Vozrozhdeniya Island AKA "Anthrax Island"

I think an article on the BBC starts out the best possible way: "On the Khazakh-Uzbek border, surrounded by miles of toxic desert, lies an island. Or at least, something that used to be an island."

Once upon a time, the Aral Sea was the world's fourth largest inland sea, and full of life. In the 1920s and 30s, this particular island served the duel purpose of a fantastic summer vacation village on the one hand, good for fishing and relaxing on the beach, and a GULAG on the other. But, I'll get to that. 

Then, due to Soviet mismanagement of water, the Aral Sea dried up. Now it has lost 90% of its water, and if you google images of it, you see the wreckages of ships beached on sand bereft of life. A graveyard of the past. 

This drying up did more than just strike a death blow to the world's fourth largest inland sea, it also connected Vozrozhdeniya Island to the mainland, and increased its size by over ten times.

Image from this site.

More recently, the island has become known for being one of the the most dangerous toxic sites in the world. From the BBC:

From the 1970s, the island has been implicated in a number of sinister incidents. In 1971, a young scientist fell ill after a research vessel, the Lev Berg, strayed into a brownish haze. Days later, she was diagnosed with smallpox. Mysteriously, she had already been vaccinated against the disease. Though she recovered, the outbreak went on to infect a further nine people back in her hometown, three of whom died. One of these was her younger brother.

A year later, the corpses of two missing fishermen were found nearby, drifting in their boat. It's thought that they had caught the plague. Not long afterwards, locals started landing whole nets of dead fish*. No one knows why. Then in may 1988, 50,000 saiga antelope which had been grazing on a nearby steppe dropped dead* —in the space of an hour. 

The island itself is so remote, it wasn't really discovered until the mid 1800s. After that, it was used for a time as a GULAG for kulaks and a summer fishing village, and then the soviets decided they wanted to do a few things, and they'd need some secret, remote places they could use to do said things, and didn't this one island off in the middle of the Aral Sea look great? Then, when the location was decided upon, the island stopped existing. It wasn't on maps. It's name didn't exist anywhere. It was erased. 

In 1936, ownership of the island transferred to the Sanitarno-Tekhnichesky Institut (STI), the medical-technical institute division in the fifteenth directorate of the Worker's and Peasant's Red Army (RKKA). That year, the director of the STI decided he would conduct open air testing of tuberculosis on that island, and so a small military group were sent there to hastily construct a village, barrack, the bare essentials of things they would need. In May 1937, testing began. At this point, the denizens of the island were receiving routine drops of various biologically exciting packages, like leprosy, smallpox, and the plague. 

Testing was going well, but soon the director of the STI and his fellow scientists were arrested by the NKVD (Note: I researched to see if he got swept up in one of Stalin's purges, which makes sense due to the date it happened, but I never found anything definitive. I think it's close enough though, that I can easily assume he got swept up in the Terror.) which halted testing for a time. For the next seventeen years, the island basically goes dark. 

Image from this site.

In 1954, the Soviet Minister of Defense decided to re-open Vozrozhdeniya Island, only this time he wanted it to be bigger and better, and more importantly: lasting. He immediately began improving what was already there, building more sturdy buildings, and more buildings, testing facilities, labs and the like. Once that was done, he launched Biopreparat Operations. 

"It was a program for which chemists, engineers, and scientists designed and tested some of the most deadly diseases humankind has known: Anthrax, botulinum toxin, plague, Q-fever, smallpox, tularemia, and Venezuelan equine encephalitis (among others). Strain were genetically modified to increase casualties while being resilient to withstand known medications and treatments. (sometimes interesting)

Over time, the island became known as Aralsk-7, and I'll talk a bit more about that in a minute. 

Kantubek was a village created to house those who worked on the base. It was small, but had anything anyone would need. Barges routinely brought supplies and necessities from the mainland. A soldier's family could go with them if they were stationed there, so they wouldn't be alone. They got a hardship bonus for their time there, as well. 

About two miles away from Kantubek was the lab, where a program was located known as PNIL. PNIL was mainly concerned with testing aerosol delivery, defenses, and vaccine-resistant strains pathogens. This was also where animals were kept for testing, and then extermination centers for those same animals. This lab employed 80-90 people. 

A large chunk of the island was quartered off for outdoor testing. "The testing range was used to identify dissemination patterns and to study the effectiveness of various dispersion methods of biological agents. Arrays of germ agent detection-equipped telephone poles spaced in one-kilometer intervals delivered deadly cargo and monitored the results of exposure." (Sometimes interesting) 

Heat generally reduces the absorption of dangerous spores, so peak testing season usually transpired in late spring and summer. Testing was also typically done at night, to avoid detection from the United States (we didn't have infrared on our satellites until the mid-1980s, according to Something Interesting). Animals were tested, and then once they'd been exposed to the spores, they'd be transported back to the lab where they were monitored for symptoms of the virus, their blood tested, and then their bodies autopsied. 

The area was kept secret to the world, so well, in fact, that the regions 1971 smallpox outbreak didn't become known to the wider world until 2002. While many in the West believed there was biological weapons testing going on somewhere in the region (and likely on this island due to previous satellite images), no one knew the specifics until a man named Kanatzhan Alibekov defected and spilled the beans about the island to officials in the United States. 

Image from this site.

Alibekov had been the Biopreparat director and Anthrax production manager on Vozrozhdeniya Island. "In 1992 Colonel Alibekov revealed that, dating to the 1970s, there were additional bacteria and germs tested beyond those with which the West was familiar (Tularemia, Q-fever, brucellosis, glanders, and plague studies)." (Sometimes Interesting) Alibekov told officials about numerous locations and tests on the island, and stories about what had been done there. He explained that his job was to, essentially, create the most efficient assembly line for the mass production of weaponized anthrax in the world. 

Reports of mysterious animal illnesses in the region, or animals just dropping dead, have been rampant since the early days of biological testing. Sheep bloating and falling to the ground and similar. Death by anthrax became so common, people in the area learned to recognize when it was happening to their animals. 

The race for biological weapons between the USSR, the US, and the UK was fraught, with each country struggling to take existing biological hazards, and make them even worse through cultivation. The ideal bioweapon would be resistant to both vaccines and antibiotics. Basically, it would be horrible and untreatable. To do this, scientists would take viruses and pathogens from the wild, and bring them into labs, to control their growth. 

On April 10, 1972, however, all three countries signed a treaty to give this program up. However, around that same time, the Soviet Union launched another bioweapons program, wherein using molecular genetics, scientists would create pathogens rather than cultivating them. 

This included a particularly nasty strain of anthrax, known to researchers as STI. For starters, it was resistant to an impressive array of antibiotics, including penicillin, rifampin, tetracycline, chloramphenicol, macrocodes, and lincomycin. But that's not the only reason you really, really don't want to be infected by STI. 

As if regular anthrax wasn't bad enough, the scientists decided this natural killer needed a final flourish: toxins which can rupture red blood cells and rot human tissue. Scientists took the genes from a close relative, Bacillus cereus, and added them using the latest scientific techniques. (BBC)

In 1988, the USSR decided it was time to do away with the anthrax they'd acquired through their Aralsk-7 program. According to the BBC, "Aralsk-7 was part of a bioweapons program on an industrial scale, one that employed over 50,000 people at 52 production facilities across the Soviet empire. Anthrax was produced in huge fermenting vats, tenderly nurtured as though they were growing beer." 

So, upon seeing all this anthrax they needed to get rid of, they searched for the right location do to just that, and ended up choosing Vozrozhdeniya Island as their dumping ground. They bleached the anthrax spores and carted them from locations unknown, to the island on the Aral Sea, then dumped them in these huge pits, buried them, and left. 

However, anthrax in the ground doesn't die or dissipate the same way it would in the air. Again, the BBC says it best: Most of the time, anthrax bacteria live as spores, an inactive form with extreme survival skills. They'll shrug off pretty much anything you care to throw at them —from baths of noxious disinfectants to being roasted for up to two minutes at 180C (358F). 

When they're buried in the ground, the spores can survive for hundreds of years. In one case, they were recovered from an archeological dig at the ruins of a medieval hospital in Scotland —along with the several-hundred-years-old remains of the lime they tried to kill them with.

You can't just bleach and bury this stuff and walk away. After the collapse of the USSR, global concerns over biological weapons mounted, and the United States decided to send a group of people out there to see if the anthrax had been disposed of properly. It took four months, but with United States help, the site was officially decontaminated. 

Currently, the island has been deemed safe. Biological factors like spores and bacteria require very specific conditions to thrive, and typically the open air on an island that can reach 140F in the summer isn't really it. Plus, protective measures have been taken to make the island safe. Upon a quick Google search, I discovered that there are "dark tourism" groups that regularly tour the island, it's empty testing facilities, the even emptier cages, and the hollowed-out ruins of the abandoned villages that once peppered its shores. 

Soil samples taken in 1979 revealed that, nearly four decades later, there were still between 3,000 and 45,000 spores per gram of soil. Proposals for dealing with the "contaminated monster", as it became known, ranged from concreting it all over, to removing the top layer of soil and dumping it in the North Atlantic. 

In the end, every inch of the 1.96 sq km island was sprayed with 280 metric tonnes of formaldehyde solution mixed with seawater. It was finally declared safe in 1990. Today the island can be accessed easily by boat — though you'll have to convince someone to take you first. (BBC)

The idea of this island, the knowledge of what happened there, is haunting. 

* - There are also known pollutants in the area, so the fish and antelope might have died from pollution rather than biological weapons factors, but no one really knows for sure.

Further Reading

Wikipedia - Vozrozhdeniya Island

Abandoned Anthrax: Vozrozhdeniya Island, Sometimes Interesting

Vozrozhdeniya Rebirth)/Antrhax Island - Décovrir la Vie

The Deadly Germ Warfare Island - BBC