Postcards from Stanland

by David H. Mould

  The most famous zek, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, was arrested in 1945 while serving as an artillery captain for reportedly expressing skepticism about Stalin. After serving time in a Moscow prison, he was sent to Ekibastuz in northern Kazakhstan, where he worked eleven-hour days in subzero conditions as a bricklayer at the power station. Solzhenitsyn’s novels, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and The Gulag Archipelago, provided the first graphic accounts of conditions in the camps for Western readers. Every day, the zeks were awakened at 5:00 a.m., pulled on their ragged, frozen uniforms, and stumbled out of their barracks to the mess hall to eat cold kasha. After the morning roll call, they filed silently to work, “half dead men strung along the ice in a grey line.” The routine was unrelenting. “The days rolled by in the camp,” wrote Solzhenitsyn, “but the years they never rolled by: they never moved by a second.”3

  No one knows for sure how many were sent to the Karlag, although some sources claim it was as many as 1.2 million. Prisoners were housed in rough barracks, surrounded by barbed-wire fences and watchtowers with armed guards. Food and water were strictly rationed. In crowded conditions, sickness and disease spread quickly, but perhaps the biggest killer was the climate. In 1943, the NKVD reported: “The death rate among prisoners has increased sharply in Karlag. . . . Having spent a work shift in the frost many are unable to warm up in the cold barracks . . . and die without receiving any medical help.”4

  At the Wiedergeburt center in Karaganda, I met eighty-six-year-old Maria Litke. She was fourteen when her family was deported by cattle car from the Donetsk region of Ukraine. “There were eighteen in our family, including the children, and about a dozen more people in the car,” she told me. “The journey took almost a month. My grandfather killed and cooked a pig to feed the family, and we shared the meat with the others.”

  Maria’s grandfather was a vet, so the family was sent to work on a kolkhoz near Semipalatinsk. After two years on the farm, at the age of sixteen, Maria was sent to the Kirova coal mine near Karaganda where she tended horses pulling the coal cars. Food was scarce, and when her ration card was stolen, she sneaked out of the camp to a village to trade firewood for food. She was caught, beaten, and placed in solitary confinement.

  FIGURE 9.1 Trudarmiya survivor Maria Litke in Karaganda

  Freedom for many of the zeks did not come until after Stalin’s death in 1953. In 1952, prisoners at several camps rioted. A larger revolt in 1954, centered on the Samarka and Kengir camps, was brutally suppressed; the Soviet army was sent in with tanks, and more than seven hundred prisoners were killed. Realizing that unrest would continue, the government closed the camps a few months later, and the prisoners were released.

  After she was freed, Maria married a miner and raised three children. Now a widow, she lives with her daughter in a small apartment in Karaganda. At one time, she thought of joining the exodus of ethnic Germans to Germany. “I have many relatives living there, and I speak good German,” she said. “But when I was deported, I lost my passport and birth certificate. I applied for a new passport from Ukraine. I was told the archives had burned and no records were left, so I could not prove I was ethnic German. Now I’m too old to leave.”

  Maria’s story is repeated a thousand times by other former zeks of other nationalities. In one sense, Maria was more fortunate than most because she lived to tell it. Over half a century after the end of the Karlag, Russian authorities still refuse to release some official records, perhaps because the descendants of the camp guards still live in Karaganda and surrounding communities.

  Outside Karaganda, one former camp has been converted into a prison for modern criminals. In Dolinka, one row of abandoned barracks is now a waste dump, and others have been converted into homes. Scraps of metal and barbed wire litter the steppe. Many prisoners are buried in unmarked graves, and some local residents describe the surrounding steppe as “one big mass grave.” One field is dotted with crosses, a place where hundreds of children, “the offspring of the enemies of the people,” were buried. It is known as Mamochinko—or Mommy’s—cemetery.

  The Karlag, like the Nazi concentration camps, presents a historical and moral dilemma for a country trying to define its identity. Do you bulldoze the camps in an effort to erase memories of the darkest chapter in the history of the Soviet Union, and gloss over the deportations in the school textbooks? Or do you preserve the camps, build visitor centers, and offer tours to school groups with interpretive guides?

  Kazakhstan is still struggling with this troubled past. May 31 is on the official calendar as the Day of Remembrance of the Victims of Soviet Oppression. On that day in 2011, government officials, representatives of political parties and NGOs, foreign diplomats, and the children and grandchildren of former Karlag prisoners attended a ceremony in Dolinka to mark the opening of a Museum for Commemoration of Victims of Political Oppression. The museum is housed in the camp’s former processing center, its facade bearing a picture of hands clutching barbed wire. The exhibition rooms are lined with the photos and case files of zeks. One hall maps the systematic program of deportation of nationalities—the Poles, Koreans, Volga Germans, Crimean Tatars and Greeks, Chechens, Ingush, Balkars, Kalmyks, Karachays, Meskhetian Turks, and Armenians. Another display documents the famine of the 1930s, in which an estimated 1.5 million, a quarter of the Kazakh SSR’s population, died. The disaster was precipitated by the forced collectivization of agriculture when herders slaughtered their livestock rather than hand them over to the state. They were pastoralists, not arable farmers; deprived of their herds and ancestral pastures, they struggled to survive on the kolkhozes.

  The symbolism of a new museum fails to satisfy those who claim that the Nazarbayev government downplays the Soviet legacy for fear of jeopardizing relations with Russia—the most powerful military power in the region and Kazakhstan’s largest trading partner. In the apartment blocks of Karaganda and in villages such as Dolinka, descendants of prisoners and their former guards are neighbors. The painful memories of the Karlag are rarely discussed, in public or private.

  Space Junk

  Just across from the Lenin statue on Karaganda’s main drag, Bukhar Zhirov (formerly Sovietsky Prospekt), the EcoMuseum is housed on the first floor of a local government administration building. You have to know it’s there because there’s no sign on the street and only a small one on the door.

  The museum features an eclectic mix of artifacts and interpretive exhibits from central and northeastern Kazakhstan, a region rich with environmental problems. There are exhibits on mining, manufacturing, pollution, water resources, and the environmental wasteland of the Semipalatinsk Polygon, where the Soviets conducted above- and below-ground nuclear tests for more than forty years. The museum is also in the ecotourism business, offering guided tours of central Kazakhstan’s mountain and desert regions and Lake Balkhash, the largest lake in Central Asia, as well as the signature “Back in the USSR” tour, an 1,125-mile circuit that takes visitors back in time to Dolinka and the Karlag, the Polygon, and the village of Aksu, whose claim to fame is its alley of Soviet monuments with many busts and statues of Lenin.

  The museum’s flashiest exhibit is the space center, a mock-up of the Mir space station control room, with banks of monitors, flashing lights, control levers and dials, and a throbbing, techno soundtrack. On both sides of the space station, the museum floor looks like a junkyard with misshapen chunks of metal, some partly burned, with barely distinguishable Cyrillic markings. Most of the items were salvaged from the military base at Lake Balkash. When the Soviet Army left Kazakhstan, it abandoned tons of military hardware—trucks, artillery, mortars, ammunition, and communications equipment. Economic times were hard, and local people moved in to salvage and sell what they could. Most of the metal went for scrap, but some items ended up at the EcoMuseum.

  Credit for the collection goes to Dmitry Kalmykov, the museum director and a trained scientist. As a child growing up in Ukraine, he loved to collect scrap metal and bring it home. “
When I moved to Karaganda and discovered there was all this stuff from the military and the nuclear test site, it reawakened my childhood interest,” he said. Dmitry started picking up metal debris during a 1992 scientific investigation at the Polygon nuclear test site and hasn’t stopped.

  The gems of the collection are parts of rockets launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome, 550 miles away in the semidesert of southwestern Kazakhstan. For the Soviet Union, the remote location—far away from population centers and, presumably, the long lenses of US spy planes—was ideal for its military space program. Since the first human space mission in 1961, when the cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin’s brief jaunt stunned the United States into kick-starting its own manned space program, Baikonur has been the launch site for all Soviet- and Russian-crewed space missions and for rockets carrying satellites.

  After the Soviet Union collapsed, Russia’s space program faced a problem—its launch site was in a foreign country. Although Russia claimed it should still control the cosmodrome, the military installations and forces guarding them, Kazakhstan insisted that Russia not only agree to joint control but start paying rent. In 1994, Kazakhstan agreed to lease the complex to Russia for about $120 million a year. The new spirit of cooperation was marked when the Kazakh Talgat Musabayev and the Russian Yuri Malenchenko blasted off together on a visit to the Mir space station.

  The deal has turned out well for both countries. Baikonur is a commercial success—the preferred launch site for most countries and private companies that want to get stuff (mostly communication satellites) into space. More than 35,000 people work there. It’s the no-frills discount store of space launch sites, easily beating the European and Asian competition for price. Most launches use the cheap and well-tested Proton rocket, the workhorse of the Soviet space program since its first launch in 1965. The Proton has gone through several model changes but remains one of the most successful heavy boosters in the history of space flight.

  The people of central and northeastern Kazakhstan don’t see much from Kazakhstan’s $120-million-a-year rocket revenue. But they sometimes see the rockets, or parts of them, out on the steppe. Rockets are launched in a northeasterly direction, with the first stage burning off over an area that can range from six to sixty miles wide, depending on the size of the rocket and its payload. A large region of the steppe from Zhezkazgan in the south to Pavlodar in the north is within the ellipse of the rocket flight path.

  What doesn’t burn up in the atmosphere falls to earth, usually on the uninhabited steppe but sometimes near populated areas. In 1999, a rocket carrying a communications satellite blew up soon after lift-off, scattering debris and fuel over a wide area. A large section fell into the backyard of a house in a village near Karkaralinsk. “This is dangerous material,” said Dmitry. “The nose of the first stage has an engine with rocket fuel. It’s like a bomb, and the fuel is highly toxic.”

  Although there have been no reports of death or injuries, Dmitry worries about the authorities’ lack of preparedness and emergency plans. He pulls out a map of the rocket ellipse. “The akimat [local government] doesn’t have such a map. If you ask the authorities where the danger area is, they don’t know. Maybe it’s here, maybe it’s there. We need to inform the people of the dangers. If you’re informed, you’re aware. Information is protection.”

  Dmitry says the rent paid by Russia is supposed to cover the cost of safety measures—equipment and training for emergency personnel, medical staff, and disposal teams, as well as safety precautions for the general population. In 2001, a parliamentary committee held hearings on safety at Baikonur, and issued a report with about thirty recommendations. These included low-cost technical fixes, such as installing radio beacons on rockets so that they can be more easily located on the steppe. If radio beacons had been used, says Dmitry, it would not have taken three days in 2006 to locate a rocket that spun out of control and crashed soon after lift-off, causing widespread ecological damage.

  The next year, a Proton-M rocket carrying a Japanese TV satellite crashed in flames two minutes after lift-off. Talgat Musabayev, the Kazakh space agency chief who thirteen years earlier had blasted off on the joint mission with the Russian cosmonaut, said that almost 219 tons of rocket fuel “either fell to the ground, or burned up in the air. This is rather a lot of poisonous substance.” In terms of diplomatic relations, it didn’t help that Nazarbayev was visiting the region at the time. “This is absolutely outrageous,” said Prime Minister Karim Masimov. “If the president’s visit is taking place and a rocket is being launched, we must have the right to stop everything.” Kazakhstan suspended launches and promised tougher rules. An official from the ecology ministry said there had been six accidents in ten years. “It just happens too often,” he said.

  Public statements have not been matched by action. A decade after the parliamentary commission issued its report, few recommendations have been implemented. In July 2103, an unmanned rocket carrying three navigation satellites veered off course shortly after lift-off and crashed in a ball of fire near the launch pad, spreading toxic fuel in the area. There were no casualties, but the estimated loss from the three satellites was $200 million.

  Despite the dangers, rural residents have resourcefully recycled the space junk dropping from the sky. Rocket bodies have been turned into garages, animal sheds, and outhouses, metal panels used for fencing for livestock, and smaller sections sold for scrap. Dmitry showed me photos taken on tours of the steppe. Half a section of an aluminum rocket body makes a pretty good Quonset hut. There’s an old Moskvich, parked in a garage built from mud bricks, with a rocket body for the roof. Part of a rocket body converted into a summer kitchen, with shelves stacked with canned goods and a cookstove.

  I asked Dmitry which government agency was responsible for safety. “That’s a prohibited question because nobody knows. The space agency says the space industry is responsible. The industry says the local akimat is responsible. The akimat says it’s the Ministry for Emergency Situations. The ministry says it’s responsible after an explosion or accident, but not before. In Kazakhstan, no one takes responsibility.”

  Iron Mountain

  After my teaching stint at KarGU, I escaped from the hostel, the kasha, and the affable cooks to spend the weekend with Irina, Igor, and Irina’s grandmother Tonya at the apartment they shared in Temirtau, a city of 180,000 nine miles northeast of Karaganda. In Kazakh, temir means iron and tau mountain. The mountain is actually no more than a hill, but the “Iron Mountain” city was built on steel.

  Its origins were modest. In 1905, about forty families from the Samara region of southern Russia settled on the left bank of the Nura River. The Samarkandsky settlement remained small until the development of the Karaganda Basin coalfield in the 1930s when the first steel plant and a coal-fired power station were built on the left bank of the river. The plant, which recycled scrap metal in furnaces fueled by coal from the Karlag, was refitted to produce munitions in World War II. In 1945, the Samarkandsky settlement was granted city status and renamed Temirtau.

  FIGURE 9.2 Temirtau, city of metallurgy

  By the 1950s, the steel plant was out of date, and authorities undertook construction of a new plant on the other side of the river. It was to be one of the largest in the Soviet Union. In 1958, the call went out for workers and their families to come to the steppe to build the Karaganda Magnitka plant, its roads and railroads, and a modern city that would be the pride of the Kazakh SSR.

  One young man who heeded the call was a herder’s son from Chemolgan, a village in the foothills of the Zailiskiy Ala Too twenty-five miles east of Almaty. Nursultan Nazarbayev was born in 1940 and grew up on a kolkhoz helping with the farm chores. According to his Western biographer, Jonathan Aitken, young Nazarbayev was a serious student, excelling in math and science. His primary education was in Kazakh, but he quickly became fluent in Russian, the language of government and the Communist Party. He was an avid reader—the Kazakh literary greats such as Qunanbayev but also the Russian
classics of Tolstoy, Chekhov, and Pushkin and Russian translations of European authors. Everyone (including Nazarbayev himself) expected him to go to university in Moscow to study chemistry. He had been inspired by radio broadcasts of Khrushchev’s speeches on the need for scientific research to improve the productivity of agriculture.

  Aitken writes that three factors changed Nazarbayev’s career path. His parents, though illiterate, had supported him in his desire to gain an education. After a lifetime of work on the kolkhoz, they still lived in relative poverty, and their health was failing; Nazarbayev did not want to go off to Moscow for three or four years, leaving them to cope without his help. Second, conversations with a young Ukrainian geologist from a village family sparked his interest in metallurgy. The geologist described the process by which iron ore is melted in a blast furnace until it becomes molten metal, after which it is shaped into steel pipes, rails, and sheets. Finally, according to Aitken, Nazarbayev was inspired by a piece of Soviet propaganda pulp fiction, How the Steel Was Forged, in which the hero overcomes all kinds of physical and human obstacles to build a steel railroad through challenging terrain.

  In 1958, Nazarbayev read the newspaper advertisement for workers for the Karaganda Magnitka plant. Members of the Komsomol (Young Communist League) were invited to enroll in training courses in metallurgy at the Temirtau Technical School to prepare for jobs in the steel works. They would join “a noble and proud profession.” The job of a steelworker was one “for real men who will earn the highest wages.”