“AP” is shorthand for “anti-plague,” and many of the photographs and details about these efforts are only preserved in these 12 volumes. They contain scientific manuscripts, as well as more unexpected historical material: biographies, poems, sketches, lists of scientists purged for political crimes, and a meditation on “Socialism or a Just Society.” The editor, Moisey Iosifovich Levi, was a former anti-plague scientist who began compiling the series after the fall of the Soviet Union. “The idea is to shine light on the activity and people of the AP system,” he wrote in the introduction to the fifth volume, “so that it does not suffer the same fate as legendary Atlantis, which is now known only from the tales of ancient Greek historians.”

Levi died before the last volume was published in 2002, but indeed, these stories have been saved. CNS researchers also translated excerpts into English and donated an original copy in Russian to the Hoover Institute at Stanford. Altogether, the volumes tell a very different tale about the plague in the Soviet Union than what the country was telling the rest of the world.

Eradication began in earnest in the 1930s, as part of Soviet efforts to change the economies of the Northern Caucasus and Central Asia. To eliminate the plague, they decided to eliminate the rodents that act as a natural reservoir for the bacteria. The weapon of choice was grain mixed with poison—zinc phosphide, black cyanide, and barium fluoracetate. “Literally tens of thousands of people were employed to just spoon poison into the burrows,” says Susan D. Jones, a historian of science at the University of Minnesota who recently published about the Soviet anti-plague system in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Many of these workers were locals: women, young boys, and the otherwise unemployed. Scientists in Interesting Stories occasionally groused about their unreliability.

Read: An ancient case of the plague could rewrite history

In addition to eradicating rodents, the Soviets also tried to eradicate fleas that spread the plague. The workers mixed insecticide with the rodent poison they put in flea-infested burrows. In the years after World War II, says Jones, surplus military trucks and airplanes also sprayed DDT over vast tracts of land. Lastly, they would burn the vegetation (so that any surviving rodents would have no food) and plow the burrows (so they would have no shelter).

In 1960, Soviet scientists boasted in the Bulletin of the World Health Organization that the U.S.S.R. had not seen a case of human plague since 1928. But that was only true on paper. In reality, scientists were still responding to outbreaks. Because mandates were passed down centrally and because the fear of admitting failure was intense and legitimate, no one wanted to report one.