About a year into my field research in Kazakhstan, I went to the city of Kurchatov, once the secret command center of the Soviet nuclear program, to make some photocopies. On the ground floor of an apartment building I found a store whose owner had a copy machine as well as several glass display cases selling souvenir stickers, magnets and other objects featuring hammers and sickles, stars and mushroom clouds.
‘I am a radioactive mutant.’
Magdalena Stawkowski
These kinds of trinkets were not particularly surprising to me. You can find them in many places. But a bright yellow button about the size of my palm stopped me in my tracks: “I am a radioactive mutant” (“Ya radioaktivnyy mutant”), read its simple message.
I laughed to myself, thinking that the button was meant to be funny, that a tourist would buy it to wear ironically and tell stories about having been near a nuclear test site.
But the button’s message is also true for the thousands of people who live in this area. Residents actually say, “I am a mutant,” when they talk about their bodies, their family histories and their radioactive environment.
As a cultural-medical anthropologist, I study health and illness as life experiences. I’ve spent many months in villages around the Soviet-era Semipalatinsk test site in Kazakhstan, known locally as the Polygon.
In my book “Atomic Collective: Radioactive Life in Kazakhstan,” I explore how the people here have created new forms of mutual aid and camaraderie in the shadow of nuclear catastrophe. Their stories weave together fallout, the Cold War and secret government agencies, international aid workers and scientists, and everyday life in the Anthropocene.
Scale of nuclear testing in Kazakhstan
The Polygon is a roughly 7,000-square-mile (18,000-square-kilometer) area, close to the size of New Jersey, that was the Soviet Union’s primary nuclear testing ground for 40 years.
People have dug around structures believed to be former missile silos, salvaging scrap metal.
Magdalena Stawkowski
Between 1949 and 1989, more than 450 nuclear tests took place here with a total explosive yield of 2,500 Hiroshima bombs. The most devastating were the above-ground tests, 116 of which were detonated between 1949 and 1963. I’ve seen the archival footage: mushroom clouds rising over the steppe, shock waves knocking people down dozens of miles away.
Today, this history is etched into a landscape pockmarked with deep craters and atomic lakes, contaminated with radioactive isotopes cesium-137, strontium-90 and plutonium-239 that can remain dangerous for thousands of years.
Burkut’s house, with the test site on the horizon.
Magdalena Stawkowski
I brought the mutant button to show Burkut. At 78, he was the oldest resident in the village of Koian. A pensioner, he was once a tractor operator on a massive…
