Abstract
In Soviet-era tellings, the Baikonur Cosmodrome was glorified as the most dramatic example of a technological prowess that would catapult society forward into the Socialist future. Irrigation would make the desert bloom, electricity illuminate the village, rockets erase the boundaries between earth and heaven. In present-day Kazakhstan, these narratives often appear in mirror form: technology retains its power to transform both the social and the natural, yet these transformations take the form of disease, social alienation, and climatic disaster. Seasonal droughts and floods, dust storms, the disappearance of the Aral Sea, and the mass die-offs of Saiga antelope in spring 2015 have all been blamed on the rockets launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome. This paper draws on ethnographic fieldwork among mobile pastoralists in rural Kazakhstan in combination with materials gathered from mass media to document popular narratives on the environmental impact of the Baikonur Cosmodrome. In these narratives, fears of climate change and environmental pollution are read as attempts to reckon with the conflicted legacies of the Soviet project.
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Notes
- 1.
Kazakh words are Romanized in accordance with the ALA-LC standard (but without the use of diacritics) except where other spellings have already become standard in English (e.g., Baikonur rather than Baiqonyr). All quotations of Kazakh texts are original translations by the author.
- 2.
Kopack (2021) offers a detailed ethnographic study of space debris pollution in communities under the flight paths. Other studies of the contemporary societal impact of Soviet-era environmental disasters focus on either the Semipalatinsk Polygon (Schatz 1999; Werner and Purvis-Roberts 2006; Stawkowski 2016) or on the Aral Sea (Wheeler 2016).
- 3.
The ethnographic material was collected during a year of fieldwork in the regions of Taraz and Turkestan focused on contemporary herding practices. None of the narratives were directly solicited by the author; rather, they emerged unprompted in the course of conversation. The media material was gathered from the newspapers Qazaq Uni, Egemen Qazaqstan, and Azattyq radiosy using searches for the Kazakh words for Baikonur, saiga, and heptyl.
- 4.
The space port was actually located at Tyuratam, but the village of Baikonur was publicly identified as the site in an attempt to mislead the United States; in 1995, Tyuratam was officially renamed Baikonur (Gruntman 2019). A third ethnic Kazakh, Talgat Musabayev, was technically a citizen of the Russian Federation at the time of his flight; Bekus (2022, 353–355) covers the nationalist imagery associated with these flights in detail.
- 5.
Heathershaw similarly identifies fear of a “Russian elder brother” as one of the most elements in Central Asian conspiracy theories. For broader discussions of the application of post-colonial theory to Central Asia, see Moore (2001) and Adams (2008); for post-colonial rhetoric in contemporary Kazakhstan, see Kudaibergenova (2016).
- 6.
- 7.
There is a growing literature on the role the space program played in Soviet culture in the Khrushchev and Brezhnev years—for recent examples, see the studies collected in Eva Maurer et al. (2011) and Andrews and Siddiqi (2011). None of these studies, however, examine the trajectory of space culture within the Soviet republic that actually housed the Baikonur Cosmodrome.
- 8.
- 9.
- 10.
This is a variation on the common urban legend that Neil Armstrong heard the call to prayer when he landed on the moon, and subsequently converted to Islam. Versions of this narrative have appeared in newspapers in Malaysia, Indonesia, and Egypt, as well as in Egemen Qazaqstan. The Neil Armstrong version is in fact far more common in Kazakhstan than the version involving Gagarin. I also encountered one variant in which the astronauts repairing the international space station heard the call to prayer while spacewalking.
- 11.
- 12.
Mustafina (2005, 319) recounts a conversation with a Mullah in the city of Turkestan who pinned the blame for a fruitless tasattyq on the participation of non-believers in the ceremony. In a 2014 article, the head Imam of a east Kazakhstan mosque listed a long series of problems with the ways in which villagers now carry out the ceremony, describing children who play ball while the sheep is sacrificed and men who come to the gathering drunk, while only the Mullah and the old people can be found at the sheep’s sacrifice (Egemen Qazaqstan, 11 June 2014). Some of these narratives have a more lighthearted tone, as in the following: “All this happened when we had just changed to tengge, right at independence. That year everyone was alarmed, for all spring there wasn’t a drop of rain in our region. In the end the aqsaqals agreed we had to give a tasattyq ceremony. Tasattyq, it means to sacrifice a sheep in hopes Allah will send rain. As soon as this was agreed, people started to argue about the money. People who had money wanted everyone to give five tengge, and those in worse situations wanted to give three. After everyone in the village had argued it back and forth, in the end they agreed on three tengge. Everyone gathered on top of a small hill outside the village, and carried out the tasattyq ceremony with the sheep they’d bought. They read from the Qur’an, ate the sheep, said a blessing, and right then the day got dark and it started to rain. The people tumbled all their things together and took off running for the village. The rain kept getting stronger and stronger, water came flooding all around them. And as they were scrambling back to the village with their things, our uncle Topen said, ‘Lord, if this is what you get for three tengge, then for five tengge we’d be completely washed away!” (Egemen Qazaqstan, 1 January 2017).
- 13.
- 14.
A rocket testing site in Russia’s Astrakhan oblast and a nuclear weapon research site in Kazakhstan’s Atyrau oblast respectively.
- 15.
There has been comparatively little written on the Zar Zaman poets in English, but for their place in nineteenth-century Kazakh literature, see Tomohiko Uyama (2000); for the Zar Zaman poets and Soviet Kazakh literature, see Gabriel McGuire (2018). A far more extensive critical literature exists in Kazakh—see in particular Mukhtar Auezov’s foundational delineation of the genre (2014).
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McGuire, G. (2024). Conspiracies and Cosmonauts: The Baikonur Cosmodrome and Popular Narratives of Ecological Disaster in Contemporary Kazakhstan. In: Sharipova, D., Bissenova, A., Burkhanov, A. (eds) Post-Colonial Approaches in Kazakhstan and Beyond. The Steppe and Beyond: Studies on Central Asia. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-8262-2_7
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