‘A magisterial, human, vividly readable account of a remarkable time’
Posted on 2011/02/05 , tagged as
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Peter Preston reviews The Dead Hand for the Guardian today. It’s not just a history, though, he says:
‘As Hoffman weaves in the story of how the Soviet Union, through its covert Biopreparat agency, secretly went on with massive research into germ warfare long after Richard Nixon and the west had abandoned it, he enters a chill caveat. Gorbachev may or may not have known what was going on. Yeltsin certainly didn’t. There was no command and no control as Russia lost its satellite states and Iranian and Iraqi middle-men came shopping for anthrax or leftover uranium. The seeds of a new paranoia were sown.’
