For almost 45 years, a Soviet biological weapons testing center existed on a godforsaken island in the middle of the Aral Sea. A residential town with a school, shops, post office, canteen, scientific laboratories and, of course, a testing ground where large-scale tests of deadly biological agents, including anthrax, plague, tularemia, brucellosis, typhoid, took place. In the early 1990s, after the collapse of the USSR, the military threw both the city and the training ground in the Aral sands.
Back in the late 1920s, the command of the Workers 'and Peasants' Red Army was preoccupied with the choice of a location for a scientific center for the development of biological weapons and a test site. The task of spreading the proletarian revolution to the whole world was still on the agenda, and shells with deadly strains inside could accelerate the construction of a state of workers and peasants on a planetary scale. For this good purpose it was necessary to select a relatively large island with a distance from the coast of at least 5-10 kilometers. They even looked for a suitable candidate on Lake Baikal, but in the end they decided to stop at three objects: the Solovetsky Islands in the White Sea and the single Gorodomlya islands on Lake Seliger and Vozrozhdenie in the Aral Sea.
The main pre-war center for the study of this important issue was the Gorodomlya island located in the Tver region, which was relatively close to the capital of the USSR. In 1936-1941, it was here that the 3rd testing laboratory, the main Soviet center for the development of biological weapons, was transferred from the Suzdal monasteries and was subordinate to the Military Chemical Directorate of the Red Army. However, the Great Patriotic War convincingly showed that such institutions should henceforth be created much further from the borders of the USSR with potential opponents.
Renaissance Island was perfect for this task. This unpopulated piece of land in the Aral Sea, an endless salt lake on the border of Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, was discovered in 1848. The lifeless archipelago, where there was no fresh water, for some unimaginable reason was called the Tsar's Islands, and its constituent parts - the islands of Nikolai, Constantine and the Heir. It was Nikolai, who was optimistically (or perhaps ironically) renamed Vozrozhdenie Island, who, after the war, became a top-secret Soviet base-testing ground for testing deadly diseases put in the service of the motherland.
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This island, with an area of about 200 square kilometers, at first glance met all safety requirements: practically uninhabited surroundings, flat relief, hot climate, unsuitable for the survival of pathogenic organisms.
In the summer of 1936, the first expedition of military biologists headed by Professor Ivan Velikanov, the father of the Soviet bacteriological program, landed here. The island was taken from the jurisdiction of the NKVD, the exiled kulaks were evicted from here, and the following year they tested some bioagents based on tularemia, plague and cholera. The work was complicated by the repressions to which the leadership of the Military Chemical Directorate of the Red Army was subjected (Velikanov, for example, was shot in 1938), and was suspended during the Great Patriotic War, in order to resume with even greater zeal after its end.
In the northern part of the island, the military town of Kantubek was built, officially named Aralsk-7. In general, it was similar to hundreds of its other analogues that arose in the vastness of the Soviet Union: a dozen and a half residential buildings for officers and scientific personnel, a club, a canteen, a stadium, shops, barracks and parade ground, its own power plant. This is how Aralsk-7 looked in the image of the American spy satellite of the late 1960s.
A unique airfield "Barkhan" was also built near the village, the only one in the Soviet Union that had four runways resembling a wind rose. A strong wind always blows on the island, sometimes changing its direction. Depending on the current weather, the planes landed on one or another lane.
In total, there were up to one and a half thousand soldiers and their families here. It was, in essence, an ordinary garrison life, the features of which were perhaps the special secrecy of the facility and the not very comfortable climate. Children went to school, their parents went to work, in the evenings they watched movies in the officers' house, and on weekends they had picnics on the shores of the Aral Sea, which until the mid-1980s still really looked like the sea.
Kantubek at the time of its heyday. With the nearest city on the "mainland", Aralsk, there was a sea connection. Fresh water was also delivered here by barges, which was then stored in special huge tanks on the outskirts of the village.
A laboratory complex (PNIL-52 - the 52nd field research laboratory) was built a few kilometers from the village, where, among other things, experimental animals were kept, which became the main victims of the tests carried out here. The scale of research is illustrated by the following fact. In the 1980s, a batch of 500 monkeys was purchased specifically for them in Africa through the USSR Foreign Trade Ministry. All of them eventually became victims of the tularemia microbe strain, after which their corpses were burned, and the resulting ashes were buried on the island.
The southern part of the island was occupied by the actual test site. It was here that shells were blown up or pathogenic strains based on anthrax, plague, tularemia, Q fever, brucellosis, glanders, and other especially dangerous infections were blown up or sprayed from an aircraft, as well as a large number of artificially created biological agents.
The location of the test site in the south was determined by the nature of the prevailing winds on the island. The aerosol cloud formed as a result of the test, in fact, a weapon of mass destruction, was blown away by the wind in the direction opposite from the military town, after which anti-epidemic measures and decontamination of the territory were carried out without fail. A hot climate with a regular forty-degree heat was an additional factor ensuring the safety of military biologists: most bacteria and viruses died from prolonged exposure to high temperatures. All specialists participating in the tests also underwent mandatory quarantine.
Simultaneously with the post-war intensification of military scientific work on the Vozrozhdeniye island, the Soviet leadership laid an imperceptible at first the beginning of an ecological catastrophe, which ultimately led to the colossal degradation of the Aral Sea. The main source of food for the lake-sea was the Amu Darya and the Syr Darya. In total, these two largest rivers of Central Asia supplied about 60 cubic kilometers of water to the Aral Sea per year. In the 1960s, the waters of these rivers began to be sorted out by reclamation canals - it was decided to turn the surrounding deserts into a garden and grow cotton there so much needed by the national economy. The result was not long in coming: the cotton harvest, of course, increased, but the Aral Sea began to rapidly grow shallow.
In the early 1970s, the amount of river water reaching the sea decreased by a third, after another decade, only 15 cubic kilometers per year began to flow into the Aral Sea, and in the mid-1980s this figure completely dropped to 1 cubic kilometer. By 2001, the sea level dropped by 20 meters, the volume of water decreased 3 times, the area of the water surface - 2 times. The Aral was divided into two large lakes not connected with each other and many small ones. In the future, the shallowing process continued.
With the shallowing of the sea, the area of the Vozrozhdeniye Island began to increase just as rapidly - and in the 1990s it grew almost 10 times. The Tsar's Islands first merged into one island, and in the 2000s it merged with the "mainland" and turned, in fact, into a peninsula.
The collapse of the USSR finally "buried" the test site on the Vozrozhdeniye Island. Weapons of mass destruction turned into an entity of little relevance in post-Soviet realities, and in November 1991 the military biological laboratory Aralsk-7 was closed. The population of the village was evacuated within a few weeks, all the infrastructure (residential and laboratory), equipment were abandoned, Kantubek turned into a ghost town.
The place of the military was quickly taken by marauders, who in their own way appreciated the wealth of the former top-secret scientific center left by the army and scientists. Everything that was of any value and at the same time amenable to dismantling and transportation was removed from the island. Kantubek-Aralsk-7 has become an elusive dream for fans of abandoned cities.
The streets of the town of Soviet military biologists, where garrison life was flowing smoothly two decades ago.
Residential buildings.
Children will never go to this school.
A reservoir for fresh water delivered from the "mainland".
Former Voentorg store.
Unlike the Chernobyl exclusion zone, you can stay here without risk to your health. The biological threat is much less tenacious than radiation, although ecologists still sound the alarm because of the burial grounds continuing to exist on the territory of the former test site with the remains of animals that died during the tests.
However, sometimes the landscapes still resemble the surroundings of such a distant Ukrainian Pripyat.
Renaissance Island with its mysterious top-secret history and apocalyptic present could not fail to interest the developers of computer games, ending up in one of the episodes of Call of Duty: Black Ops.
The shallow Aral Sea opens up a wide scope for geological exploration activities. Already in the 1990s, oil, gas, and rare non-ferrous metals were discovered here. Their active development, on the one hand, and the transformation of the Renaissance Island into a peninsula, on the other, make it more and more likely that more and more people will contact the territory of the military biological laboratory.
And although the military and civilian authorities claim that all the necessary security measures in relation to the former landfill were taken in a timely manner, one can only guess what else the island of Renaissance may hide in its bowels and how unpleasant these surprises can be for humanity.