LAUSR

The origin of the Soviet biological warfare (BW) program was fear. With Stalin’s Secret Weapon, Anthony Rimmington casts a revealing light onto one of the Soviet Union’s most closely guarded secrets—the existence of a program (initially multiple efforts) to develop biological weapons and defenses against such weapons. Rimmington maintains that Soviet leaders’ interest in BW was a direct “response to, and extension of” German operations during the First World War. He contends that the research program of the Soviet Central Veterinary Bacteriological Laboratory “closely resembled” that of the military bacteriological laboratory in Berlin. Fear also played a significant and recurring role in hindering Soviet BW research, notably during the Great Terror under Iosif Stalin. Many notable and talented scientists were suspected, surveilled, and arrested, some escaping back to relative safety while others were executed or died in captivity (pp. 3, 17, 19). The role of Stalin himself is an aspect of this history that Rimmington considers important and insufficiently addressed by the existing literature. Rimmington seeks with this book to fill a “significant gap” in the military and scientific history of the Soviet Union, as well as to provide a “deeper understanding” of the global development of BW, supported by newly available source material from the British Secret Intelligence Service and Russian archives. In addition to shedding new light on Stalin’s role in Soviet BW development, Rimmington also believes that the study of the Soviet program can illuminate how modern states might pursue clandestine BW programs, that the Soviet program may have played a role in deterring German use of biological weapons during World War II, and that the Soviet program may have been “much more extensive than previously believed, easily outstripping that of the major Western powers.” Finally, Rimmington wants to present a more “nuanced and balanced” consideration of Ivan Mikahilovich Velikanov, the lead scientist of the Soviet BW program for many years (pp. 1–12, 17–20). Rimmington achieves his goals for the book. He follows through on his promise to examine the Soviet BW program in considerable detail, with chapters devoted to the origins of the effort, the transition from a defensive focus to research exploring the offensive application of BW, various research facilities that came online during the period of focus, Ivan Velikanov, and—although the book focuses mainly on the