Vozrozhdeniya Island

Vozrozhdeniya was once a small island; it was only in the nineteenth century. In the 1960s, the island began to grow in size as the Aral Sea began drying up as the Soviet Union dammed its feeder rivers for agricultural projects. The shrinkage of the Aral continued and accelerated over time, and the receding waters briefly made Vozrozhdeniya the second-largest lake island in the world, at , in the final days of its existence in mid-2001, becoming a peninsula when the South Aral Sea dried up enough that the island joined the mainland. Upon the disappearance of the Southeast Aral Sea in 2008, Vozrozhdeniya was simply a part of the surrounding land, and by 2014 it was simply a part of the land within the extensive Aralkum Desert. ==History==

In 1848–1849, a Russian marine expedition of the Aral Sea was organized with the schooner Konstantin, commanded by naval officer and investigator A. I. Butakov. One of the members who served as the expedition's artist was Taras Shevchenko. A group of islands was discovered that were named the Tzar Islands, consisting of Nicholas I Island, Konstantin Island and Naslednik Island. In the Soviet period Nicholas I Island was renamed Vozrozhdeniya. In the 1920s, leaders of the Red Army were searching for an appropriate place to build a science and military complex for inventing, producing, and testing biological weapons. An ideal location for such complex would be a relatively large island from a coast. Initial sites discussed for this complex included Lake Baikal, but choices were narrowed down to the Solovetsky Islands in the White Sea, Gorodomlya Island located on Lake Seliger and Vozrozhdeniya Island. In 1948, a top-secret Soviet bioweapons laboratory was established on the island, which tested a variety of agents, including anthrax, smallpox, plague, brucellosis, and tularemia. In 1954, the site was expanded and named Aralsk-7, one of the main laboratories and testing sites for the Soviet Union's Microbiological Warfare Group, tasked with inventing and testing the effects of multiple fatal diseases. In the earlier 1990s, word of the island's danger was spread in the west, first by Soviet defector Vladimir Pasechnik, and later by Ken Alibek, the former head of the Soviet Union's bioweapons program. According to released documents, anthrax spores and bubonic plague bacilli were made into weapons and stored at the complex. The main town on the island, where scientists and employees of the complex lived, was called Kantubek, which lies in ruins today, but once held approximately 1,500 inhabitants. The official Soviet name of this city was the same as the weapons complex itself: Aralsk-7. All people who lived on Vozrozhdeniya Island were evacuated within several weeks; civil and military infrastructure was abandoned, and Kantubek became a ghost town. ==In popular culture==

In Command & Conquer: Generals, the island was under U.S. occupation but was captured by the fictional Global Liberation Army. The area and its former biological weapons base and laboratories were also featured in a mission in Call of Duty: Black Ops called "Rebirth", where Alex Mason goes lone wolf–though he hallucinates that Viktor Reznov accompanies him–against Friedrich Steiner while Jason Hudson and Grigori Weaver lead a team to extract Steiner out of the area. Call of Duty: Warzone mixes the island's chemical weapon history with a recreation of the Alcatraz prison for its Rebirth Resurgence mode. The novel The Home Team: Weapons Grade also mentions the site; the book's villains dig up two metric tons of "Anthrax 836" from an impromptu dump site 11 km from the island for use in a terror plot. ==See also==