My goodness, how’s that for an unsettling title?
Our flight from Aktau to Semey goes via Almaty. Almaty airport is a bit of a noisy Hellhole at the moment – lots of construction going on in the Domestic terminal.
What is now the city of Semey in Kazakhstan was known as Semipalatinsk when it was part of the Russian empire. Russian novelist Fyodor_Dostoevsky was exiled here for four years. His house is now a museum. We like visiting the houses of well-known writers.
When I was younger, I enjoyed reading the long, drawn-out psychological tales that Russians were so good at writing. (Especially the Constance Garnett translations.) Less popular today because, I’ve been told, people have a hard time keeping track of the many triple-barreled names that pepper these novels by the score.
According to AI: ‘There are 7 major literary and memorial museums in the world dedicated to Fyodor Dostoevsky. Six are located in Russia, and one is located in Kazakhstan.’
This one is pretty good. It’s a nifty old wooden house, common in this frontier town.
Even the mosques are made of wood.
An excursion to the Polygon region – we arrange a tour to the formerly secret city of Kurchatov. This is where the USSR developed and tested its nuclear weapons.
The site was selected in 1947 by the infamous Lavrentiy Beria, political head of the Soviet atomic bomb project. (This was in addition to his duties as head of the NKVD, incarcerator of millions and murderer of tens of thousands. A busy man.)
The town was named after Igor Kurchatov, the ‘father of the Russian atomic bomb’.
Gulag labour was employed to build the primitive test facilities. The Soviet Union conducted 456 nuclear tests at Semipalatinsk from 1949 until 1989. (The first hydrogen bomb was tested in 1953.)
The first Soviet bomb test, Operation First Lightning, was conducted in 1949, in an area that would become known as the Opytnoye Pole (experimental field).
The Opytnoye Pole test site is 45 KMs away, straight down this road.
This is a video showing one of the earliest nuclear tests at the Opytnoye Pole test site, from nearly the same vantage point.
You used to be able to visit more sights in the area, including the actual test sites. Since 2019, these have been closed again.
Fortunately, a Swedish engineer, Martin Trolle Mikkelsen, specializes in chronicling abandoned Cold War sites. He took hundreds of photos of the area before it was closed down, You can see them here – pretty fascinating stuff.
In Kuchatov, there is a museum of the Polygon housed inside the National Nuclear Center, but it’s also no longer open to the public. Too bad, because it has a lot of interesting exhibits, such as:
- An AP-2 control panel from 1955
- A map of the blast radius. To see the effects of the test, Ground Zero would be surrounded by buildings (including a replica Metro station), military and civilian equipment, and live animals (described on the map as a ‘Biological Reserve’.)
- A model of blast radius effects. It looks like a sort of diabolical board game.
The plaque on a memorial shows the layout of the different test sites. Maybe this is where the name ‘Polygon’ come from.
All of this had a predictably negative effect on the health of local people over time. Al Jazeera (!) made a documentary about this ongoing disaster. There’s a monument to the victims in Semey itself.
We also stop at the ruins of the (formerly secret, now abandoned) Chagan air base. This base was the home of long-range heavy bombers, ready to unleash their cargo of nukes on us bourgeois imperialists at a moment’s notice from the Kremlin.
It’s eerie to walk through these streets that once thronged with Russian servicemen and their families..
It reminds us of walking around Varosha in Cyprus.
Apparently, the near-total demolition isn’t an effort to protect state secrets – it’s due to armies of looters taking everything they can sell to ward off the economic collapse after the Soviet pullout from Kazakhstan.
The garrison town was about 10 KMs distant from the actual air base and runways. There were two runways, both 4 KMs in length, now being slowly reclaimed by nature.
Imagine these runways bristling with Tupolev Tu-95 bombers.
The hotel we book in Semey is an old Soviet pile. It has hundreds of rooms.
Ours is a spacious suite, with TWO bathrooms and a nice view of the park across the street.
Sight or Insight of the Day
Funny story – the day after our Polygon tour, we are in our hotel in Semey. Late in the morning, an air-raid siren begins to wail. (Maria doesn’t hear, she has her earbuds on.) For a brief moment, given our visitations of the previous day, the thought passes briefly through my mind: ‘This is it – the Trump-ocalypse has begun. Donald nuked Tehran, missile silo hatches are clanging open around the world. We’re all gonna die.’ It was nothing, of course. I still don’t know why the siren went off at that time in the morning.
All these resources poured into the creation and production of nuclear weapons. There exists an illusion about the end purpose of these devices. It’s not a matter of ‘gaining a strategic advantage over an opponent’ or ‘ensuring battlefield superiority’ or ‘neutralizing the enemy’s command & control capability’. Basically the result of this technology is the potential extermination of all life on Earth. Every man, woman, and child. Every puppy and every kitten. All the fish in the sea and the birds of the air. (OK, cockroaches would probably survive.)
I read an interesting book last year, Nuclear War: A Scenario. (Warning: Not good reading for the anxiety-afflicted.) It sets out step by step how within a couple of hours in any 24-hour cycle, a chain reaction of missile exchanges could result in an unstoppable Armageddon. Thankfully, half the world would be asleep through it all.
And all this satanic power is in the hands of a few dozen men – not a single woman – most of whom are ruthless aging dictators, and at least one doddering vindictive idiot on the cusp of extreme dementia. What a strange species we are.