The man on the laboratory table could not move. He could not speak, could not lift a hand, could not draw a full breath. The poison they had given him was collapsing his muscles one by one, and in fifteen minutes a healthy man would be dead, his heart stopped in a way that any autopsy would read as a simple heart attack. The man had been a prisoner, condemned as a traitor, and he had spent the last seven years in the gulag before being sent here.

Here, in a place the staff called simply Laboratory One, his death was not an execution but an experiment. Grigory Mairanovsky watched him die, noting every effect, every twitch, every failing system, because that was the purpose of this place. The Soviet Union had begun investing in secret poison research almost from its founding. Exactly when the first laboratory opened is unknown because every record was classified; it was either established on Lenin’s orders in 1921 or by Stalin in 1926.

Either way, the goal was identical: develop poisons that could be used against the government’s enemies without leaving any trace. Through the 1920s and 1930s the program produced new compounds, but its most infamous era began in 1939, when Mairanovsky took over. He had earned his doctorate through human experiments with mustard gas, so it came as no surprise that his leadership of Laboratory One followed the same path. He received enormous funding, materials, and a steady supply of political prisoners who served as test subjects, which the staff called birdies.

It is unknown how many birdies were killed. One study managed to identify the names of 150 people Mairanovsky personally put to death, but there were certainly many more whose names were lost. From careful study of known poisons like cyanide, strychnine, and ricin, Mairanovsky’s team developed new concoctions. Their greatest success was a substance known as K2, a tasteless, odorless, nearly undetectable poison that caused a near total collapse in muscle function when applied to a human.

The victim would lose the ability to move, then the ability to breathe, and die within fifteen minutes in what appeared to be a heart attack. The team proved so lethally effective that the government began using them as executioners. Political prisoners marked for elimination were sent to Mairanovsky, who used each one as another test subject. In 1947, Isaiah Oggins, an accused traitor who had spent seven years as a gulag prisoner, was sent to Laboratory One for execution.

Mairanovsky injected him with poison and observed his painful death over the following minutes. By the 1940s, Laboratory One was probably the most advanced poison facility in the world, surpassing even the Nazi experiments conducted on concentration camp victims during the Holocaust. When Mairanovsky reviewed evidence of those German experiments, he concluded proudly that the Nazi poison achievements were, in his words, significantly less than ours. He remained in power until 1951, when a purge wave caught up with him.

He eventually died in 1964. But the poison program he had built did not die with him. It continued formulating new horrors through the last days of the Soviet Union, and unknown to anyone at the time, it would outlive the state that created it. The Soviets were also convinced that the human mind itself could be weaponized.

The field was called psychoenergetics, covering unusual psychic abilities like remote viewing and psychokinesis. Secret experiments were conducted to determine whether such powers actually existed, and the conclusions were disturbing. After years of research, Soviet scientists concluded that there was some truth to these abilities, even though they did not fully understand them. They were so certain that in 1975 an official commission was established to review the research, and it doubled down, insisting the field was valuable.

The main interest was remote viewing, the claimed phenomenon in which a person experiences the world from outside their own body. The intelligence applications were too obvious to ignore. American experiments used conscious, fully aware subjects, but the Soviets preferred altered states of consciousness. Subjects were drugged, hypnotized, or made to practice yoga in hopes of shifting their minds into a state that enabled remote viewing.

The goal was not only to prove the power existed, but to devise a method that could train anyone to do it. The experiments claimed some success, but clear evidence was never made public. The other major area was psychokinesis, moving objects with the mind. Scientists tested everything from moving cups to freezing animals with mental force, working with individuals who claimed to possess the ability.

The classified nature of the work means most of it remains unknown, but the experiments were productive enough to keep funding and staffing for years. One supposed success story did emerge. In 1963, Soviet authorities identified Nina Kulagina, who claimed to have inherited psychokinetic powers from her mother. Scientists brought her in for tests, where she appeared to move objects with her mind.

For several years she was brought back repeatedly, and in 80 percent of tests she apparently succeeded. She was observed moving matchsticks, compass needles, and small balls. During her demonstrations, scientists recorded intense concentration, an unusually high heart rate, and elevated body temperature, signs she was exerting real physical effort. The experiments exhausted her, requiring several days of rest and supposedly leaving her dizzy, with intense pain in her head and spine.

Several scientific papers were published, with the research team swearing the results were genuine, and a short documentary film demonstrating her powers was recorded, footage that is still easily found today. But those outside the team met the claims with heavy skepticism. Nina and the scientists were accused of fraud, of using magnets or hidden strings to create the illusion of psychokinesis. Nina herself had been held criminally liable for fraud in the past.

Despite the scientists’ claims, they never offered concrete proof or replicated their results with other subjects. Still, the Kulagina case remains perhaps the most persuasive example of psychokinetic abilities ever presented to science. Psychic powers were not the only boundary the Soviets tried to cross. They even attempted to resurrect the dead.

In 1925, Sergey Bryukhonenko unveiled a device he called the autojector, a system of electric pumps that could circulate and oxygenate blood, acting as a sort of artificial heart. In September 1925, he stunned the second Congress of Russian pathologists in Moscow by severing a dog’s head and quickly attaching it to the machine. The severed head continued to blink, move, and respond to stimuli for almost two hours. He replicated the experiments multiple times, and by 1926 he was apparently able to keep severed heads alive for twenty-four hours.

The Soviet Chemical Pharmaceutical Institutes took a keen interest, providing funding, a laboratory, and publishing special issues of its journal dedicated to his research. Bryukhonenko’s work triggered an outpouring of public and academic interest. The possibility of keeping patients alive while their hearts were replaced, or even transferring heads to new bodies, opened a wave of speculation about a medical revolution. By 1928, his experiments were making headlines in the Western press.

He continued refining the work through the 1930s. In 1939, his progress was filmed for a documentary called Experiments in the Revival of Organisms, which reportedly showed that he could now keep the heads alive for days at a time. Following that, Bryukhonenko received permission to expand his research to humans. Details of those human experiments are far less clear.

He saw much less success working with human cadavers, because he did not have permission to kill humans the way he had killed dogs. He had to rely on recently deceased bodies, but brain death from lack of oxygen made his methods of resurrection ineffective on any body dead for more than a few minutes. Ultimately, he failed to achieve any sort of human resurrection or the animation of a severed human head. Yet his work was pioneering for cardiac surgery in general.

The autojector never saw clinical use, but the basic idea inspired later Soviet cardiologists, who went on to vastly improve heart surgery. As disturbing as the footage of animated severed dog heads was, Bryukhonenko’s work may have been some of the most positive and life-saving research Soviet scientists ever conducted. It was not only poison and psychic powers the Soviets tried to harness, but disease itself. In 1959, a traveler from India arrived in Moscow, fell ill quickly, and died of what was later identified as smallpox.

A further forty-six people were infected in the minor outbreak that followed. When authorities discovered what had happened, they dispatched members of the biowarfare team to collect blood and tissue samples from the victims for use in the weapons program. For the next eight years, Soviet scientists worked on weaponizing smallpox. By 1967 it was ready.

The variant, called India 1967, could be deployed using specialized bombs, which the Soviets tested at the top-secret biological warfare site on Vozrozhdeniya Island, code-named Aralsk 7. The island was the USSR’s primary open-air testing ground for biological weapons and one of the most secret places in the country. Over the decades, the Soviets tested everything from nerve gas to weaponized bubonic plague there, but it was the smallpox bombs that caused the most trouble. In the summer of 1971, authorities were testing the smallpox bombs around the island, with little effort to control damage to the local environment or the employees working on and around it.

On August 6, a crew member of a research vessel assessing the impact of biological weapons on surrounding sea life fell violently ill. Because the weapons program was highly classified, no one recognized it as smallpox. The patient was returned to the mainland and admitted to hospital. The initial victim made a full recovery, but within days, multiple other people, including children as young as nine, began showing signs of infection.

Ten people were infected and three died before local health officials realized it was smallpox. They were baffled. Smallpox had been wiped out in the USSR since the 1930s, so how had it returned? Biological weapons researchers like Pyotr Burgasov knew immediately what had happened, but the program was top secret.

When Burgasov contacted Yuri Andropov, the head of the KGB, to warn him about the outbreak, he was ordered to never speak of it again. Fortunately, a swift response by local health officials and the fact that most citizens already carried the smallpox vaccine prevented a major outbreak. The Soviet authorities covered it up completely, and it was only rediscovered years later when bioweapons scientists defected and revealed what they knew. But the smallpox leak was not the worst leak from the Soviet biowarfare program.

In 1979, scientists at a biowarfare facility in the city of Sverdlovsk were working with Bacillus anthracis, better known as anthrax. The powdered substance was being weaponized, and large amounts were stored at the facility. Sometime on April 2, maintenance crews failed to replace filters in the facility’s ventilation system. The overload caused a large amount of anthrax to be sucked into the ventilation and dispersed into the air outside.

Anthrax was already spreading through the air by the time officials realized what had happened. In a chilling foreshadowing of the Chernobyl disaster seven years later, Soviet officials downplayed the disaster among themselves and kept it a total secret in the crucial first hours and days. They apparently hoped the anthrax would disperse harmlessly. On April 4, the first victims in the city and surrounding villages showed up at hospitals presenting signs of anthrax poisoning: bleeding sores, difficulty breathing, vomiting blood, and other terrible physical effects.

Sources disagree on how many people were infected. Officially, ninety-five people were infected and sixty-eight died. Other sources claim the numbers were higher, with some counting over a hundred deaths. Because of the wind and the height of the chimney dispersing the anthrax, no one in the biowarfare program itself was infected.

Every single known victim was a civilian. The authorities rushed to cover it up. They administered anthrax vaccines to nearby residents, refusing to explain why they were doing so or what had happened. Instead, they claimed there had been a naturally occurring anthrax outbreak caused by rotten meat.

It took foreign observers and whistleblowers to expose the disaster years later. Only in 1992 did Russian President Boris Yeltsin officially reveal that biowarfare experiments had caused the outbreak. But even as the Soviets hid their own responsibility for biowarfare disasters, they were inventing responsibility for them on the part of their enemies. The secrecy with which they conducted their twisted experiments showed they knew how monstrous they were, and they understood that any normal person, horrified by such revelations, might turn against the government that performed them.

The KGB realized the same logic would work against the United States. Starting in 1983, the KGB launched an active measures campaign accusing the United States of secret experiments that had created the new and terrifying AIDS virus. AIDS had first emerged in 1981 and caused global panic. At the time its origins were unknown, and its emergence in the United States gave the KGB the chance to pin the blame on Washington.

The KGB planted the claim in India first, hoping to turn the Indian people away from the Americans. Soviet-linked newspapers published the story that US experiments had created AIDS and that the Americans were about to move those experiments to secret labs in Pakistan. The rumor gained little traction at first, but a renewed propaganda effort in 1985 reignited the story, and it spread quickly around the globe. Newspapers in communist countries published the claims, and sympathetic journalists and academics in the West amplified them without evidence.

The East German Stasi recruited a retired biophysicist named Jacob Segal to publish pamphlets alleging that US intelligence had created AIDS in a laboratory and used the country’s gay population as guinea pigs for their new biological weapon. The Soviets then ensured Segal’s claims were circulated, especially in Africa, which was especially hard hit by the epidemic, hoping to trigger a backlash against America and move the continent into the Soviet orbit. The KGB and Stasi knew the claims were false, as did the scientific community in both the Western and communist worlds. Even the president of the USSR’s Academy of Medical Science dismissed the idea as nonsense.

The rebuttal from the global scientific community and the USSR’s own scientists eventually forced the campaign to be halted by 1988, but the damage was done. The KGB had successfully spread the rumor around the world. Even today, a sizable number of people believe AIDS was man-made, including as many as 15 percent of Americans. The belief remains popular in Africa, where that assumption has worked its way into government policy and scientific research on the continent, undermining efforts to fight the disease and save lives.

Russia does not have a law requiring the declassification of state secrets. It has kept the KGB archives mostly closed since the fall of the USSR and shows no signs of opening them. Everything covered in this history represents only some of the horrific revelations from a tiny portion of those archives. It is unknown how many more and worse horrors remain locked away in Soviet files.

But more disturbing than the past secrets are the present ones. One of the reasons so little has been declassified is that those programs have continued to the present day. The Soviet poison program was resumed by the Russian Federation in the 1990s and remains active. Political dissidents like Alexei Navalny, defectors like Alexander Litvinenko, and even foreign politicians like Ukrainian Prime Minister Viktor Yushchenko have been attacked by Russia using poisons developed and distributed by the same program set up all those years ago.

The name and flag changed, but the methods and goals have not.