Fallout Memory Trajectories at Semipalatinsk: Reassembling the Post-Soviet Past

Abstract

This chapter examines post-Soviet efforts to address the legacies of nuclear testing near Semipalatinsk, Kazakhstan, by tracing different modes of memorializing nuclear fallout. Similar to the construction of new monuments, memory work also takes place through scientific data labor aimed at the documentation of the impact of nuclear testing. In the early post-Soviet years of radical economic transition, nation building policies, and pressing environmental issues, a variety of scientific projects engaging in documenting health effects of fallout took shape. The analysis focuses on selected trajectories of Soviet nuclear legacies, especially concerning long-term, transgenerational effects of fallout exposure. It investigates scientific memory practices used to document radiation effects and shows how the post-Soviet nuclear condition is drawn upon for the building of the new state of Kazakhstan. Nation building becomes a multi-scale endeavor that, in a biopolitical sense, reaches from state governance to the politics of knowledge infrastructures and embodiment.