was the cause of the anthrax outbreak—is the official policy, and apparently has been since 1979. The “softest” statement by a military representative is probably Kuntsevich, as chairman of the President's Committee saying in September 1992: “The experts advance various scenarios for what happened. Before coming to any unequivocal conclusion, they should all be studied exhaustively. Our committee plans to carry out this work.” (Chernenko 1992).

¹⁶Biopreparat is described in the Russian 1992 CBMs as created for “production of pharmaceuticals and other protective preparations” and not having the “infrastructure, which is necessary for production of biological warfare agents.” Kalinin denied Biopreparat's involvement in the offensive BW program in late 1992, describing Biopreparat's military role as defence against weapons of mass destruction and prevention of infectious diseases through production of medical supplies and research (Kaysyn 1992).

¹⁷Two editions of the Russian original were checked (Vilnius: Balticon and Leningrad: Sovyetskiy pisatel; both printed 1990).

¹⁸“Considering that implementation of the convention lags behind, I declare that Russia abandons its reservations concerning the possibility of using biological weapons in response. They were made by the USSR to the 1925 Geneva protocol on the prohibition of the use in war of chemical and bacteriological weapons.”

¹⁹In the English official version of the Convention the word designed is used but in the Russian official version the equivalent of assigned (intended) is used, a slight distinction which facilitates the permissive interpretation of article 1 of the BWTC. Cf. English version: “designed to use such agents or toxins for hostile purposes or in armed conflict.”

²⁰Kalinin, who came from the Chemical Defence Force to the Virological Centre in Sergiev Posad, then appointed director of Biopreparat. Yevstigneev is a member of the board of directors of Biopreparat and deputy director of the MoD Radiological, Chemical and Biological Defence Force, who did his research at the MoD center in Yekaterinburg. Vorobev worked for over two decades at Sergiev Posad and is now affiliated with the Sechenov Moscow Medical Academy. Urakov was deputy director of the MoD facility in Kirov when he was transferred to head the Institute of Applied Microbiology in Obolensk (Rimmington 1999, 2000, 2003).

²¹According to Alibek, his draft for the decree was changed by Kalinin's allies to allow the program to continue (Mangold and Goldberg 1999, 109–110; Alibek and Handelman 1999, 188–190).

²²Some Biopreparat institutes were selected for the inspections that took place in January 1991. Alibek describes how the visits were designed to limit the times for the actual inspection as much as possible and that there were cover stories for sensitive installations to deceive the visitors (Alibek and Handelman 1999).

²³The mechanism for defining such scientists is based on their own simple declaration of involvement in the Soviet program and categories of know-how.

²⁴In 2003, the Rosboepripasy representatives state that “the coordination between agencies remains the weakest link” for Russia's fulfilment of the BTWC (Spirande and Ignatev 2003).

²⁵Assuming that a state should have discovered Yeltsin's decriminalisation of inter alia the development and keeping of BW, it is highly unlikely that it should not also have insisted on recriminalisation of the keeping of BW, since an act of hidden diplomacy not comprehending the latter, under circumstances out of its control could present that state as an accomplice of a breach against the BTWC, not to speak of as an accomplice of a crime against humanity.

²⁶A detailed report by the Swedish Defence Agency (FOI) on the Centre of Special Diagnostics and Treatment of Especially Dangerous and Exotic Infectious Diseases is in preparation.

²⁷In his state-of-nation address to Russian parliament Putin acknowledged “that the collapse of the Soviet Union was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century,” a view that is shared by many Russians (RTR Russia TV 2005).

²⁸Among the some forty states that have not acceded the BTWC, there are three states neighbouring to Russia, Moldova, Kazakstan and Tajikistan, http://www.opbw.org/.

²⁹The BTWC avoids the term biological weapons. Instead it inter alia prohibits biological agents that have no justification for prophylactic, protective or other peaceful purposes (Art. I).

³⁰Upravleniye konventsionnykh problem khimicheskogo i biologicheskogo oruzhiya Rossiyskogo agenstva po boyepripasam.

³¹States Parties, accessions and non-signatories of the BTWC are listed at http://www.opbw.org/

³²In order to enable and encourage an employee to refuse to engage in and/or report illegal or wrongful activities of his employer or fellow employees, the employee or whistle-blower has to be legally well protected against retaliation from his employer and fellow employees. In states lacking whistle-blower acts retaliation is often common and may assume the form of a damaged career, a non-wage-increase, a change in tasks or even place of work to the worse. Many democracies lack such legislation and are plagued by state employees seeing to their own personal future and disregarding most illegal or wrongful activities at their place of work. Even if whistle-blower acts are necessary and powerful tools for preventing illegal or wrongful activities in the public sector and enabling civilian control, such legislation has to be supplemented with legislation on transparency for the cases where all employees of a work place agree upon these illegal or wrongful activities.