Academic literature on the topic 'Vozrozhdeniya Island'

Abstract With 3 million lice-ridden Russian corpses and another 27 million people afflicted by typhus after the First World War, the Soviets could not have missed the potential of entomological warfare. In 1928, the Revolutionary Military Council initiated the weaponization of typhus. A top-secret institute was founded in the town of Suzdal under the control of OGPU, the forerunner of the KGB.1 In light of the risks associated with studying human diseases, the facility was transferred to a more isolated site in 1936. In a move reminiscent of the Japanese occupation of Pingfan, the residents of Vozrozhdeniya Island in the Aral Sea were given six hours to evacuate their homes, and the Soviet biological warfare program set up shop. Typhus might have catalyzed the Soviet program, but interest in other pathogens was formalized in a project code named Golden Triangle, an allusion to its three elements: plague, cholera, and anthrax.

A key requirement with regard to the Soviet Union’s preparedness for biological warfare was the identification of a location—preferably an island—for use in field tests of bacteriological agents. Initially, the Red Army made use of the Central Army Chemical Proving Ground at Shikhany and carried out a range of tests on BW simulants. The risks and difficulties associated with BW tests at Shikhany, especially the proximity of the town of Volsk to the proving ground, eventually led to the transfer of this work to the newly established biological proving ground on the highly remote Vozrozhdenie Island in the Aral Sea.

During the immediate post-war period, Lavrentiy Beria, the Soviet minister of internal affairs, continued to maintain control of the Soviet biological warfare program and to further develop its offensive capabilities. In his new role, Beria and his staff had access to biological weapons specialists captured as a result of the Soviet victory in the Second World War. In the post-war period, Beria maintained the NIIEG facility at remote Kirov as the key hub of the Soviet BW program. During the period 1947 to 1949, a new military BW facility was spun off from the Kirov institute. Based in Sverdlovsk it was known as the USSR Ministry of Defense’s Scientific-Research Institute of Hygiene. In 1953, a third military BW facility, the Scientific-Research Sanitary Institute, was created at Zagorsk. The Vozrozhdenie Island open-air BW proving ground was also expanded after the war.