Authors

Discussion

When the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991, Kazakhstan inherited a vast and complex nuclear legacy. Located across its territory were uranium mines, metallurgical plants, experimental reactors and nuclear test sites. This infrastructure, like the republic itself, was suddenly severed from its corresponding branches situated elsewhere in the former USSR. This had significant consequences for independent Kazakhstan. A focus on nuclear technology, therefore, is a valuable lens through which to explore both the USSR in its final years and the complex politics of transition in post-Soviet states, as they endeavoured to deal with the legacy of the former Soviet empire. Scholars such as Togzhan Kassenova have begun to explore Kazakhstan’s nuclear experience, focusing on the history of the Semipalatinsk Test Site and its consequences, radiation knowledge production, or Kazakhstan’s accession to the Non-Proliferation Treaty. However, a focus on nuclear weapons can obscure other aspects of the Soviet nuclear legacy. I seek to incorporate radioactive waste into this narrative and explore how collapse affected both the government as well as industries and citizens in newly independent Kazakhstan.
Building upon Gabrielle Hecht’s concept of ‘nuclearity’, which discusses what is and is not considered a nuclear technology, this paper will use the problem of radioactive waste as a case study to explore the long-term and multi-faceted experience of the Soviet collapse in Kazakhstan. In the first few months of independence, radioactive waste, a by-product of the nuclear fuel cycle and other industrial enterprises, was identified by the Ministry of Ecology and Bioresources as a major problem facing independent Kazakhstan. Both the scale and geographical scope of radioactive waste in the republic had not been adequately accounted for during the Soviet period. Severed from the Union-wide industry, independent Kazakhstan could not rely on other Soviet republics to deal with waste as it had done prior to 1991. Furthermore, public anxieties about proposed waste disposal sites were exacerbated due to the association of anything ‘nuclear’ with the Semipalatinsk Test Site, a major public issue in Kazakhstan after the news that more than four hundred nuclear weapons tests had taken place there became widely discussed in the press after 1989. The process of creating a new system is indicative of the long-term nature of the Soviet collapse, which was not a chronologically limited event but included an extended process of revision and rebuilding. Drawing upon citizen letters and government documents from the Presidential Archives and the National Archives of the Republic of Kazakhstan, I aim to expand the temporal boundaries of the Soviet collapse. I will demonstrate how the problem of radioactive waste exemplified the complicated legacy left by the Soviet Union and shed light on the challenges of independence.