[1] The origins of the Biopreparat network are closely connected with the creation in the 1950s by the USSR, under the leadership of Nikita Sergeevich Khrushchev, of biological warfare mobilisation facilities hidden within newly built civil production plants.
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.
[2] Another key institution which Biopreparat was to draw heavily upon for the recruitment of scientific personnel with knowledge of biological weapons was the Scientific-Research Technical Bureau (Nauchno-issledovatel'skoe tekhnicheskoe byuro or NITB).
[2] On the 24 April 1974, the USSR's Main Administration of the Microbiological Industry (Glavmikrobioprom) issued Order 131 DSP which created the All-Union Science Production Association Biopreparat.
[2] The Biopreparat project was reportedly initiated by academician Yuri Anatol'evich Ovchinnikov, who convinced General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev that development of biological weapons was necessary.
The first significant intelligence reaching the West regarding the nature and extent of this Soviet covert BW effort resulted from the defection to the UK in October 1989 of a high-level Biopreparat scientist, Vladimir Artemovich Pasechnik (1937–2001).
In March 1985, with the election by the Politboro of Mikhail Gorbachev as General Secretary of the CPSU, Biopreparat increased in size and political importance and began to emerge also as a major player with regard to the civil biopharmaceutical sector.
[2] Biopreparat was a system of nominally civilian, research and design institutes, pilot plants and dual-use manufacturing facilities located mainly at sites in European Russia, in which a small army of scientists and technicians worked on bacterial and viral pathogens with a view to developing a new generation of biological weapons.
The project incorporated the following R&D, design, pilot plant and production facilities: Research was conducted on a range of bacterial and viral pathogens with a view to their potential weaponization.