Aralsk-7 is a closed ghost town where biological weapons were tested.On a godforsaken island
in the middle of the Aral Sea there was a Soviet biological weapons testing center.
A residential town with a school, shops, a post office, a canteen, scientific laboratories
and, of course, a testing ground where lethal biological agents, including anthrax, plague,
tularemia, brucellosis, typhus, were tested on a large scale. In the early 1990s, after
the collapse of the USSR, the military abandoned both the city and the polygon in the Aral
sands.Back in the late 1920s, the command of the Workers’ and Peasants’ Red Army
was concerned about the choice of a place to house a scientific center for the development
of biological weapons and a testing groundfor them. The task of spreading the proletarian
revolution around the world was still on the agenda, and shells with deadly strains inside
could accelerate the construction of a planetary state of workers and peasants. For that good
purpose, a relatively large island with at least 5-10 kilometres from shore had to be
selected. A suitable candidate was sought even on Baikal, but in the end it was decided
to stop at three sites: Solovetsky islands in the White Sea and single islands of Gorodoml
on Lake Seliger and Renaissance in the Aral Sea.The main pre-war center for the study
of this important issue was 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 Test Laboratory,
the main Soviet center for the development of biological weapons, which was transferred
from the Suzdal monasteries and subordinated to the Military Chemical Department of the
Red Army, was located. However, the Great Patriotic War has convincingly shown that
such institutions should be created much farther from the borders of the USSR with the probable
enemies. Renaissance Island was ideally suited for
this task. This deserted piece of land in the Aral Sea, a drainless salt lake on the
border of Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, was opened in 1848. The lifeless archipelago, where there
was no fresh water, for some unimaginable reason was called the Tsarist Islands, and
its component parts –the islands of Nicholas, Constantine and Heir. It was Nicholas, optimistically
(or perhaps ironically) renamed the island of the Renaissance, became after the war a
top-secret Soviet base-testing ground for the deadly diseases put at the service of
the motherland.This island with an area of about 200 square kilometers at first sight
met all the safety requirements: almost uninhabited surroundings, flat terrain, hot climate, unsuitable
for the survival of pathogens.In summer 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 away from the NKVD, exiled kulaks were evicted and the following
year they tested some bioagents based on tularemia, plague and cholera. The work was complicated
by the repressions suffered by the leadership of the Military-Chemical Department of the
Red Army (Velikanov, for example, was shot in 1938) and was suspended for the duration
of the Great Patriotic War to resume with even greater diligence after the war.In the
northern part of the island was built a military town Kantubek, officially called Aralsk-7.
In general, it was similar to hundreds of other analogues that emerged in the Soviet
Union: a dozen and a half houses of officers and scientific staff, a club, dining room,
stadium, shops, barracks and a place of worship, its own power plant. This is what Aralsk-7
looked like on the image of an American spy satellite of the late 1960s.A unique airfield
«Barkhan» was built near the village, the only one in the Soviet Union that had four
runways reminiscent of the rose of winds. The strong wind always blows on the island,
sometimes changing its direction. Depending on the current weather, planes landed on one
or another runway.In total there were up to one and a half thousand soldiers and their
families. It was, in fact, an ordinary garrison life, the features of which were only special
secrecy of the object and not too comfortable climate. The children went to school, their
parents were on duty, in the evenings they watched a movie in the officers' house, and
on weekends they had picnics on the shore of the Aral Sea, which until the mid 1980s
was still really like the sea.Kantubek at its heyday. With the nearest city on the "big
land", the Aral Sea, maritime traffic was carried out. Fresh water was also brought
here by barge, which was then stored in special huge reservoirs on the outskirts of the settlement.A
few kilometers from the village was built a laboratory complex (PNIL-52 -52nd field
research laboratory), which, among other things, kept the experimental animals, who became
the main victims of the tests carried out here. The scale of the research is illustrated
by the following fact. In 1980s, the USSR purchased a batch of 500 monkeys specially
for them in Africa through Vneshtorg. All of them eventually became victims of a strain
of tularemia microbe, after which their corpses were burned and the resulting ashes were buried
on the island.The southern part of the island was occupied by a test site itself. It was
here that shells were detonated or airborne pathogenic strains of anthrax, plague, tularaemia,
Ku fever, brucellosis, sap and other highly dangerous infections, as well as a large number
of artificiallycreated biological agents, were atomized. (Photo clickable)The location
of the polygon in the south was determined by the nature of prevailing winds on the island.
The resultant aerosol cloud, in effect a weapon of mass destruction, was windward from the
military camp, followed by mandatory epidemiological measures and decontamination of the Territory.
A hot climate with a regular 40-degree heat was an additional factor that ensured the
safety of military biologists: most bacteria and viruses died from prolonged exposure to
high temperatures. All specialists participating in the tests were also subject to mandatory
quarantine.Simultaneously with the post-war activation of military research on Renaissance
Island, the Soviet leadership laid the invisible at the beginning of the environmental disaster,
which eventually led to the colossal degradation of the Aral Sea. The Amudarya and Syrdarya
were the main source of food for the lake and the sea. In total, these two largest rivers
in Central Asia supplied the Aral Sea with about 60 cubic kilometres of water per year.
In the 1960s, the waters of these rivers began to be sorted out by melioration canals -it
was decided to turn the surrounding deserts into gardens and grow there such a necessary
for the national economy cotton. The result did not take long: the cotton harvest certainly
increased, but the Aral Sea began to chalk rapidly. In the early 1970s, the amount of
river water reaching the sea decreased by a third, after another decade, the Aral Sea
began to receive only 15 cubic kilometers per year, and in the mid 1980s, this figure
fell to 1 cubic kilometer. By 2001, the sea level had dropped by 20 metres, the volume
of water had fallen by a factor of 3, and the surface area of the water had doubled.
The Aral Sea is divided into two unrelated large lakes and many small ones. Later the
shallowing process continued.The area of Renaissance Island with the shallowing of the sea began
to increase as rapidly -and in the 1990's increased almost 10 times. The Tsarist Islands
first merged into one island, and in the 2000s it merged with the "big land" and essentially
became a peninsula.The collapse of the USSR finally "buried" the test site on the Renaissance
island. Weapons of mass destruction turned into an irrelevant entity in the post-Soviet
realities, and in November 1991 the military biology laboratory Aralsk-7 was closed. The
population of the settlement was evacuated within a few weeks, all infrastructure (residential
and laboratory), equipment was abandoned, Kantubek turned into a ghost town.The place
of the military was quickly occupied by looters, who in their own way evaluated the wealth
of the former top-secret scientific center left by the army and scientists. Anything
of anyvalue that could be dismantled and transported was removed from the island. Kantubek Aralsk-7
became an elusive dream for lovers of abandoned cities The streets of the town of Soviet military
biologists, where two and a half decades ago, the garrison life ran smoothly.Residential
buildings.The kids will never go to this school again.A reservoir of fresh water from the
«big land.»Former Voentorg shop.Unlike the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, there’s no health
risk to be here. The biological threat is far less survivable than radiation, although
environmentalists are still beating the whistle because of the continued existence of the
former graveyard site with remnants of animals that died in the testing process.Sometimes,
however, the scenery still resembles the surroundings of such a faraway Ukrainian town of Pripyat.
Renaissance Island with its mysterious top-secret history and apocalyptic present could not
but interest developers of computer games, caught in one of the episodes of Call of Duty:Black
Ops.The shallow Aral Sea opens a wide space for exploration activities. Already in the
1990’s there were discovered deposits of oil, gas, rare non-ferrous metals. Their active
development on the one hand and the transformation of Renaissance Island into a peninsula on
the other make contact with the territory of the military biological laboratory more
and more likely.While military and civilian authorities claim that all necessary security
measures have been taken in a timely manner with respect to the former firing range, one
can only guess what else might conceal Renaissance Island and how unpleasant these surprises
could be to humanity.