Ministry of Agriculture and Food (Soviet Union)

It was formally known as the People's Commissariat for Agriculture (Russian: Народный комиссариат земледелия - Narkomzem) was set up in Petrograd in October 1917.

[3] For more than four decades, the USSR Ministry of Agriculture managed a large Soviet offensive biological warfare programme focused on the development of anti-livestock and anti-crop agents.

The crucial step to initiating a coordinated large-scale agricultural biowarfare effort was the issue on the 7 August 1958 of decree No.

One aspect of the programme concerned the creation of reserve mobilisation production facilities for anti-agricultural BW agents.

[7] There is no reliable information at all with regard to which delivery systems were to be employed to allow the agricultural BW agents developed by the network to be used against enemy crops and herds of livestock.

Ken Alibek, who had some limited interaction with the Soviet military agricultural network, claims that the agents were "designed to be sprayed from tanks attached to Ilyushin bombers and flown over a target area along a straight line for hundreds of miles".