Polygon(s) Borders: Contested Nuclear Legacy in Modern Kazakhstan

• In Event: 50460 - Section on Comparative-Historical Sociology Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 5: Contentious Politics

Abstract

The Soviet nuclear project created a vast network of specialized spaces across its territory: uranium mines, power reactors, processing plants, and weapons testing sites. The collapse of the Soviet Union left newly independent states grappling with fundamental questions about this nuclear inheritance: How do you manage contaminated landscapes when the institutions that created them no longer exist? How do you come to terms with the long life of radioactivity and the complex legacies of nuclear modernization? For Kazakhstan, these questions became particularly acute with the inheritance of the Semipalatinsk Nuclear Test Site (SNTS), also known as the Polygon. The SNTS conducted at least 468 nuclear tests between 1949 and 1989, detonating more than 616 nuclear and thermonuclear bombs.
Julian Go's (2024) typology of “imperial reverberations” helps us understand how colonial structures continue through formal reproduction, institutional persistence, path dependency, and cultural archives. This paper extends this framework by distinguishing between 'slow memory' and 'commemorative memory.” I examine how the invisible legacies of Soviet nuclear testing persist as 'slow memory' (Wustenberg 2023) in two forms: material and embodied residues in contaminated landscapes and affected bodies and institutionalized frameworks of knowledge about radiation risk. This slow memory exists regardless of interpretation, but it requires commemorative articulation to become meaningful in public discourse, and different actors interpret and mobilize it in various ways. For example, anti-nuclear activists like the Nevada-Semipalatinsk movement interpreted this slow memory through a colonial lens, framing Soviet nuclear testing as imperial violence against Kazakh land and its people. Today, competing memory frameworks shape how the National Nuclear Center in Kazakhstan, local communities, and activists interpret and manage the Polygon's space.

Author

• Olga Alexandrovna Feldberg, University of Virginia