In Aitken’s broad narrative sweep, Nazarbayev’s rise from poor herder’s son to president becomes an ideologically and socially conscious Soviet version of the Horatio Alger myth. Nazarbayev is a loyal son, a hard-working, intellectually curious student, admired by his teachers, who gives up the opportunity to join the Moscow elite. Instead, out of devotion to communism and to care for his family, he takes a dangerous, physically demanding industrial job, and becomes an inspiration to his fellow workers. His dedication is rewarded when his leadership qualities are recognized, and he rises in the party hierarchy.
The settings are pure Soviet—the kolkhoz, the Komsomol meetings, the floor of the blast furnace, the May Day parades and party rallies, the meeting rooms and hallways of Communist Party headquarters—but the plot is universal. The moral is that anyone can overcome their humble beginnings and make their way in the world. Much of Nazarbayev’s enduring popular appeal and political longevity rests on the fact that he did not come from wealth and privilege. It is the classic poor-boy-makes-good story.
Of course, it wasn’t as simple as that. When Nazarbayev arrived in Temirtau in September 1958, construction of the plant had not yet begun. He found, according to Aitken, “a small town, surrounded by a vast construction site with cranes and tractors.” His first job was as a laborer, mixing concrete to build the approach roads to the site. He then joined a group of three hundred young recruits sent to a technical institute in Ukraine for eighteen months to be trained in steelmaking.
Despite Soviet restrictions on media, Nazarbayev and his fellow students learned about the riots that swept through Temirtau in August 1959. Construction workers assembled to protest about working conditions, food shortages, contaminated drinking water, and inadequate winter clothing. When the management refused to negotiate, they looted the food shops. Soviet troops and police brutally suppressed the riots. Sixteen workers were shot and killed, twenty-seven wounded, and more than seventy arrested; twenty-eight police officers were wounded. Leonid Brezhnev, the future Soviet leader, flew in to show Moscow’s support for the local authorities’ repression.
The plant’s first blast furnace went on line in July 1960 with handpicked workers, including twenty-year-old Nazarbayev, on the first shift. Archival photos in the city’s museum show Nazarbayev and coworkers, wearing broad, floppy felt hats to protect their heads and necks from sparks from the furnaces where temperatures reached over 2,000 degrees Celsius. Nazarbayev rose quickly in the steelworker hierarchy—from junior to senior blast furnace attendant, then from deputy to senior gas man. By the time he was twenty-one, he was earning 400 rubles a month and sending half of his paycheck home to his parents.
Nazarbayev had a strong work ethic. After an eight-hour shift, he took the bus to Karaganda to attend four hours of evening classes in metallurgy. On weekends, he organized social activities and enlisted fellow workers to join the subbotnik (Saturday activity), the Soviet equivalent of community service, planting trees on a desolate hilly area that had been designated for a park.
As production expanded, more workers were needed. Nazarbayev became a poster boy in a marketing campaign. Kazakhstanskaya Pravda, the official newspaper of the Kazakh SSR, published a picture of the smiling, handsome Nazarbayev dressed in the uniform of a blast furnace attendant, his wide-brimmed felt hat tilted backward at what Aitken calls “a slightly rakish angle.” The photograph was reproduced in newspapers all over the Soviet Union with captions suggesting that Karaganda Magnitka was a great place to work.5
The workforce grew rapidly, from 2,000 in 1960 to 30,000 three years later. Local authorities struggled to provide housing for workers and their families, but by the end of the decade Temirtau had become a Soviet industrial showplace, with boulevards, apartment blocks, schools, theaters, parks, a 15,000-seat sports stadium, and monuments to industrial workers. Karaganda Magnitka’s production from its seven coke ovens and four blast furnaces accounted for 10 percent of the Kazakh SSR’s GDP.
In many ways, Temirtau was similar to the American company town (although the “company” was the state) but with better housing, transportation, schools, medical care, and recreational facilities. In the same decade, Americans were shocked by media reports showing the desperate economic and social conditions of Appalachian communities, and the scars left by a century of exploitation of the region’s coal and forests. President Lyndon B. Johnson’s War on Poverty put Appalachia on the political and media map, and brought funds, volunteers, and resources to the region to combat its generational poverty.
I wonder if some who lived in the coal camps would have exchanged their wood-frame shacks for a heated apartment in Temirtau, a steady paycheck, free education and medical care, parks and recreation facilities, even if it meant having to “live under communism.”
Saving Temirtau
Steel brought Tonya (Antonietta) Golubsova, Irina’s grandmother, to Temirtau. She and her steelworker husband moved from a town near Moscow in the early 1960s, joining the stream of industrial workers who resettled in Temirtau. At the plant, her husband worked shifts with Nazarbayev. Tonya thinks Nazarbayev’s modest, working-class background helps account for his popularity. “He didn’t come from a rich or well-connected family,” she said. “People feel that he understands their problems.”
Nazarbayev was soon elected secretary of the Komsomol section, representing young workers at the plant. He gained a reputation as an orator, able to motivate fellow workers, and as an effective organizer. He married Sara Kunukayeva, an electrical worker at the plant, became a Communist Party member—the ticket to political advancement—and in 1968 took a job as a local party official. Over the next thirty years, he worked his way up through the Communist Party hierarchy, positioning himself for the presidency in 1991.
Tonya says she admires Nazarbayev’s personal achievements but does not like policies that she feels discriminated against ethnic Russians and Germans. Like other Russians, she resents Kazakhstan opening its borders to all those who claimed Kazakh ethnicity—the oralmans—offering them apartments, jobs, and a relocation allowance. Tonya claimed this resulted in an influx of unskilled workers, especially from Mongolia and Uzbekistan, who did not have the same work ethic as the industrial workers who had left.
The collapse of the Soviet Union sealed the fate of many single-industry cities. Without investment to modernize equipment and a sales force to market products, factories closed their gates, throwing thousands out of work. Many feared that Temirtau would suffer the same fate. The steel plant went through tough times in the early 1990s, and many of its top managers and engineers left for Russia. City authorities struggled to cope with unemployment, crime and drug abuse, and to provide services for an aging population.
Temirtau was saved by the Indian billionaire steel magnate Lakshmi Mittal. In 1995, his London-based LMN Group purchased the plant for $250 million. With a $450 million loan from the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development and $250 million of its own money, the company modernized the plant. When workers from the coal mines in Karaganda threatened to cut off supplies because they had not been paid, the company bought the mines and put the miners on its payroll. After Temirtau’s electricity generating plant failed sixteen times in 1996, interrupting steel production, it bought the plant and its distribution network, making the steel company the supplier of the city’s heat and electricity. With new iron deposits being exploited in Karaganda and Kostanai provinces, new Asian markets, especially in China, and world prices for construction materials rising, the plant was expanded. In 1999, it turned its first profit.
The company, now renamed ArcelorMittal, employs almost 30,000 people in its steel plant and coal mines, almost as many as Karaganda Magnitka at the height of production. The company has put money back into the city. It renovated the aging water system, bought a textile factory to manufacture uniforms for workers, refurbished the rundown Steel Hotel, provides health services, subsidizes teachers’ salaries, started a TV station, and made the trolley
buses run on time. At the Mittal football stadium, the Mittal-sponsored Temirtau Steelworkers play local derbies against the Karaganda Coalminers. Temirtau is, to all intents and purposes, a company town again.
Despite large investments and an image-building campaign, local officials and environmental groups complain about the company’s safety and environmental record. More than one hundred miners died in accidents at mines between 2004 and 2010. Temirtau is one of the most polluted cities in Kazakhstan. In 2010, the regional prosecutor’s office fined Mittal for air pollution and poor documentation on the environmental effects of its operations. Still, the company refuses to disclose the results of its air and water quality tests or discuss its environmental record at public forums. Irina says that local residents have become used to pollution, and the company has worked to convince them that the environmental and health effects are minimal. On many days, a thick pall of smoke from the blast furnaces hangs over the city. “Sometimes the smoke is grey, sometimes yellow, sometimes pink,” she said. “We have no idea what’s in the air.”
Steel is still the lifeblood of Temirtau. The historical signs and symbols are everywhere, from Soviet-era monuments of heroic steelworkers to the Metallurgists’ Palace of Culture. Fittingly, the newest landmark, dwarfing the steelworkers’ monument at the north end of the main drag, Prospekt Mettalurg, is a museum dedicated to Temirtau’s most famous steelworker. Although other construction projects in Kazakhstan were delayed or abandoned after the global economic crisis, the museum opened in time to mark the twentieth anniversary of Kazakhstan’s independence in December 2011 and twenty years of Nazarbayev’s presidency.
Some local businessmen had proposed something even more striking—carving Nazarbayev’s into the face of the iron mountain. “Mount Rushmore is a well-known national monument,” the group’s leader told the akim (governor) of Karaganda oblast. “Why can’t our country pay a similar tribute to the first president of Kazakhstan?” The akimat promised to study the proposal, but did not sound too positive. “The president has never been in favor of such type of recognition,” a spokesman said.6
Steel and Strawberries
Tonya isn’t too interested in rock carvings, museums, or independence celebrations. Like many older residents, she impatiently awaits the first days of spring when she can escape from her apartment to her two-room dacha, nestled in the low hills on the right bank of the Nura River. Far away from the noise and pollution, she raises potatoes, carrots, cabbages, beans, cucumbers, peppers, tomatoes, apples, cherries, raspberries, gooseberries, and other fruits. She makes some money selling her produce. In the winter, the vegetables and canned fruit are kept in a root cellar under a garage near the apartment. She had given Stephanie tomato seeds from plants she has grown; on a return trip, I brought envelopes with seeds from three of Stephanie’s favorite varieties.
Tonya’s pride and joy are her strawberries. “I can pick strawberries from April to October,” she claimed, as she showed me her carefully cultivated beds.
“Babushka, what are we going to do with all these strawberries?” asked Irina, as she stacked banki (jars—or, in this case, cut-off plastic water bottles) brimming with fruit on the porch. “Prosto kushayte, kushayte [just eat, eat],” said Tonya. On a sunny day in late June, we picked and ate, picked and ate, until night fell. Then we drove back to Temirtau, the trunk full of banki of strawberries. In the fall, Tonya will fill the refrigerator with jars of home-made strawberry jam, and Irina will ask, “Babushka, what are we going to do with all this jam?” And Tonya will probably answer, “Prosto kushayte, kushayte.”
FIGURE 9.3 Tonya Golubsova at her dacha (photo by Irina Velska)
ten
No Polygon, No Problem
Open Steppe and Open Minds
By temperament and academic training, Magda Stawkowski does not rush to judgment. She’s a medical anthropologist, schooled in the classics—Margaret Mead, Bronisław Malinowski. She knows first impressions of a place, a community, or a culture can be misleading, maybe even downright wrong.
Yet when she and Robert Kopack, a geographer, arrived in a remote village in northeastern Kazakhstan to study how people live near a former nuclear test site, they had the same initial reaction. Cattle, horses, sheep, and people move freely throughout the so-called Polygon region, where for forty years the Soviet Union conducted above- and below-ground nuclear tests. “Nothing is marked—you may be in a very radioactive area and not know it,” said Magda.
“I thought there’s no way people should be living there,” said Robert. “They should get out—right now.” The couple considered getting out themselves after they took Geiger counter readings in the house where they stayed for a few days after arriving. “It was scary,” said Robert. “I said, ‘We don’t have to stay. There’s a nuclear test site here.’ But that view changed, oh my god, so fast.”
When I met Magda in March 2011, she was working with Dmitry Kalmykov at Karaganda’s EcoMuseum, plowing through a stack of data and reports for her dissertation at the University of Colorado. She spotted me, looking perplexed, in front of the museum exhibit on the Polygon. I don’t have a science background, so understanding data on nuclear tests and radioactive levels is difficult enough in English; even with a dictionary, I had little chance with the Russian version. Magda gave me a quick primer on Russian nuclear terminology. Then we started talking about her experiences living in the village.
Two months later, on my next visit to Karaganda, I met her and Robert to learn about the journey they had taken from fear and doubt to the conviction that the people of the Polygon should be left to control their own lives.1
The region is significant to the history of the Kazakh people. The writer, poet, and educator Abay Qunanbayev, whose works are required reading in schools and whose statue stands in city and town squares all over the country, was born in a village in the region and traveled through it. Other famous artists, writers, and political leaders had their roots there. Some families have lived in the region for seven generations, and their ancestors are buried there.
“The people have a strong relationship to the land,” said Robert, whose research project was to draw maps with overlapping layers showing indigenous names, radiation zones, and grazing areas. “People have been living here for 150 years and they talk about the landscape in specific ways. They have names for mountains, caves, and rivers, names that help them avoid getting lost, even in the winter. These names mean something—a name may signify a type of face, such as a wrinkled morning face.”
Villagers told Magda and Robert that if they were relocated, they would lose their connection to the land, family, and community. Instead, they needed doctors, access to social services, better roads, and assistance in developing livestock raising.
“It’s a beautiful place,” said Magda. “It’s not just the flat steppe. There are hills and valleys, lakes with wildlife. People feel free, and they live their own way without the laws that apply in the city. There are no police. The social fabric is the structure that holds the community together. Yes, life is tough, especially in winter. But the people are kings of their own domain; they’re self-sufficient. Some people want to move them. I’d be the first to say that’s a crazy idea. In the city, they’re dead, they don’t have the skills. Make their lives better where they are. It’s a very simple thing.”
For the authorities, deciding what to do with the vast nuclear test site and the people who live there is far from simple. If there was scientific consensus on the levels of radioactivity and the dangers to public health and the food chain, policy decisions could be made. But there is no consensus. Although everyone agrees a cleanup is needed, Kazakhstan’s regulatory authority, the National Nuclear Center (NNC), claims that research by foreign scientists and environmental groups exaggerates the dangers. Although other test sites around the world have been closed off, the NNC wants to open almost all the Polygon to commercial mining and livestock grazing. And, as is too often the case in Kazakhstan, no one is su
re which government agency is responsible for cleanup.
Forty Years of Nuclear Tests
On the map of Kazakhstan, the Polygon looks like a small area. But it’s a question of scale. The 7,000-square-mile region, southwest of the city of Semipalatinsk, is almost as large as Israel, about half the size of the Netherlands or Taiwan. The site was selected in 1947 by Lavrentiy Beria, the political head of the Soviet atomic bomb project. He falsely claimed the region was uninhabited, although at the time about 3,000 people lived in villages and kolkhozes.
Labor from the Karlag was used to build the test facilities, including a laboratory complex on the southern bank of the Irtysh River, named for Igor Vasilyevich Kurchatov, the nuclear physicist who, along with Georgy Flyorov and Andrei Sakharov, directed the secret Soviet effort to develop nuclear weapons during World War II and headed the postwar program. The first successful bomb test, Operation First Lightning (nicknamed “Joe One” by the Americans in reference to Stalin), was conducted by Kurchatov’s team in 1949, scattering grey radioactive dust on nearby villages which Beria had neglected to evacuate. The shock waves were felt as far away as Karaganda where coal miners working underground feared the tunnels and roofs would collapse.
MAP 10.1 Northeastern Kazakhstan and Polygon (map by Brian Edward Balsley, GISP)
The nuclear program included research on the effects of radiation on humans and animals. In later tests, groups of people of all ages were given cash and cases of vodka, dropped off at sites near ground zero, and picked up after the explosion. They were examined for the effects of radiation at a secret hospital in Semipalatinsk, and the results were sent to Moscow. Sheep, horses, and dogs were also tested.
Official figures claim that 161 tests were conducted from 1949 until 1963, when aboveground testing was banned, but the number could be higher because some controlled explosions were not classified as tests. Up to 1989, 295 devices were detonated in mountain tunnels, according to a 2010 study by Kazakhstan’s Institute of Radiation Security and Ecology.
Postcards from Stanland Page 28
