You might have seen that SAIGA takes tours to a weird and mysterious place called the Polygon in Kazakhstan, and while many of you will immediately know its history, there will also be a large number who have no idea what this could possibly be referring to other than the possibility of a geometric shape.
The short answer is that the Polygon was a nuclear testing site. During the Soviet Union, 468 nuclear bombs were tested in this small area of North-Eastern Kazakhstan. Far away from its western borders with NATO, the site was chosen due to it being ‘uninhabited’. Of course, this wasn’t true and between 1949 and 1989, 1.5 million locals were directly exposed to the fallout from the nuclear testing. Although it is impossible to ever know the rationale behind secret Cold War decisions, some have surmised that the proximity to the Chinese border also played a part in the selection of this site, as many in the Soviet leadership were more scared of the ‘irrational’ Chinese as opposed to the ’rational’ west.
The area was also home to several of the famous Soviet gulags, or labour camps, at this point in history filled with Germans and many others from Eastern Europe, which provided slave labour to build the testing facilities.
The health consequences, while not completely understood, are probably the saddest story of the Polygon, and the main reason why a visit here is so important. Individual stories often hit home the hardest, like the children playing outside when one of the tests were conducted, causing them to faint and have permanent hearing loss, or the story of a whole family living 150km away who now all have blood pressure over 160 and struggle completing even basic tasks.
But the statistics are harder to grapple with. 80% increases in the prevalence of tumours in the lungs, oesophagus, kidney, rectum and pancreas. 50% increases in deformities in children born in the region even today 30 years after they stopped testing. Huge increases in heart and thyroid diseases.
Nearby the nuclear testing site there also happens to be one of the longest runways in the world where Soviet Air Force bombers took off, carrying their nuclear weapons. This was only one of four bases in the entire country able to handle their longest range aircraft, but today lies derelict and open to the public.
The main town at the Polygon site is Kurchatov, a formerly closed city, named after Igor Kurchatov, the founder of the Soviet cuclear programme. Even during the varying hardships experienced in the USSR, Kurchatov always enjoyed a relatively high standard of living. This was because many of the country’s leading scientists lived here, closed off from the rest of the country, unable to travel in or out, to ensure the site’s scientific secrets were kept within. The trade-off was those goods not available to the rest of the population were available here, the pay they received was substantially higher than the rest of the country’s, and the housing, while now seen as outdated, was luxurious for the era.
Today you can visit the test sites themselves. Hundreds of craters dot the landscape, the most famous called the Atomic Lake. The Atomic Lake was made by an explosion twenty-five times great than Hiroshima. You’ll even see locals fishing here which is absurd considering the radiation emitted in the area. Also marking the landscape are the concrete bunkers and observation posts used to witness first hand the detonations of these experimental weapons. In Kurchatov, there is a museum dedicated to the history of the area, and in nearby Chagan, you can visit the old Soviet Airforce base. The whole area does need prior permission though and you must be on a tour in order to get the permits.
If you’re interested in visiting this sad, but amazing and unique place, join us on one of our Polygon tours .
