Between 1949 and 1989, the Soviet Union conducted 456 nuclear tests on the steppe of northeast Kazakhstan, reshaping the surrounds while exposing an estimated 1.5 million people to fallout. These tremors and landmarks are the focus of Polygon by the Kazakh-British producer and violinist Galya Bisengalieva, whose unyielding drones tell the story of forty years of cultural and ecological devastation south of the valley of the Irtysh River.
Polygon offers a potted history of Soviet activity in Kazakhstan. The bristling strings and winnowing tones of ‘Alash-kala’ stridently and perhaps wistfully evoke the Alash Autonomy, the provisional Kazakh government which strove for an autonomous and democratic state between its proclamation in 1917 and the imposition of Soviet rule in 1920. Other songs relate to the emergence of Nevada Semipalatinsk, one of the first anti-nuclear movements in the USSR, and the date on 29 August 1991 when the Semipalatinsk test site was finally closed for good.
On ‘Chagan’ and ‘Balapan’, the composer excavates the Atomic Lake which was blasted into the earth on 15 January 1965, when the Soviets commenced their Nuclear Explosions for the National Economy program and produced a radioactive plume which was detected as far away as Japan. Meanwhile on ‘Degelen’ she surveys the furtive aftermath of the site, as scavengers on the lookout for copper and iron threatened to come across stockpiles of undetonated plutonium.
Russian and American scientists worked for more than a decade to plug dozens of horizontal tunnels bored into the mountain massif of Degelen, bidding to secure the safety of the world to come. But radioactive contamination continues to blight the steppe, its flora and fauna and now mostly deserted villages, with some areas of Degelen now reseeded with perennial grasses, poplar, elm, Tatar maple and weeping birch in an effort to assess and sustain potential signs of recovery. Thus with a watchful eye, on her record’s closing track Galya Bisengalieva works backwards, unfurling a spirit of hopeful defiance which gives way to neither reflection nor sublimation so much as a tautly-poised quietude in the face of lingering horrors.
