Polygon(s) Borders: Contested Nuclear Legacies of the Semipalatinsk Nuclear Testing Site

• In Event: Memory Beyond Borders: Exile, Environment, and Law in the Former Soviet Space

Abstract

The Soviet nuclear project created a vast network of spaces across its territory: uranium mines, power reactors, processing plants, and weapons testing sites. After the USSR's collapse, successor states confronted an unsettling 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 with a total yield 2,500 times greater than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima.
This paper extends Julian Go's (2024) framework of “imperial reverberations” by distinguishing between 'slow memory' and “commemorative memory.” I examine how the legacies of Soviet nuclear testing persist as 'slow memory' (Wüstenberg 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. Contemporary memory politics, enacted through Kazakhstan's National Nuclear Center, local communities, and activists, reveal competing frameworks for interpreting the Polygon's contested space. By analyzing these contrasting approaches, I demonstrate how the patterns of Soviet nuclear governance function simultaneously as persistent material realities and as contested resources for imagining different futures for contaminated territories.

Author

• Olya Feldberg, U of Virginia