Description
This multi-award winning film looks at one of the best kept secrets of the Cold War through some unprecedented access. Over two decades, the Soviet Union amassed the largest biological weapons program the world has ever known, huge stockpiles of deadly germs such as smallpox, plague and anthrax — all ready to be unleashed on civilian populations. We were told the secret weapons program ended with the collapse of the Soviet Union. But did it? In Sverdlovsk (now called Yekaterinburg), Russia, the faces of the dead on dozens of ombstones bear silent witness to one of the Soviet Union’s darkest secrets: all mark one point in time; early April, 1979. For years, there was very little information to explain why or how the people died. The cause of death was explained away with lies to conceal one of the most frightening developments of the Cold War. It involved thousands of scientists, who spent two decades turning deadly diseases like anthrax and smallpox into weapons of mass destruction. As we hear in this documentary, there are those who fear that work continues inside Russia today. Sverdlovsk has a long association with death. Czar Nicholas II and his family were executed in Sverdlovsk. Today, if its one million citizens were asked to choose a sister city, it might well be Hiroshima.