The Semipalatinsk Museum That Defies Logic

by Mark Fyers (Greece)

I didn't expect to find Kazakhstan

The sleepy east Kazakhstan city of Semey seldom appears on the glossy brochures of most tourist guides. A quiet city of 300,000, it was once home to the USSR's Nuclear Arms Program. Overseen by scientist, Igor Kurchatov, it was thrown into the history books in 1989 after the USSR collapsed. However, its legacy is one steeped in mystery and hidden from public view, until now. The Semey Medical University is renowned throughout the country as a prestigious medical school. But perhaps what makes SMU more unique is its collection of memorabilia on display. After meeting, Yulia* and her brother Dimitri*, there was a sense that the memorial would not be as I expected. Dimitri was clearly afraid, his eyes sullen, his voice trembling. "I will not go in there, last time I was sick", he tells me as we exit the car towards the university entrance. It's immediately apparent what he means. From the first whiff of the chemically-inducing aroma complete with the stale grey stained walls, there was something unexpected close by. We were banned from photography, take as long as we needed to view the objects, and to process what I was about to see. On first inspection, the room is filled with shelves of glass jars. Some only 30 cm, while others were closer to 100 cm. Objects floated in liquid, contained in these glass jars were some horrific sights. A fetus of only a few weeks old, it's cranium outside its body. In another, Siamese twins, two heads on one body, another with four toes and a couple of fingers on each hand. As grim as the bodies were, the travesty lay much deeper. It required introspective logic, how a supposed race for weaponised glory could invoke such reckless disregard for human life. While many of these alien beings would never survive outside of a womb, some would. Eyes that spoke of suffering, bulging and penetrating. The chemical aroma drifted me into a thought about the ramifications of such an ugly chapter in this regions history. Why are we so unaffected by war? While the twisted, mutilated bodies each told their story, there was one for whom was not told, that of Igor Kurchatov. What drove a man to experiment with disregard for human life? Would he have ever paid the cost for this event? We may never know as Kurchatov died in 1960, before his nuclear arms program had been completed. However during his time as the overseer of the program, witnesses claim that at 100km from the epicentre, the local inhabitants were falling over in the street. And here at over 200km from the epicentre, glass from office buildings imploded onto the streets. Today this sleepy desolate eastern city on the fringes of the cold and arid Kazakh steppe bares the scars of the nuclear tests. Cancer rates, unofficially attributed to the testing have skyrocketed. Children have inherited tumours and cancer from their parents, and perhaps most significantly disturbing, a rise in cases of the cranium enlarging condition known as Pagets Syndrome are rife in the region. For all its pain, what light can come from this? To get to the heart of that answer, I had to speak with locals. Yulia, along with others I spoke to agree, the only way forward is to present this to the world. While there are strict regulations surrounding visiting the site, the local government is working towards bizarrely turning this into a dark tourist attraction. But should such a travesty be showcased to the world as a tourist gimmick? In short, of course not but it serves as a poignant reminder of how far we have come since this dark period, yet how far we still must go. It serves as a real life history lesson that no textbook can duplicate without witness to the obscene. It is only through witnessed firsthand this devastating collection of glass jars with their haunting story can we truly gravitate to understand what we must do in order to move forward, and to truly honour these victims of a senseless evil war. (*real names were excluded from this article)