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Kaisha Atakhanova was born in Karaganda, an industrial city and former gulag. She graduated in biology from Karaganda State University and began full-time research, specialising eventually in the genetic effects of radiation on amphibians. In 1992 she abandoned her research to found the Karaganda Ecological Center, to promote environmental protection and grass-roots democracy in Kazakhstan. She recently ran a successful campaign to block a plan to import nuclear waste into Kazakhstan for disposal

What do you remember about the nuclear tests when you were young?

We lived 400 kilometres away from the tests, which took place in a closed area of steppe they called the Polygon. But even so, I remember as a child how the ceiling light fittings shook in our house and the land seemed to move sometimes. These were the underground nuclear tests, which replaced atmospheric tests after the nuclear test ban treaty in 1963. We didn’t know what they were at the time. An earthquake maybe, people said.

Really, people just didn’t know what was happening?

It was a secret, even when the atmospheric tests were going on. People saw these huge mushrooms in the sky, but they didn’t know what they were. When the tests were going on, the military came to the villages and told people to come out into the streets, to lie down in ditches and cover themselves with white materials such as sheets or towels, and not to look up. But they still looked up, because they were curious about what was going on, with all the flashing lights.

After each test, the military would give the people some red wine, which was supposed to be an antidote to radiation. They took blood samples and then took them out of the village for a few days, until the dust settled. But the cattle and chickens and everything else stayed in the villages. Afterwards the people carried on living in radioactive houses and with radioactive animals.

When did people learn the truth?

It was only with perestroika in the 1980s that we found out what had been going on. And the tests continued even then. The last one was in 1989 and the Polygon was not abandoned by the military until 1991.

It was a great experiment on the people of Kazakhstan. It was devastating and the effects are still going on. When the young women of that time were pregnant, their embryos were affected by radiation. Their babies are now grown up and having their own children. The genetic damage is being passed on down the generations and people are still getting ill. Both my parents died of cancer about 10 years ago. My sister also died of cancer. I only have one brother left, and I am really, really upset because now he has cancer. I think he might die soon. I may not see him again.

What was your upbringing like?

My father was a coal miner in Karaganda, a big industrial city in eastern Kazakhstan. But nature was the place where I always felt comfortable. I went to the steppe a lot. The flat steppe was a wide open space like the ocean, and you could see the sun and the moon at the same time.

I always liked animals and I became a biologist. After I graduated from the Karaganda State University, I did environmental and biological research. I was interested in genetic studies: cells and chromosomes. My speciality was amphibians, especially frogs. They are unique objects of research because they live on the land and in the water. Frogs are like a sponge. They absorb everything, and everything goes through them.

Including radiation?

Yes, of course. When perestroika came and we found out that nuclear tests had been carried out in our area, my colleagues and I decided to help research the effects. We wanted to show that the wildlife and people who lived there had suffered. Once the military had left, we decided to do some field studies in the Polygon near Semipalatinsk. We had a dose meter, but we didn’t have proper protective clothing. We just wore tracksuits and gloves and wellington boots. We had masks and we covered our hair. We set up camp and went exploring.

What did you find?

We were there for two months the first time. It was like one long nightmare. Over 40 years there had been almost 500 nuclear tests there, in the air and underground. Together they were equivalent in strength to 20,000 Hiroshima bombs. When we first went, we found lots of old military machinery and equipment, planes and tanks that had been left out in the open during the tests to see how they were affected. Afterwards they were put into big dumps. We went past these dumps regularly and I saw that they were gradually getting smaller and smaller.

We found out that the locals were taking the radioactive material for scrap or to use in their houses or on farms. They took whatever they could. It was good quality, you see. We had a guide who was a local doctor. One day when we came across some telephone wire, she picked it up and said it was good quality, some general or colonel had probably used it. So she took it home and used it for her telephone.

The Polygon had huge bunkers, like a whole underground city. The locals knew about them. They said the military had left things such as fuel there, and they went to fetch it for their tractors. Businessmen hired locals to smelt non-ferrous metals such as copper. The stuff in those bunkers was worth millions. At one time, the Americans were helping to block the openings to mines where there had been underground tests to reduce the radioactivity, and the locals were reopening them to get at the valuable scrap inside.

What research did you do at the Polygon?

I did research into animals and their habitats. I wanted to see what kind of cellular changes the testing had caused. In the Polygon there were areas with background radiation levels of over 20,000 microroentgens per hour, 2000 times above normal. I had a chance to see how this affected animals that had been there a long time, generation after generation. We found that even small amounts of radiation caused significant changes in cells and chromosomes.

Frogs were good for doing these tests because they absorbed the radiation and they have big chromosomes, so you can see the damage. I collected frogs on the testing grounds, especially from a nuclear lake that we found. This was where the largest nuclear explosion took place, in 1965 on the dry bed of the river Shagan. To prevent the nearby river Irtysh being contaminated with radioactive dust, the Shagan was dammed and a radioactive lake formed. The military put carp in the atomic lake. The fish grew really large and we carried out tests on the fish, lizards and frogs.

“Those who lived near the test sites knew nothing of the risks. They took their cattle to feed there”

Did anyone else know this nuclear lake existed?

The military knew about it, of course, but until we went no non-military scientists knew about it. The local people knew it was there, but they didn’t know it was dangerous. They went fishing in it, even swam in it. When we started work, the people who lived in the villages near the Polygon knew nothing about the risks. They took their cattle and goats to feed on the pastures there.

It must have been an opportune time to do research.

Yes and no. After the Soviet Union collapsed, we could do things and go to places that we couldn’t before. But it was a difficult time because there was little funding. Eventually we got grants from the MacArthur Foundation and European nuclear agencies, and that helped a lot. For two years we carried out research in the village of Murzhik, 40 kilometres from ground zero where the tests were carried out.

But you gave up research. Why?

After a while I felt we had got a lot of scientific information from the research. It showed that the population suffered from even small doses of radiation. But the people themselves felt like guinea pigs. For 70 years, as citizens of the Soviet Union, they had had pensions and social benefits from the state. They thought that now, with the Polygon closed and the discovery that their health had suffered, someone would come and treat them. Instead scientists came to test them and write scientific papers about them, but nothing actually changed in their lives. They had been poisoned and their social conditions were bad, but nobody helped them. So I started on public work to help people change their lives.

What did you do?

I couldn’t give them clean land to live on. So in 1992 I was one of those who started the Ecocenter, a small organisation that encourages people to defend their environmental rights and demand help. We give seminars where we tell people about the laws and how to get access to information, apply for money, start court proceedings and lobby for their interests.

For example, we helped one village get a grant from the Counterpart Consortium, an environmental group in central Asia that receives money from the US government. The group bought 50 goats, built a shed for them and bought animal feed from local businesses. The milk had good effects on their health: tuberculosis is widespread there, but it became scarcer once they had their own source of milk. The goats now have offspring, which the villagers are giving to other nearby communities. But overall things haven’t changed much. It is a problem of poverty as much as radiation.

Why don’t people leave the steppe?

They don’t want to. They have nowhere else to live. They’ve been there a long time. And the radiation is not high everywhere. It’s worst around ground zero and the nuclear lake. In other places it is not too bad.

Does the government approve of your work?

They support us. Not financially, but they haven’t stopped us. That is important.

We have had a big campaign recently to prevent a government-owned company from bringing nuclear waste from around the world to Kazakhstan. It would come by rail from Russia. They dreamed of making billions of dollars by burying the waste here, and they promised that some of the money would go to decontaminating the huge piles of abandoned waste in the dumps. But we campaigned against it, and in the end we got parliament to defeat it.

Is your green movement like those in the west?

A bit. The authorities are afraid of us as an environmental movement. They don’t know what to expect, so they are careful. But I don’t like people to demonstrate in the streets. I think you should demonstrate from inside, by asserting your rights. Every day is a step towards democracy for us.

Do people in Kazakhstan really have more freedom now?

Yes, we do. My father came from southern Kazakhstan. He fought in the second world war, but after the war he could not go home to his native village due to Stalin’s laws. He was sent to Karaganda, which was then a kind of gulag for the coal and steel industry. There he met my mother. But he couldn’t go home to see his relatives.

Last year, for the first time in my life, I went to see the place where my father was born. I found people there who still remembered him. It was very sad for me because he had died without going home. But I gathered some clean soil from his homeland and took it to put on his grave. It was clean soil, not like the soil in the north.