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.

[6][7] 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.

In the summer of 1936, Ivan Mikhailovich Velikanov led the Red Army's first expedition to conduct biological weapons tests on Vozrozhdeniya Island.

Later that same summer, Leonid Moiseevich Khatanever, the new director of the Biotechnical Institute and an expert on Francisella tularensis (the causative agent of tularaemia), led a second expedition to Vozrozhdeniya.

[9] 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.

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.

[13] All people who lived on Vozrozhdeniya Island were evacuated within several weeks; civil and military infrastructure was abandoned, and Kantubek became a ghost town.

Call of Duty: Warzone mixes the island's chemical weapon history with a recreation of the Alcatraz prison for its Rebirth Resurgence mode.