Postcards from Stanland

by David H. Mould

  In Soviet times, the region was a restricted zone, guarded by 20,000 troops. Kurchatov (known only by its postal code, Semipalatinsk-16) was a closed city, one of the most secretive and restricted places in the Soviet Union. Villagers did not know that they were living near a test site. “People couldn’t enter or leave—this place was not even on the map,” said Magda.

  Many died or suffered from radiation-induced diseases. According to government statistics, the number of stillbirths in the region rose from 6.1 per thousand in 1960 to 12.2 in 1988. Human birth defects were at least six and a half times the Soviet average, mental retardation and diseases of the nervous system two and a half times greater, and cancer rates significantly higher. In total, as many as half a million people may have suffered from the effects of radiation.

  With the reforms of the perestroika era, the Communist Party’s grip on politics and society began to loosen. In 1988, Gorbachev’s government decided to allow the formation of informal political and social groups outside the party, which had previously sponsored all organizations. The most prominent environmental group to emerge was the Nevada-Semipalatinsk movement, founded by the writer Olzhas Suleimenov in 1989 to halt nuclear testing. More than a million people signed petitions demanding a test ban on Kazakhstan’s territory, and huge crowds turned out at the group’s rallies. Nazarbayev’s support for the movement reinforced his political position and nationalist credentials as he prepared for the country’s independence.

  Although nuclear tests were halted in 1989, Kazakhstan was left with the fourth-largest nuclear arsenal in the world (after the United States, Russia, and Ukraine). More than one hundred missiles, each with ten nuclear warheads, were housed in deep bunkers across the steppe. There were fears in the West that the country would not be able to guard the missiles and the stockpile of weapons-grade uranium and plutonium, or—in a nightmare scenario—would sell them to the highest bidder. The CIA claimed Iranian intelligence agents were visiting nuclear installations throughout the former Soviet Union, shopping for deals.

  Whether or not the CIA was right, Kazakhstan wanted to get rid of its nuclear stockpile. In August 1991, Nazarbayev signed a decree officially closing the Polygon and declared that Kazakhstan had no interest in remaining a nuclear state. The United States paid for the transfer of missiles to Russia to be dismantled, and compensated Kazakhstan for the weapons-grade uranium in the warheads. In 1994, a specialist US team embarked on a secret mission to the closed city of Ust-Kamenogorsk to recover half a ton of enriched uranium from a vault at the Ulba Metallurgical Plant, the largest lead-zinc smelter in the country. Over a six-week period, using a mobile nuclear laboratory, the team opened a thousand canisters of uranium, measured the contents, and transferred them to stainless steel containers, which were packed into special 55-gallon drums for shipment to the US nuclear facility at Oak Ridge, Tennessee. The elaborate and dangerous mission, code-named Operation Sapphire, signaled a new level of cooperation and trust between the United States and Kazakhstan.

  You’re in the Polygon, but You Wouldn’t Know It

  Although the tests, bombs, and missiles were gone, “nuclear-free” Kazakhstan faced the formidable task of dealing with the environmental legacy of forty years of nuclear tests—the equivalent of the explosion of twenty thousand Hiroshima bombs. In the 1990s, with the economy in tatters and the government strapped for cash, progress was slow. Although some tunnels were sealed and detectors installed on others to keep out scrap-metal scavengers, open areas of steppe remained largely unguarded. Barbed-wire fences rusted. Signs marking radioactive areas faded or were stolen. People swam and fished in water-filled nuclear craters.

  “The Polygon has been fully open, ever since it was closed,” said Magda. “It’s astonishing how unprotected, how unmarked the site is. You don’t know if you’re in the test site or out of it.” Villagers drive through the Polygon to the cities of Kurchatov, Semipalatinsk (now renamed Semey), Pavlodar, and Karaganda. Alternative routes outside the nuclear test zone add many hours to travel time. In summer, drivers stop on the dusty roads to change flat tires; in spring, they push their cars out of the mud.

  In an attempt to show that the Polygon is safe, the government has invited foreign journalists and “disaster tourists” to visit Ground Zero. There haven’t been many takers. Louise Gray of the Telegraph, who took the tour in August 2011, didn’t find it reassuring:

  The point of detonation . . . is now a small lake in the heart of the steppe. With the quivering rushes and endless sky, it looks almost pretty. . . . But the Geiger counter is racing and so is my heart. My stomach is churning as radioactive dust rises, even though we are wearing gas masks and protective covers on our feet. The Soviets filled the area with apartments, bridges and roads, to resemble a town; now, all that is left are burnt lumps of concrete. . . . Our guides, dressed in camouflage gear and disarmingly casual, pick up rocks of melted soil wearing just surgical gloves. The Geiger counter is reading three microsieverts per hour, which is considerably more than you might expect of natural background radiation. Yet the NNC tells us that, during our 10-minute visit, our group of seven received less radiation than on a transatlantic flight. Its director, Dr. Sergey Lukashenko, claims to have swum in an “atomic lake” created by another explosion.2

  For local herders, convoys of off-road vehicles with tourists and journalists are just the latest unwelcome visitors to their traditional grazing lands. They kick up the dust, make noise, and sometimes leave litter, but they never stay long. For those whose homes are on the steppe, life and work go on. “People simply accept that they are living near a nuclear test site, and get on with their lives,” said Magda. “There’s still a belief that a shot of vodka will protect you from radiation. If you drive through the Polygon, you take a bottle of vodka in the car.”

  With or without vodka, it’s almost 250 miles from Karaganda to the village where Magda and Robert lived. On a good day, it’s a six-hour journey; when the weather is bad, it can take up to fifteen hours. After two hundred miles on the main highway, a gravel road branches northeast into the Polygon. “It’s an awful road,” said Robert. “The whole car shakes. After almost every trip, we had to tighten down the screws.” The couple say they changed at least thirty flat tires. “We used inner tubes so the tires wouldn’t fall apart. We carried a spare but on one trip we had two flats. We just pumped up the tire and kept driving until we had to pump it up again.”

  The final seventeen miles is on a dirt track, euphemistically called a steppe road. There are few landmarks; as tracks intersect, it’s easy to get lost. “You just have to go by memory,” said Robert. “We got used to it—by the end we could drive at night.”

  The road is closed by snow from late December to late March, leaving the village isolated. Spring rains make driving hazardous. “On one trip in April, we got stuck in the mud,” said Magda. “We ended up sleeping in the steppe. We did not walk at night because there are wolves in the region. In the morning, we walked to the village to find someone to pull the car out. It was April Fool’s Day. You know they celebrate that in Kazakhstan?”

  The Women Are “Totally Healthy”

  Magda didn’t set out to do her dissertation on a village in the Polygon. When she first came to Kazakhstan in 2007, she was planning research on the Polish diaspora—descendants of Poles exiled by Stalin in the 1930s. She had a personal stake in the history. “My family is from Poland, and they were deported to Siberia in that period,” she said.

  As she traveled north from Astana to Polish villages, she heard a “passing comment” about the Polygon, and decided to investigate. The next year, she returned, rented a car, traveled through the region, and decided to change her research topic. “As a medical anthropologist, I study illness in its social and cultural contexts,” she said. “How do people perceive illness? How do they heal themselves? How do they assess risk?”

  She learned about the village from a 1999 study on the effects of radiation on health and the environm
ent conducted by Karaganda State Medical University. The study compared the health of people in two villages with similar economic and social conditions—one six miles from the aboveground test site and one outside the nuclear zone. Through a chemical analysis of meat and milk products, bone, and animal and human waste, the team, led by Dr. Naila Dusembayeva, a geneticist, found that levels of five radioactive elements, including the highly toxic Caesium-137 and Strontium-90, were significantly higher in the village near the test site. Dusembayeva’s team compiled family trees and health histories, recording stillbirths, infant mortality, and a range of physical and psychological diseases. Again, the rates for the village in the nuclear zone were significantly higher than for those in the other village.

  “In villages in the Polygon, people are dying because of disease, not because of age,” Dusembayeva told me. She says the herders’ diet of meat and milk products is the main cause. Radioactive elements enter the food chain because animals graze on contaminated pastures. Few villagers grow vegetables “because they know the ground is not healthy.”

  “Some scientists argue that the people aren’t hygienic enough, that they live in squalor,” said Magda. “I say that’s bullshit. Look at other villages in Kazakhstan. People live the same way, and they don’t die as quickly.”

  In the Soviet era, the village had a population of about 400. It was part of a sovkhoz (state farm), with tractors, machinery, and warehouses, raising grain and livestock. It was a multinational community with Kazakhs, Russians, Ukrainians, Volga Germans, Poles, and Tatars. Since 1991, the village has gone into a steady decline as people leave to seek jobs in the cities, and now has only about fifty inhabitants, almost all Kazakh. Many farm buildings are in disrepair, and organized agriculture has been replaced by pastoralism, with herds of cattle, sheep, and horses grazing freely on the unfenced steppe. Herders enjoy common grazing rights, and no land is privately owned. “You follow your animals,” said Magda. “You don’t enclose them—you take them to food.”

  The herding families rely on livestock for income, and meat prices in Kazakhstan have been rising. Sheep, cattle, and horses from the Polygon are slaughtered and sold on markets throughout northeastern Kazakhstan. The carcasses are inspected for animal diseases such as brucellosis, but not tested for radiation because the analysis is too expensive. According to Dusembayeva, the health risks of radiation have spread from those who raise livestock in the Polygon to urban residents. “There are no restrictions,” she said. “No one tells the villagers where it’s dangerous to graze animals. We have enough land in Kazakhstan that people should not have to use dirty ground.”

  Magda agrees with Dusembayeva that no area of the Polygon can be given a clean bill of health, but she questions whether the medical research told the whole story, particularly about personal health histories. “The health study was done by doctors, and they compiled data by handing out surveys. The survey had questions such as ‘Do women smoke?’ People answered ‘No.’ ‘Do women drink?’ ‘No.’ Women don’t do anything. They are totally healthy. The reality is that if you’re there long enough you realize that the surveys are completely meaningless.”

  As an anthropologist, Magda knew that the best way to understand how people in a nuclear test zone view their health was to live among them—to do interviews, collect medical histories, and observe how they lived and worked.

  Telling No Lies

  Villages in Kazakhstan are close-knit communities, where strangers are often regarded with suspicion. A colleague in Karaganda put Magda in contact with the akima (mayor) of the village, who agreed to make introductions. It wasn’t easy. Why would two educated Westerners want to live there for four months?

  “I explained what I could [about my research],” said Magda. “For about a month, everyone thought we were spies and didn’t want to talk with us. You have to establish rapport and that takes time and willingness to participate and become part of the daily life of the village.”

  Magda and Robert moved into one half of a house with a stove and a few furnishings. Their closest neighbors were in the other half, and they often shared meals. They started to work. Robert did chabaning (herding) and helped slaughter animals. Magda cooked and helped neighbors with chores. They painted the house, chopped wood, and collected animal dung for fuel. In winter, animals are kept in barns beside houses, and fed with hay stacked on the roofs. “We put up huge stacks of hay,” said Robert. “There was just a lot of physical labor.”

  In Soviet times, villagers in the Polygon were routinely submitted to medical tests to determine the effects of radiation. Results were sent to labs in Moscow, and the people tested were never told about their conditions. Overcoming suspicion about researchers is difficult. “They think people lie to them,” said Magda. “They come in and take their blood without giving a reason, and they get no results. That’s been a consistent pattern—they are used for someone else’s needs. That was my biggest concern—not to exploit, even unknowingly, a population that is vulnerable. We didn’t lie to them.”

  Magda and Robert had seen the data from the 1999 study about the radioactive elements in meat and dairy products, but decided that the health risk was outweighed by the issue of trust. “We ate the meat; we drank the milk,” said Robert. “What are you going to do? Make these people feel as if there’s something wrong with them? Not eat their food? Wear a mask around them?”

  “People believe they are sick from radiation,” said Magda, “but they accept it. Life is hard, anything can kill you—that’s their attitude. They have accepted a very difficult life and they are survivors.”

  No Polygon, No Problem

  US, Australian, and Canadian mining companies already operate in the region, exploiting reserves of gold, copper, manganese, and coal. In 2010, the director of Kazakhstan’s National Nuclear Center (NNC), Kairat Kadyrzhanov, claimed that only 5 percent of the region was “heavily contaminated” and proposed a ten-year program to open up the rest to commercial agriculture, primarily livestock raising. “We will guarantee that it’s possible to work there safely—to raise cattle and build houses,” said Kadyrzhanov. “Some politicians are irritated with our suggestion to open part of the Polygon for agriculture. But we are talking like scientists, not like politicians.”3

  Environmental activists such as Kaisha Atakhanova think it’s the other way around: the government scientists are talking (and acting) like politicians. A veteran of environmental politics, Atakhanova has seen it all before. In 2001, Kazatomprom, a state enterprise, introduced legislation to allow Kazakhstan to import and dispose of low- and medium-grade radioactive waste. Kazatomprom said it would be a major boost to an economy that was still struggling and forecast revenues of up to $40 billion over a twenty-five-year period. And where would the waste be dumped? At old uranium mines in western Kazakhstan or, in a cruel historical irony, in the Polygon, where new storage facilities could be created.

  Supporters claimed that the revenue would be used to help Kazakhstan clean up its own nuclear waste. Atakhanova was not the only one to question how importing more nuclear waste would reduce levels of radioactive contamination. The Economist wryly noted that at the same time that Nazarbayev marked the tenth anniversary of the closure of the Polygon test site to appeal for more foreign aid to deal with cleanup and the long-term effects of radiation, a state enterprise was proposing turning the country into “a nuclear dustbin.”4

  Atakhanova led a coalition of more than sixty NGOs that lobbied parliament to defeat the legislation. They argued that a country rich in oil, gas, and other natural resources did not need revenue from radioactive waste imports. The scheme would damage Kazakhstan’s international reputation and scare off tourists. Besides, because of government corruption, there was no guarantee how the revenue would be spent. The legislation was stopped, and the environmental network formed went on to campaign on other issues.

  Atakhanova says the NNC wants to turn over the Polygon so that it is no longer legally liable for monitoring a
nd cleanup. With land in private ownership, local authorities will be responsible, but they lack funds and expertise. “It’s a pragmatic approach by the national government,” she told me. “They tell the local authorities: it’s your responsibility and it’s your budget. No Polygon, no problem.”

  Gulsum Kakimzhanova, who heads an environmental NGO based in Semey, says reclassifying land as suitable for agriculture means that radiation-control regulations, including the removal of a layer of soil and the wearing of protective clothing, no longer apply. “Why will people follow regulations if they don’t have to? They’ll do whatever they want,” she said. She doubts the NNC’s claim that off-limits areas will be clearly marked. “What are you going to do?” she asked an NNC official at a meeting. “Give a cow a map so it can decide whether it can eat the grass or not?”

  Atakhanova and Kakimzhanova dispute the NNC’s claim that more land is needed for agriculture. Much of the land in the Polygon is of poor quality, and water is scarce. At community meetings in 2011, only a handful of farmers said they needed more grazing land. “We lost this land many years ago, and we don’t need it now,” one local official told them. Instead, villagers told them that they needed social and medical services, including special programs for radiation victims, better schools, and economic opportunities, including microcredit to develop small businesses. Local authorities have proposed moving people from villages to regional centers, where jobs and services are better. “We should think not only about economic interests,” said Atakhanova. “The government should ask these people what they need and then do it. We are not a poor country. We can improve the quality of life for people in the Polygon.”

  In 2005, Karaganda’s EcoMuseum sent a formal request to more than twenty government agencies, asking them to outline their areas of responsibility for public health and safety in the Polygon. Most did not respond, but those that did were not reassuring. The pattern was familiar to EcoMuseum director Kalmykov, who had asked similar questions about the Baikonur cosmodrome, and received a similar runaround. “On the Polygon, the Ministry of Health Protection said that the local akimat was responsible, the akimat said that the Ministry of Emergency Situations was responsible, and the ministry said that the NNC was responsible. That’s the situation in Kazakhstan. Nobody is responsible.”