Crossroads Asia | Politics | Central Asia

Farewell to Russia: The View From Kazakhstan

Karaganda and its environs are home to some of the largest-scale coal-mining on the planet. And once, the home to an immense gulag.

The Karlag Museum in Dolinka.

In “Farewell to Russia: A Journey Through the Former USSR” journalist Joe Luc Barnes travels across the 15 states that once comprised the Soviet Union. In the excerpt below, Barnes stops off in Karaganda, the heart of Kazakh coal country and once the site of a notorious gulag.

The steppe stretches in all directions under the massive sky. There are no trees, no hills, no natural points of interest of any sort, save for a herd of horses grazing by the roadside. The openness of Central Asia makes itself felt immediately. Kazakhstan alone spans an area larger than Western Europe. 

But these northern plains are not featureless. Factories dot the landscape, their chimneys raised like middle fingers in defiance of the mighty heavens. Thin trails of smoke seep from them and a vast network of pylons and railway tracks sprawl from their feet. Karaganda and its environs are home to some of the largest-scale coal-mining on the planet. At the time of my visit, much of this industrial landscape belonged to steel giant ArcelorMittal. 

“We don’t like them here. They don’t care about employees; they pay us nothing, and don’t give a shit about our safety,” my taxi driver tells me.

“Do you work down the mines?”

“Used to. I’m an invalid now; was forced to retire. My lungs can’t take it any more.”

“Would you like to be back down there?”

“Of course!” he says, displaying that gritty courage you often get in mining communities, where a hard day’s graft is the highest form of honor.

As it happens, this former miner is taking me to one of the predecessors of ArcelorMittal – another institution that has a rather patchy record when it comes to worker rights.

Around a century ago, Karaganda didn’t really exist. Coal had been discovered here in the late 19th century, but the nascent mines were soon abandoned – for some reason it proved difficult to persuade people to leave their families behind and toil down the pit in the middle of the frigid steppe. Besides, there were too few houses and nowhere near enough food to supply a large-scale mining settlement. But all that changed in February 1927, when Article 58 of the Russian penal code was brought into force.

Article 58 justified the arrest of those suspected of counter-revolutionary activity. The law cast a wide net as the precise meaning of “counter-revolutionary activity” was left deliberately vague, leaving Alexander Solzhenitsyn to ask: “Who among us has not experienced its all-encompassing embrace? In all truth, there is no step, thought, action, or lack of action under the heavens which could not be punished by the heavy hand of Article 58.”

People may not have fancied moving to the steppe, but fortunately for economic planners the Soviet justice system had suddenly created a large pool of laborers who had little choice in the matter.

Between 1921 and 1953, an estimated 18 million people passed through the Soviet forced-labor camp system known as the Gulag. The number of those who died is disputed, but is thought to be around 1.5 to 1.6 million. These numbers suggest that while the Gulag experience was unimaginably brutal, it was not necessarily the death sentence it is often portrayed as.

The Karaganda Camp (or Karlag) was created in 1930 to solve the problem of supplying the coal mines. It grew so rapidly that, by 1940, the area of the camp covered 6,500 square miles and was home to 65,000 prisoners. The Kazakh SSR became a repository for all manner of “undesirables,” from the political dissidents convicted under Article 58 to the so-called rich peasants, or kulaks, who were seen to be standing in the way of the equal distribution of land. They were joined by whole groups of “disloyal” ethnicities such as Poles and Chechens, Koreans and Crimean Tatars. In the early 1940s, half a million ethnic Germans, who had been living along the banks of Russia’s Volga River for almost two centuries, were also forced to relocate here. 

Between them they played a large part in the building of Karaganda, which went from a small settlement in the late 1920s to a city of over 200,000 twenty years later. The camp headquarters, and now the site of the Karlag Museum, was in a small town called Dolinka, about 30 miles from Karaganda proper. There are few other visitors, so the young woman at the ticket office is happy to give me a free tour.

She takes me to the dormitories first. It’s draughty even at the height of summer. Rough woolen sheets filled with straw are draped over bunk beds whose supporting planks are so thin I doubt they would have supported any but the scrawniest of inmates – though I suppose the diets here were unlikely to have left anyone particularly rotund.

“Local people used to ride here on horseback and throw kurt over the walls of the camp for the prisoners........

© The Diplomat