Ecology, Memory, and Protest in late Soviet Kazakhstan6 min read
Despite the fact that antinuclear movements have often given rise to nationalist mobilization, Kazakhstan’s Nevada–Semipalatinsk movement followed a different path. In this piece, Jackie Erlon-Baurjan explores this paradox, as well as the absence of a broader nationalist political agenda in Central Asia amid what was otherwise an intense moment of national revival.
“Between 1949 and 1989, at the Semipalatinsk Nuclear Test Site (SNTS), a total of 468 nuclear explosions were carried out, comprising 125 atmospheric and 343 underground blasts. The aggregate yield of the nuclear devices tested in the atmosphere and underground at the SNTS (in a populated region) exceeded by a factor of 2,500 the power of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima by the Americans in 1945.”
The Dead Lake by Hamid Ismailov
In the late 1980s, ecological disasters such as Chernobyl triggered a political awakening across the Soviet Union. Antinuclear activism emerged as one of the most dynamic movements challenging Moscow’s authority, articulating resentment towards the center and demanding greater political autonomy. Characterizing this phenomenon in her book Eco-Nationalism, political scientist Jane Dawson famously argued that antinuclear activist movements functioned as surrogates for an “ever-present nationalism” that rapidly rose in the late 1980s and largely dissipated after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Yet, the Nevada-Semipalatinsk antinuclear movement in the Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic never followed the same path. Despite being one of the largest and most effective environmental movements in the USSR — bringing an end in 1989 to nuclear testing at the Semipalatinsk “Polygon,” the center of Soviet nuclear testing — it never framed its struggle in nationalist terms, nor did its leaders demand greater political autonomy from Moscow. Despite the fact that ethnic Kazakhs had borne the disproportionate burden of nuclear testing, Nevada–Semipalatinsk consistently presented itself as an internationalist movement, framing its struggle as civic and multinational.
This absence of nationalism in Central Asia occurred at precisely the moment when nationalism elsewhere in the Soviet Union appeared politically irresistible. So, why did one of the most powerful ecological movements of the late Soviet period refuse to use the political language that proved so effective in other republics?
Three years after the violent suppression of the December 1986 Zheltoksan protests — prompted by Moscow’s top-down replacement of a popular Kazakh leader with an ethnic Russian — public discourse seemed to distance itself from any form of titular nationalism. Political caution alone cannot explain the contradictions at the heart of late Soviet Kazakhstan. At the very moment when nationalism was being rejected as a political identity, the Kazakh nation was being reborn in culture.
By the 1980s, a generation of creative figures had begun to seize the relatively open political space created by Mikhail Gorbachev’s policy of glasnost in order to locate an “authentic” Kazakh past, whether in the figure of 19th-century national poet Abai, in steppe khanates, or in the memory of an early national movement, Alash Orda, which sought to preserve Kazakh identity in the wake of the Russian Revolution. Today, these figures and images litter the symbolic and physical landscape of contemporary Kazakhstan. In an era when being ‘Soviet’ meant overcoming the national, especially in the supposedly ‘most backwards’ nations of Central Asia, the Kazakh project not only challenged Soviet top‑down narratives but also sought to create an alternative national archive of cultural and national symbols.
While a Kazakh national identity was flourishing culturally, it was also noticeably absent from formal politics. No figure illustrates this tension more clearly than Olzhas Suleimanov, a Kazakh Russian-language poet who founded and led the Nevada–Semipalatinsk movement. Publicly, Suleimanov championed a form of “internationalism,” framing his movement as part of a global anti-nuclear struggle despite having previously produced intellectual works infused with nationalist undertones. His 1975 novel Az-i-Ya, a Turkic rereading of a Russian medieval epic, was accused of national chauvinism and banned within the USSR. His works, including the poem The Wild Field (1973), which centers the hypocrisies of Kazakhstan’s supposed ‘empty’ and ‘wild fields’, are still taught today in Kazakhstan’s schools to cultivate “national patriotism.”
In this way, Suleimanov embodied the particular structural conditions of the Kazakh SSR. The Soviets had cultivated a form of the nation-state that presupposed the development of titular nationalism, while simultaneously seeking to constrain nationalist politics. Yet, in Kazakhstan, where Kazakhs constituted a minority (39 percent) within their own republic, titular nationalism was inherently delicate. The political scientist Edward Schatz called this the tension between “multi-ethnicity (and its ideology of internationalism)” and “ethnic titularity (and its ideology of ethno-political entitlement)”.
Central Asia unsettles what Jane Dawson presumes about antinuclear activism, not because nationalism failed to emerge at least culturally, but rather because it was constrained politically. The absence of nationalist movements in Central Asia complicates studies on nationalism. Is nationalization a question of timing; that is, were forms of modernization that tend to produce nationalism, such as literacy and urbanization, not sufficiently present in Central Asia to produce larger political movements? If so, where were the Central Asian republics in this dialectical accumulation of symbolic and cultural capital that tends to produce a national consciousness?
Are these even the right questions to ask when we think about Central Asia? If nationalism is about timing, how should we juxtapose the fact that material living standards — i.e., literacy and urbanization — rose at exactly the same time as when Soviet rule was most extractive?
If we look closer, beneath Nevada-Semipalatinsk’s civic internationalism lay unmistakable symbols of Kazakh cultural revival. On one occasion in August 1989, marking an anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima, protestors tied white cloth to trees, walked between fires in a ritual of cleansing, and conducted traditional nomadic rituals. These gestures were symbolic, but by enacting them, regular citizens entered into a discourse about nation-making so often dominated by cultural elites.
After independence in 1991, Kazakhstan’s new political elites turned the memory of the Nevada-Semipalatinsk movement into an official part of national myth-making. The country’s first leader, Nursultan Nazarbayev, hailed the movement a national achievement, while many of the cultural elites behind Nevada-Semipalatinsk entered newly-formed government institutions, lending the new regime symbolic legitimacy at the cost of their own oppositional potential. The memory of the Polygon was gradually absorbed into state narratives.
The symbolic grammar forged by regular protesters during the late Soviet period did not disappear. In 2021, amid protests against development plans at the Taldykol reservoir in Astana, activists staged a healing ritual, a Baqsy Saryny. Taldykol protesters inherited, consciously or otherwise, a symbolic repertoire that emerged in the twentieth century. They are cultural descendants of the Nevada-Semipalatinsk movement, invoking a kind of activism that is culturally grounded, relational, and oriented toward ecological caretaking. It is within these spaces, outside of formal politics, that ordinary Kazakhs continue to contest top-down narratives, perform and negotiate identity, and reclaim historical memory. It is also a sign of how older forms get refashioned in new contexts, how the realm of ideas can exceed the limits of power, and how our ongoing sense of what could or might be must continually be imagined anew.
