Vozrozhdeniya Island

This article is about the former island. For the album by folk metal band Arkona, see Vozrozhdeniye.

Vozrozhdeniya

Native name: Kazakh: Возрождение аралы Uzbek: Vozrojdeniye oroli
File:Vozrozhdeniya Island.jpg
Geography
Location	Central Asia
Country
Kazakhstan Uzbekistan
Demographics
Population	1,500 (as of 1980s)

Rebirth Island joins the mainland in mid-2001.

Vozrozhdeniya Island (Russian: Остров Возрождения, Ostrov Vozrozhdeniya, which translates as Rebirth Island or Renaissance Island) was an island in the Aral Sea during the Soviet Union. Now the former island is owned by Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan (as of the early 1980s). In 1954, a biological weapons test site called Aralsk-7 was built there and on the neighboring Komsomolskiy Island.

Geography

Vozrozhdeniya was once a small island; in 19th century its size was only 200 square feet. However, the island began to grow in size in the 1960s as the Aral Sea dried up due to its feeder rivers being dammed by the Soviet Union for agricultural projects. The shrinkage of the Aral continued and accelerated, and Vozrozhdeniya became a peninsula in mid-2001 when the channel to its south dried up completely and became a land bridge. Upon the disappearance of the Southeast Aral Sea in 2008, Vozrozhdeniya effectively ceased to exist as a distinct geographical feature. It briefly reemerged as a peninsula in 2010 when the eastern basin was flooded by heavy snow melt.

History

Back in 1920s leaders of the Red Army were concerned with selecting an appropriate place for building a science and military complex for invention and production of bioweapons and a polygon for testing those inventions. An expansion of a proletarian revolution and spreading it across the world was one of the first goals on the leaders’ agenda, and the potential of bioweapons to bring fatal outcomes in huge size was considered as an effective supporting mechanism in realization of this goal.

An ideal location for such complex would be a relatively big island in 5–10 km from a coast. An appropriate place for building the complex had been initially searched for near the Lake Baikal, but the final selection of potential places for building the complex included Solovetsky Islands in the White Sea, Gorodomlya Island located on Lake Seliger and Vozrozhdeniya Island in the Aral Sea.

Several unsuccessful attempts to build the complex during 1936-1941 and the Russian Civil War led to an understanding that such a complex must be created further from boundaries of the Soviet Union with other states. The Vozrozhdeniya Island satisfied this important consideration. After the war it became an extra-secret Soviet base for invention and testing the effects of multiple fatal diseases.

Located in the central Aral Sea, Vozrozhdeniya Island was one of the main laboratories and testing sites for the Soviet Union's Microbiological Warfare Group. In 1948, a top-secret Soviet bioweapons laboratory was established here, which tested a variety of agents, including anthrax, smallpox, plague, brucellosis, and tularemia. In 1971, a release of weaponized smallpox from the island infected ten people, of whom 3 died.

In the 1990s, word of the island's danger was spread by Soviet defectors, including Ken Alibek, the former head of the Soviet Union's bioweapons program. It was here, according to recently released documents, that anthrax spores and bubonic plague bacilli were made into weapons and stored. The main town on the island was Kantubek, which lies in ruins today, but once had approximately 1,500 inhabitants. The official name of this city was Aralsk-7. It looked like a typical city built during Soviet times- small size and simple infrastructure that consisted of a social club, a stadium, a couple of schools and shops.

A unique airfield "Barkhan" was located closely to Kantubek. It was the only airfield in the Soviet Union that had four runways. The weather on the island changes very frequently; thus, planes landed on one of the four runways depending on current weather and wind direction .

In the Post-Soviet realm the idea of mass destruction lost its relevance. Eventually, the bioweapon invention complex and a test site Aralsk-7 was closed in November 1991. People who lived on the Vozrozhdeniaya Island were evacuated within several weeks; civil and military infrastructure were desolated and Kantubek turned into a ghost town.

Many of the containers holding the spores were not properly stored or destroyed, and over the last decade many of these containers have developed leaks.

In 2002, through a project organized and funded by the United States with Uzbekistan assistance, 10 anthrax burial sites were decontaminated.

In popular culture

• In the video game Command & Conquer: Generals, the island was under U.S. occupation but was captured by the fictional Global Liberation Army.
• The area and its former Soviet biological weapons base and laboratories was featured in a mission in the video game Call of Duty: Black Ops.
• In the novel The Home Team: Weapons Grade, by Dennis Chalker and Kevin Dockery, the villains dig two metric tons of "Anthrax 836" up from an impromptu dump site 11 km from Rebirth Island for use in a terror plot.

See also

• Biopreparat
• Ken Alibek
• Kantubek
• Gruinard Island in Scotland, another location formerly used for anthrax testing.

External links

• Abandoned Anthrax: Vozrozhdeniye Island. Sometimes Interesting. 29 Nov 2014
• Youtube: Going To Extremes: Voz-Island (Part 1)
• Youtube: Going To Extremes: Voz-Island (Part 2)
• Welcome to Anthrax Island - Guardian Unlimited
• Rebirth Island joins the mainland (2000 and 2001 satellite images)
• NASA satellite image comparison between 1989 and 2003
• Biological Decontamination of Vozrozhdeniye Island: The U.S.-Uzbek Agreement
• Former Soviet Biological Weapons Facilities in Kazakhstan: Past, Present, and Future
• 1960's Satellite images of Soviet laboratory
• Top Inhospitable Places in the World