On This Day in History: April 2
A biological Chernobyl
Some call the event the “biological Chernobyl,” although it was seven years before that reactor went boom. It was also a mega violation of the Biological Weapons Convention. But this is the Soviet Union we’re talking about. Fuck your rules. Nope, that wasn’t anthrax that accidentally leaked and killed a bunch of people. Nothing to see here. You want Gulag? Keep walking or get Gulag.
--On This Day in History Shit Went Down: April 2, 1979--
Sverdlovsk, now Yekaterinburg, was a “closed city” during the Cold War, meaning you couldn’t visit it without special permission because of all the secret military shit going on there. And leaking anthrax wasn’t the first toxic fuckery to take place in Sverdlovsk, because in 1957 a nuclear waste facility blew up and we don’t know how many died as a result because the commies didn’t want to tell anyone, but it’s believed to be somewhere between “a lot” and “a shitload.”
In the dying days of World War II, the Soviets happened upon some biological warfare plans during their invasion of Manchuria, where the Japanese had been experimenting with that nasty shit on the Chinese. And the Soviets said hey fuckin’ cool we can put this into ballistic missiles and point it at the Americans.
The anthrax in Sverdlovsk was some seriously toxic shit, and it’s downright diabolical in how it came to be. In 1953 there was a different anthrax leak in the city of Kirov—Jesus fucking Christ, Russia, get your shit together—and it went into the sewers and fucked up the resident rat population. Three years later some mad scientist found that the Kirov rats were carrying an even more virulent strain of anthrax, so they cultured that shit, called it “Anthrax 836,” and started mass producing it. You know, just in case.
The shit had to be dried out to be weaponized. Some flunky removed a clogged filter on the drying machines and left a note saying, “Replace the filter before you turn that thing back on.” His boss was probably up to his eyeballs in vodka and ignored the note, and during the next shift, on April 2, 1979, turned the machine on sans filter and oops fucking anthrax everywhere.
At least 100 people died, and probably a lot more, but we don’t know because the KGB started burning hospital records in a fire big enough to roast a thousand kolbasa. Remember that drunk-ass Yeltsin guy? He was First Secretary of the city at the time and led the coverup. The deaths were blamed on contamination in a meatpacking plant.
It could have been a lot worse, but the winds blew the anthrax away from the city instead of toward it, snuffing out a shit-ton of livestock. To this day, the facility is under lockdown, surrounded by hundreds of heavily armed soldiers with lots of big dogs who have big teeth and who probably haven’t been fed in a while.
Subscribe for access to cool shit:
Well...........that’s all thoroughly horrifying.
Holy crap, how did I not know about this until now?