Inimkond: Catherine Alexander

Cleaning up and moving on: Kazakhstan’s ‘Nuclear Renaissance’

Between 1947 and 1989 the Soviets tested approximately 456 nuclear weapons on and in a vast tract of land in North east Kazakhstan. When the Soviet-turned-Russian Army, finally returned to Russia from the small town (Kurchatov) that had housed them on the edge of the test site, in 1993, Kazakhstan was not only left with radioactive contamination, but lacked much of the test documentation needed to understand the effects and was plunged into poverty. Nonetheless, partly in a bid to secure remaining nuclear expertise on the site and town, the National Nuclear Centre (NNC) was set up in this isolated, once closed and secret town to spearhead Kazakhstan’s ‘nuclear renaissance’ and monitor the site. Here I track the various strategies used by the Soviets to contain and disappear this highly secret site before moving to more recent attempts by the government-sponsored NNC to be more open – including opening up a large part of the site, after 25 years of remediation and monitoring, to commercial and agricultural use. Juxtaposing these narratives and strategies with accounts from long-term residents and more recent arrivals in the town provides far more ambivalent engagements with the town and site, and attempts to contain wastes in a Soviet past and move onto a brighter nuclear future. Rather what appears is a resistance to any kind of spatial or temporal containment, a denial of progress, I end by thinking through the consequences of assuming the site can be limited in terms of radioactive contamination. 

Catherine Alexander is the professor of Anthropology at the University of Durham. She has done fieldwork in Turkey, Kazakhstan and the UK focussing on economic and political anthropology and questions such as property regimes, housing, (nuclear)waste and social inequalities.

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