Semipalatinsk Nuclear Test Site in Qazaqstan, 1953: The First Soviet Thermonuclear Bomb

Nuclear testing continued at the Semipalatinsk test site until it was officially closed in August 1989, following public protests initiated in the late 1980s by Qazaq Russophone Poet Olzhas Sulemeinov. To some extent, this protest was made possible by Gorbachev’s new policies of perestroika and glasnost in 1986. But even before Gorbachev, critiques of Soviet rule had often been expressed through environmental concerns, including literary engagements with the desiccation of the Aral Sea in the early 1980s. Situating itself internationally, the Qazaq anti-nuclear movement called itself “Nevada-Semipalatinsk” to symbolise that the popular struggle against nuclear testing was global, and to link itself to the protests of locals in Nevada, U.S.A., who also suffered from their government’s nuclear testing programme.

The explosion of the first thermonuclear bomb thus symbolises both the nuclear race between the United States and the USSR, and the disregard for life on the margins of their own imperial territories. The thermonuclear bomb was many times more destructive than the ‘original’ atomic bombs that had been dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. After the first Soviet nuclear test, U.S. intelligence realised that the Soviet Union’s nuclear programme was more advanced than they had thought. Therefore, the further development of nuclear weapons became a priority in order to stay ‘ahead’ of the Soviet empire. After the U.S. dropped its first thermonuclear bomb, nicknamed ‘Ivy Mike’, on an island in the Enewetak Atoll on 1 November 1952, the Soviet Union followed suit on 12 August 1953, at its test site in rural Qazaqstan, slowly closing the gap between Soviet and U.S. nuclear science. Both empires chose the geographic and ethnic margins of their far-flung territories.

​

The Semipalatinsk test site in Qazaqstan was chosen in part because it was situated in a sparsely populated area. However, throughout the period of nuclear testing, people lived (and continue to live) in small villages [Qaz. ‘aul’] not far from the test site. The next larger city is Semipalatinsk (now: Semei), only 150 kilometres from the testing grounds. While Russian politicians and scientists saw only a little populated, seemingly ‘empty’ space that was not used agriculturally, for the Qazaqs the steppe surrounding Semipalatinsk was an important ancestral site. The landscape itself, then, is not ‘barren’ or sparsely populated, but very much alive in the environmental imaginary of the Qazaq people. For over a century, the city Semipalatinsk had been a site of cultural and intellectual life. Founded in 1718 as a Russian settlement, it also became a centre for Qazaq intellectual life. The most revered Qazaq poet, Abai Kunanbaiuly lived and wrote his famous poems and songs in the steppe surrounding Semipalatinsk. Semipalatinsk was not only the site of writers, poets and philosophers, but also of political emancipation. It was the place the Qazaq political elite chose as their capital for what they hoped would become an independent state: Between 1917–1920, it was chosen by the Qazaq political party Alash Orda as the capital of the Alash Autonomy, an independent state formed after the October Revolution but unable to survive the Civil War. After agreeing to join the Bolsheviks in the hope to be granted self-determination, the former political leaders of the Alash Autonomy fell victim to the Bolshevik ‘cleansing’ of ‘class enemies’. Most of the former political leaders were shot in the Stalinist purges of 1937.

It is not surprising, then, that in contemporary Qazaq literature and theatre nuclear testing is not treated as a single instance of nuclear destruction but is situated within wider historical complexities. As Qazaq author Rollan Seisenbaev describes nuclear testing in his Russophone autobiographical short story “The Day the World Collapsed” [День когда рухнул мир], for the inhabitants of the Qazaq steppe who were evacuated from the areas near the test site shortly before the explosion of the first Soviet thermonuclear bomb, the nuclear tests became one more catastrophe in a long chain of Soviet-inflicted suffering: Repression, the Red Terror, famine and the desiccation of the Aral Sea – they all resurface in Seisenbaev’s short story centred on the explosion on 12 August 1953.

Thus, the Semipalatinsk Test Site is not only a site where nuclear explosions damaged the health of the population, tore up the soil and contaminated the area for decades or even centuries to come. It is also a site where the landscape imaginaries of Russian politicians and scientists collided and clashed with those of the local Qazaq people. Seen by one side as ‘empty’ space, for the Qazaqs, the entire region was (and still is) imbued with a rich cultural and political heritage. Today, it is also still littered with both imperial and nuclear debris. This is reflected in Qazaq literature on the subject, which re-instates the Qazaq environmental imaginary and restores cultural meaning to both the people and the environment of the Qazaq steppe. Literature, thus becomes a vital space for engagement with the environment and empire alike, capable of producing decolonial re-imaginings of a landscape that remains contaminated.