Postcards from Stanland

by David H. Mould

  “There’s no process for taking a decision,” said Atakhanova. “No ministry is willing to take responsibility. What are the legal requirements and criteria for returning this land to agriculture? No one knows. I told the NNC, ‘You are scientists. It’s not your job to push government to make this decision. Please organize an open discussion of stakeholders.’ No other country has returned a nuclear test site to agriculture. Will Kazakhstan be the first in the world to do so?”

  Magda says she’s surprised that the issues are even being discussed. “In the US, no one would ever argue whether or not it was safe to graze animals on a nuclear test site or swim in nuclear craters. We wouldn’t ask these questions. For whatever reason this is up for debate in Kazakhstan.”

  The Seven Palaces

  Since the beginning of the Soviet nuclear test program, the city of Semipalatinsk has been linked—economically, politically, and, not least, semantically—with the Polygon. Most historical accounts refer simply to the “Semipalatinsk Polygon” as if the nuclear test site was, if not part of the city itself, then at least an outer suburb. In fact, the test site is almost one hundred miles southwest of the city. Even so, residents remember the force of explosions shaking the ground and rattling apartment windows. No one knows how much fallout drifted over the city when the wind was from the west.

  In 2007, the city name underwent cosmetic surgery when its name was officially changed from the Russian Semipalatinsk to the Kazakh Semey. However, it’s difficult for the city to shake off its dark historical associations. Although the headquarters of the nuclear testing program was at Kurchatov, Semipalatinsk was the regional administrative center and economic and transportation hub, with medical facilities for radiation testing. Many families have members who worked for the nuclear program as scientists, technicians, teachers, medical staff, and laborers. Some were exposed to radiation, and the city has high rates of cancer and birth defects. Since independence, the city has built a monument to the victims of testing—a giant stone mushroom cloud.

  If you can ever forget about the Polygon, Semipalatinsk ranks as one of the more attractive cities in Kazakhstan’s northern industrial belt. The first settlement was a Russian fort built in 1718 on the Irtysh River near a ruined Buddhist monastery—a lonely outpost where the Russians faced off against the warlike Oyrats from Mongolia. The fort was named Semipalatinsk for the monastery’s seven buildings (palata can mean a hall, chamber, house, or palace). Because of frequent flooding, the fort was moved eleven miles upstream in 1778, and a small city grew up around it, based on the river trade between China and Russia. Its commercial importance increased with the construction of the Turkestan-Siberia Railway (the Turksib), making it a major point of transit between Central Asia and Siberia.

  During the civil war, the Kazakh nationalists of the Alash Orda movement renamed the city Alash-qala and made it the capital of their short-lived independent state; it was recaptured by the Red Army in 1920. As a manufacturing city, its population grew during the Soviet period, and after World War II the nuclear testing program brought in scientists, engineers, and skilled workers. After 1991, Semipalatinsk joined the rust belt of industrial cities stretching across northern Kazakhstan from Ust-Kamenogorsk to Uralsk. However, unlike single-industry cities, its economy was more broadly based, with universities, medical facilities, retail outlets, and service industries. It’s also a cultural center, with galleries and museums. Nevertheless, its population has declined from about 350,000 in 1991 to under 300,000, with many young, educated people leaving for jobs in Astana and Almaty.

  I flew from Astana to Semey in February—a two-hour trip across the snow-covered steppe. As you approach the city, the steppe gives way to forests of pine, fir, and birch. The landscape looks more like southern Siberia than Kazakhstan; indeed, Semey is only just over sixty miles from the Russian border, close enough for weekend shopping. Prices for almost everything—meat, vegetables, bread, vodka, Chinese clothes, and other imports—are higher in Russia, so it’s worth the trip.

  Semey has the usual rows of drab apartment blocks and triumphal public architecture—a large central square with government buildings, parks, and a war memorial. There’s more activity around the Tsum central department store, where streets are lined with shops and some trendy, if rather out-of-place hangouts—the London Pub, with a large photo of Tower Bridge at night, an Irish pub, and the distinctly retro SSSR Café, with reprints of Soviet-era posters and newspaper headlines from Pravda and Izvestiya announcing Yuri Gagarin’s April 1961 pioneer space flight.

  A few blocks from the city center, you enter an older, pre-Soviet era—small one- and two-story log houses, some faced with stucco, with brightly painted windows and carved ornamental woodwork. Most have small gardens. These are the traditional homes found throughout Siberia and northern Central Asia, with logs cut from the great birch and fir forests. On some streets, they sit awkwardly between modern concrete commercial buildings, but in other places they line both sides of the street. Although many old, single-story houses have been bulldozed in Astana’s real estate boom, much of Semey’s nineteenth-century architecture survives.

  FIGURE 10.1 Traditional Russian house, Semey

  FIGURE 10.2 Traditional Russian house, Semey

  Literary Semey

  One of the best preserved nineteenth-century homes is now a museum dedicated to its most famous resident, Fyodor Dostoyevsky. In 1849, the writer, then aged twenty-eight, was one of a group of intellectuals in St. Petersburg arrested for attending meetings of the Petrashevsky Society, a socialist utopian group that called for emancipation of the serfs, judicial reform, and, more dangerously, the end of the monarchy. A military court found fifteen of the accused, including Dostoyevsky, guilty of a “conspiracy of ideas.” On a December morning, they were taken to a square and lined up before a firing squad. At the last moment, a messenger rode up with an order from Tsar Nicholas I. Their sentences had been commuted to hard labor and exile in the East—the favorite destination for aristocratic opponents of the tsars.

  Dostoyevsky spent the next four years in iron shackles on a labor crew at a prison in Omsk in southern Siberia, an experience that inspired his first major novel, Notes from the House of the Dead. In 1854, he began five years of enforced military service as a private in the First Siberian Company of the Seventh Line Battalion, garrisoned in Semipalatinsk. Although the officers were regular army, the regiment was composed mostly of released prisoners and exiles.

  Despite the rigors of army life, Dostoyevsky greeted his arrival in Semipalatinsk as a liberating experience. “When I left my melancholy prison, I arrived here with happiness and hope. I resembled a sick person who is beginning to recover after a long illness, and having been at death’s door, even more strongly feels the pleasure of living during the first days of his recovery.” The writer was waiting for an amnesty, hoping that soon he would be able to return from exile to European Russia.

  Soon after his arrival, Dostoevsky met the young Baron Aleksandr Wrangel, a German-Russian aristocrat sent from St. Petersburg to become the new district prosecutor. Wrangel had read Dostoevsky’s novel Poor Folk, and the two became close friends, with the young prosecutor helping and supporting the writer and introducing him to Semipalatinsk society. Dostoyevsky returned to writing in earnest. “There is clarity in my soul,” he wrote. “It’s as though I have my whole future and everything that I’ll do right before my eyes.”

  Brief sketches of Semipalatinsk are found in his works. Notes from the House of the Dead begins with a description of the city: “In the remote regions of Siberia, amidst the steppes, mountains and impassable forests, one sometimes comes across little, plainly built wooden towns of one or often two thousand inhabitants, with two churches—one in the town itself, and the other in the cemetery outside—towns that are more like the good-sized villages of the Moscow district than they are like towns.” A scene in the story “Uncle’s Dream,” set in Semipalatinsk, is similar: “In the streets, with their rows o
f little houses sunk into the earth, there was a savage barking of dogs which abound in provincial towns in alarming numbers.”

  Dostoyevsky spent the spring and summer of 1855 with Wrangel at a dacha on the banks of the Irtysh where they went swimming, fishing, and riding, tended a flower garden, and read books sent from Moscow. By now he had fallen in love with Maria Dmitrievna, the wife of a local customs officer, Aleksandr Isayev. It was a tortured relationship, with Maria callously playing on the writer’s jealousy and insecurity. When Isayev’s alcoholism cost him his position, the couple fell on hard times and moved north to Kuznetsk in Siberia. Isayev died a few months later, leaving Maria penniless. Dostoyevsky borrowed money from Wrangel to pay for the funeral. Meanwhile, Wrangel used his connections in St. Petersburg to obtain an officer’s commission for Dostoyevsky and to have his hereditary title restored. Maria eventually agreed to marry Dostoyevsky, and they rented the second floor of the house of the city postmaster in Semipalatinsk. It was an unhappy match, with Maria now jealous of her husband. Dostoyevsky was experiencing frequent epileptic seizures, and was discharged from the military. After eighteen months, word finally came that his exile was over, and the couple returned to European Russia. The marriage continued on its turbulent course. Maria’s health declined, but her death left Dostoyevsky devastated. Maria, attractive, fickle, and manipulative, became the model for the tragic character of Katerina Ivanovna Marmeladova in Crime and Punishment.

  FIGURE 10.3 Dostoyevsky Museum, Semey

  In 1971, the house where the couple lived was reopened as the Dostoyevsky Museum, and in 1976 a modern annex was added to the original building. Next to the museum, in a small garden, a statue of Dostoevsky stands beside that of another of his friends, the army officer, explorer, folklorist, and artist Chokan Valikhanov.

  The two had met in Omsk, and renewed their friendship in Semipalatinsk. Valikhanov, a grandson of the last khan of the Kazakh Middle Horde, was educated in the prestigious Orenburg Cadet Corps and rose to the rank of captain in the Imperial Army. In Central Asia, he served as an intelligence agent among the Kazakhs and Kyrgyz. In 1858, disguised as a merchant’s son, he arrived in the city of Kashgar in western China, a region where the Qing Dynasty faced unrest and sporadic revolts from its Muslim subjects. Valikhanov lived undercover in Kashgar for five months, gathering intelligence, before traveling to St. Petersburg to report to the government and write about his adventures.

  Valikhanov’s historical reputation—and the reason he is a national hero in Kazakhstan, with streets in many cities named after him—rests on his written accounts of expeditions to explore Kashgaria and the “seven rivers” or “seven waters” region (Semireche in Russian or Zhetysu in Kazakh) of what today is southeastern Kazakhstan. Like all nineteenth-century explorers, Valikhanov painstakingly recorded everything he saw and learned. His notebooks are crammed with observations on the landscape, animals, plant life, history, folklore, language, literature, and politics. He was the first person to reportedly write down a fragment of the Manas epic from a Kyrgyz bard.

  Dostoyevsky realized Valikhanov’s significance as one of the few educated Central Asians who could educate Russians about the region. “Isn’t it a great goal, isn’t it a sacred mission,” he wrote him, “to be practically the first of one’s people who would explain in Russian what the steppe is, its significance and that of your people in regard to Russia, and at the same time to serve your homeland by means of enlightened intercession for her among the Russians?”

  Intercession had its limits as the Russian army pushed eastward and southward into Central Asia in the 1860s. Torn between his duties as an officer and his sympathies for his fellow Kazakhs and Muslims, Valikhanov protested at the army’s brutal conquest. Nevertheless, he continued intelligence work until his early death in 1865 at the age of thirty, either from tuberculosis or syphilis contracted in Kashgar.

  While downplaying his ethnic sympathies, the Soviets found Valikhanov to be a ready-made hero for the Kazakh people—an intrepid explorer, a scholar, artist, man of the people. In heroic status, his nineteenth-century literary counterpart was the poet, translator, and educator Abay Qunanbayev. Just as Valikhanov had, in the service of the Russian army, recorded the traditional culture of Central Asia, Qunanbayev used his literary talents to draw connections between Kazakh and Western traditions.

  Qunanbayev was born in 1845 in the village of Qasqabulaq in the Chingistau hills, south of Semipalatinsk. The family was reasonably well off by local standards, so there was money to send the bright boy to school—first to a madrassa and then to Russian school in Semipalatinsk. At school, he read and admired the works of Mikhail Lermontov, Aleksandr Pushkin, and other nineteenth-century writers, and determined to pursue a literary career.

  Qunanbayev was a contemporary and friend of several leading nineteenth-century Russian literary figures, and translated their work into Kazakh; he also translated Byron, Goethe, and other European writers. Qunanbayev’s major original work is The Book of Words, a philosophical treatise and collection of poems in which he encourages his fellow Kazakhs to embrace education, literacy, and moral character to escape poverty, enslavement, and corruption.

  If you honor God and have any shame, if you want your son to be a real man, send him to school! Don’t begrudge the expense! For if he remains an unlettered scoundrel, who will benefit? Will he be a solace to you? Will he be happy himself? And will he be able to do any good for his own people?

  Although Qunanbayev is celebrated as a national hero for writing in the Kazakh language, he knew the importance of learning Russian. The nomadic life that had supported his people for centuries was already changing, and he urged them to broaden their horizons.

  One should learn to read and write Russian. The Russian language is a key to spiritual riches and knowledge, the arts and many other treasures. If we wish to avoid the vices of the Russians while adopting their achievements, we should learn their language and study their scholarship and science, for it was by learning foreign tongues and assimilating world culture that the Russians have become what they are. Russian opens our eyes to the world. By studying the language and culture of other nations, a person becomes their equal and will not need to make humble requests.

  Qunanbayev’s main contribution is his poetry, which expresses nationalism and grew out of Kazakh folk culture. Before him, Kazakh literature had consisted chiefly of long oral poems. Qunanbayev’s public readings of his translations as well as his own work were the beginnings of Kazakh as a literary language. He wrote in the Arabic script that was used until the early twentieth century, when the Roman alphabet was adopted, only to be replaced by Cyrillic when the Soviets took over the region after the civil war.

  Today Qunanbayev is universally revered as one of the first Kazakh folk heroes. Almaty State University, public schools, and streets and boulevards in Almaty, Astana, and almost every city in the country are named after him. Statues, generally depicting him in full traditional dress holding a dombyra, stand in squares in many cities as well as in Moscow. Semey’s Abay museum opened in 1995, the 150th anniversary of the writer’s birth.

  Qunanbayev died in 1904. In the early Soviet era, despite his pro Russian leanings, his works were suppressed because his accounts of traditional culture were regarded as backward and antiproletarian. After the Stalinist purges of the 1930s and 1940s, the authorities realized that each republic needed a few acceptable ethnic heroes. The batyrs, the Alash Orda nationalist leaders, and other regime opponents were not considered appropriate. Writers, artists, musicians, scientists, and teachers fit the bill. Qunanbayev’s reputation was restored, and his literary works (especially his pro-Russian writings) officially licensed by Moscow.

  Although it’s impossible to forget the dark side of Semey’s history, I prefer to think of the city as a cultural and educational center. Apart from Qunanbayev, who spent most of his life in the region, other Kazakh literary greats were raised in the Chingistau hills—his nephew and student, the hi
storian, philosopher, and poet Shakarim Qudayberdiuli (1858–1931), for whom Semey State University is officially named (though the formal name is rarely used in everyday speech); the writer and social activist Mukhtar Auezov (1897–1961); and others. Dostoyevsky, Valikhanov, and others spent time in the city, and wrote about it. This is what sets Semey apart from other cities in Kazakhstan’s rust belt.

  Meals on Wheels and Sheep’s Heads

  One thing that does not set it apart is the city services. In Astana, the snow is cleared; in Semey it just piles up. In Astana, city workers have modern snowplows and front-end loaders. In Semey, they have old Soviet trucks and shovels. They try to clear the main roads, but the side streets, even in the center of the city, don’t get much attention. You are almost always walking on snow, over ice, over hard-packed snow. This makes the habit of holding onto your companion not only culturally acceptable but vital to personal safety. I felt most secure when my two assistants/interpreters from the university—Togzhan and Natasha—were to my left and right, their arms locked in mine.

  I stayed at the official university guest apartment. It was more than I needed—two bedrooms and a formal dining room with chandeliers, an ornate dining table with eight chairs and the largest red-leather sofa and armchairs I’ve ever seen. None of the three TVs worked, but the place was comfortable. There was even room (or at least apartment) service. Each morning, an unsmiling staff member from the university canteen drove over to deliver my breakfast. In the evening, my driver (who smiled even less) stopped at the canteen to pick up dinner. By the end of the second day, the small refrigerator was almost full and I had to insist that no more deliveries be made for a couple of days. I said I hoped my request was not culturally offensive and that I genuinely appreciated the university meals-on-wheels service.