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Vozrozhdeniya Island
SSG Fowler, Jacob
United States Army
CBRN ALC Class 523-03
SFC Assadi
22 March 2023
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The application of Biological Warfare Agents has been a topic of enigma and trepidation.
Throughout the past hundred years, many of our Worlds Governments have maintained an
incredible level of secrecy when it comes to their own development of biological agents. The
widespread use of biological warfare agents has fortunately never occurred in any of the world’s
recent wars, but we are becoming more and more aware of efforts to weaponize these products
for tactical advantage. One of the more commonly known examples is the biological weapons
testing site known as Aralsk-7, constructed by the Soviet Union in the early 1950s.
During the 1920s, the Soviet Union, more specifically the Red Army, were in search of a
site that could adequately support their initiative to design, test, and mass-produce agents of
biological warfare. Only a few locations could fit the bill, due in part to the requirements of the
terrain. The Red Army needed an island with a significant land mass that was between five to ten
kilometers from the nearest coastline. Ultimately, Vozrozhdeniya Island was chosen, as it met all
the needed criteria and was situated within the Soviet borders (Patowary, 2017). The island as it
sat was located within the Aral Sea, straddled by the Uzbekistan border to its South, and the
Kazakhstan Border to its North. In 1936, the first expedition to the island was conducted by the
Red Army itself, led by Ivan Mikhailovich Velikanov and a team of approximately one hundred
personnel to spearhead tests and experiments on the island. Within the first year of the operation,
Velikanov was abruptly arrested and executed by his superiors, with insubordination being the
alleged reason. Following his death, a second expedition was in its planning phase and Leonid
Moiseevich Khatanever was named the director of the newly formed Soviet Biotechnical
Institute, who had a heavy emphasis and interest in the research and use of Francisella tularensis.
With the commencement of the second expedition, a large array of funding and resources were
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allocated to the Institute to develop dissemination techniques for the Tularemia bacteria
(Patowary, 2017).
In 1948, the island became the established home of a classified bioweapons laboratory,
where the primary function was to test the effectiveness of various agents, including anthrax,
plague, smallpox, and tularemia. Six years later the island facility was expanded and
redesignated as Aralsk-7, which was extensively utilized by the Soviet Microbiological Warfare
Group to fulfill their tasking to design and test the lethal effects of multiple diseases. This
initiative to develop Soviet biological warfare agents came with a sudden and fierce driving
force, as the Soviet Military and Civil Leadership had become greatly concerned that the Soviet
Union was vulnerable to what was suspected to be a NATO-developed array of viral-based
biological weapons. Prior to 1954, the Soviet Union had only one Moscow-based facility that
was fixated on virology research, and they knew that wasn’t enough. Throughout the 1950s and
60s, Vozrozhdeniya Island became just one of several institutions that were constructed in
response to a perceived threat to the USSR (Tucker, 2002).
Over the course of 20 years, the Island was operational at an unrestricted rate until 1972,
when the USSR apprehensively signed the treaty pertaining to the Biological Weapons
Convention. The Convention sought to abolish the development, production, and stockpiling of
biological weapons around the globe (Gorvett, 2017). Although it was respectable in theory,
international circumstances prevented select countries from following through with their
commitment. Shortly after signing, the USSR ultimately decided to amplify its program citing
the suspicion that the United States continued to produce and store its own biological warfare
agents despite the treaty. In the years following, problems arose in the Soviet bioweapon effort
due in part to its rivalry in funding with the Nuclear Arms effort. Therefore, the Program
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annexed a multitude of departments and agencies within the Soviet Union, including the KGB,
the Ministry of Defense, the Ministry of Health, and the Ministry of Agriculture. Two years after
the signing of the 1972 BWC Treaty, a new agency was formed within the USSR known as
Bioprepat with the offensive objective to spearhead the biological weapon effort. For nearly a
decade, the agency conducted top-secret operations across the Soviet Union and employed 3040,000 people (Gorvett, 2017).
Prior to the signing of the BWC Treaty, in 1971 Vozrozhdeniya Island became the site of
an accidental release of the variola virus, which is the common cause of smallpox. The outbreak
infected ten people, three of whom subsequently died. This occurrence, coupled with the
worldwide initiative to put an end to Biological Weapons, ultimately resulted in the facility’s
decline. Fortunately for the Soviets, the use of censorship and threats allowed Aralsk-7’s risk and
recklessness to be maintained in secrecy, allowing the testing site to carry out operations for the
following decade. The situation in the Soviet Union pertaining to the presence of a Bioweapon
Program came to international view in the 1990s when multiple Soviet defectors broke their
silence and informed the public of dangerous and illegal activities taking place as a result of the
biological warfare initiative. These defectors’ testimonies, combined with several disastrous
bioweapon incidents that caused Soviet loss of life, led to the at-time Russian President Boris
Yeltsin publicly admitting to the Russian presence of an offensive bioweapon program. In 1991,
Soviet authorities convened to discuss the future of Aralsk-7, triggered by the impending end of
the USSR. The following year, President Boris Yeltsin announced that Russia was going to be
compliant with NATO’s stance on biological warfare and dismantle the former-Soviet
bioweapon program (Tucker, 2002).
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By the Summer of 1992, all operations at Aralsk-7 ceased, and Vozrozhdeniya Island was
hastily evacuated of its approximately fifteen hundred workers and military personnel. Due to the
sudden withdrawal, most of the infrastructure on the island was deserted untouched, and Aralsk7 and the surrounding areas of inhabitation became a hazardous wasteland. A large amount of the
storage units that contained the biological warfare agents were abandoned and have become
increasingly unstable over the years. Within the past two decades, clean-up efforts have
successfully mitigated most of the biological hazards, although it is still highly inadvisable that
any personnel visit the area without an escort (Tucker, 2002).
As it sits today, Vozrozhdeniya Island and the lake it sat on have gone through a
multitude of environmental changes, so much so that all that remains is a large dried lake bed of
little water and desolate life. Remnants of Aralsk-7 can still be seen to this day, as a subtle but
haunting reminder of the dark history of Biological Warfare.
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References
Gorvett, Zaria. (2017). The deadly germ warfare island abandoned by the Soviets. The BBC.
Retrieved from: https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20170926-the-deadly-germ-warfareisland-abandoned-by-the-soviets
Patowary, Kaushik. (2017). Vozrozhdeniya, The Anthrax Island. The Amusing Planet.
Retrieved from: https://www.amusingplanet/2017/10/vozrozhdeniya-anthrax-island.html
Rissanen, Jenni. (2003). The Biological Weapons Convention. Nuclear Threat Initiative.
Retrieved from: https://www.nti.org/analysis/articles/biological/weapons/convention/
Tucker, Jonathan B. (2002) The 1971 Smallpox Epidemic in Aralsk, Kazakhstan, and the Soviet
Biological Warfare Program. James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies.
Retrieved from: