Nevada-Semey Anti-Nuclear Movement: Placing the Soviet Union into the Framework of Global Colonialism

• In Event: From Housing Struggles to Political Mobilization: Grassroots Activism in Late Soviet Central Asia

Abstract

The following paper is focused on the anti-nuclear movement in Kazakhstan in the late soviet period, as part of a growing civic activism in the 1980s-1990s in Central Asia. After fifty years of nuclear tests in Semey Polygon conducted by the Soviet Union, Kazakh civil society mobilized into the Nevada-Semey anti-nuclear movement which led to the decrease and latter ban on the nuclear testing in 1989. Nevada-Semey was initially formed as an international movement that would advocate for global anti-nuclearism and international solidarity. Led by Kazakh writer and politician Olzhas Suleimenov it was predominantly bottom-up mobilization, but had also received substantial institutional support. The largest grassroots environmental movement in the Soviet Union strived to join the global peace movement, but also promote anticolonial resistance to Moscow.
Nevada Semey, as many other Central Asian grassroots political and civic activism is often overlooked in the framework of pre-collapse of the Soviet Union activist movements. The commemoration of antinuclearism in Kazakhstan is often linked to the nuclear disarmament policy of the early independence years and Semey Polygon. Yet, Western scholarship often omits Kazakh transnational antinuclear resistance which created a precedent to put a halt on nuclear testing globally. It also often falls in the general misconception that Central Asia was not as politically involved in anticolonial resistance as Baltics or Eastern Europe. Hence, I argue that by looking at the democratic anti-nuclear movement Nevada Semey it is possible to place the Soviet Union into the bigger picture of global colonial history and anti-nuclearism

Author

• Kamila Smagulova, Leiden U (Netherlands)