More bad news out of Russia. There are reports of a 28-year-old female employee of Russia’s Irkutsk Anti-Plague Research Institute dying of pneumonic plague a few days ago.
Russian officials have not confirmed the cause of the woman’s death. But they insist that they are in control of the situation. (Some two hundred contacts of the deceased lab worker have been placed under medical observation.)
There were several close calls related to Soviet bioweapons programs during the Cold War (including the 1979 Sverdlovsk anthrax accident). In each case, Soviet authorities declined to make full disclosures of the extent of the exposures. Thankfully, none resulted in worldwide pandemics.
The Kremlin was cagey even about acknowledging the deaths of one of its leaders. Between 1982 and 1985 (just before Gorbachev was named General Secretary of the USSR), three Soviet leaders died in relatively quick succession: Leonid Brezhnev, Yuri Andropov, and Konstantin Chernenko.
In each case, the Kremlin was slow to confirm the deaths to the Western media. This led to jokes about hypothetical Pravda headlines like “Stalin not feeling well” and “Lenin under the weather”. (By the mid-1980s, both Lenin and Stalin had been dead for decades.)
Where Russia is concerned, we should always hope for the best but we should never assume that the Kremlin is giving us the full story.
-ET