Raymond Zilinskas, director of the Chemical and Biological Weapons Nonproliferation Program at the Monterey Institute of International Studies, has donated several rare publications on the history and development of Soviet anti-plague and biological warfare defense programs to the Hoover Institution Library.
Of particular note is a twelve-volume set entitled Zanimatel’nye ocherki o deiatel’nosti i deiateliakh protivochumnoi sistemy Rossii i Sovetskogo Soiuza (Moskva, 1994-2002) on how to create defenses against plague and other infectious diseases. Also significant are two books by and about key scientists involved in the Soviet biological warfare program: A. A. Vorob’ev’s Ne podvodia cherty (Moskva, 2003) and Dostoiny izvestnosti (Sergiev Posad, 2004), a history of the Virological Center of the Ministry of Defense issued in honor of its fiftieth anniversary. These titles are held by only two other institutions in the United States, one being the National Library of Medicine in Bethesda, Maryland.
This acquisition will be of great value to scholars studying the Cold War and Soviet and US defense programs. It fits in well with Hoover’s Vitalii Kataev papers and Sonja Schmid interviews, both of which document the role of technology in the demise of the Soviet Union, as well as the records of the Committee on the Present Danger, which describe US responses to the Soviet military threat.
Readers interested in more information on Dr. Zilinskas and his work on the Soviet anti-plague system should visit the project’s site: http://cns.miis.edu/antiplague/index.htm
