online event: Living with heavy metals in northeastern Kazakhstan: confronting pollution in times of industrialization and crises, 1960s–90s

 online event: Living with heavy metals in northeastern Kazakhstan: confronting pollution in times of industrialization and crises, 1960s–90s

June 14, 15:00 CET

Presenter: Marc Elie (Center for Russian, Caucasian, East-European and Central Asiatic Studies, France)

Organizer: Anastasia Fedotova (Institute for the History of Science and Technology, St. Petersburg)

Registration: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/11EbgKBv6Bw_6ScuWxGiWKQfFDBc2Ja2TeGetYs6MGuI/viewform .

In northeastern Kazakhstan, the extraction and transformation of non-ferrous metals like copper, zinc, and aluminum from the 1960s onwards devastated ecosystems and human health. The cities of Pavlodar and Ust-Kamenogorsk (Öskemen) became huge industrial centers for the military and civilian sectors. Their inhabitants were exposed to intense pollution of air, water, soil, and organisms. Yet the dramatic health situation only sparked protests for a short period in 1989–1991. Before and after that, workers and residents seemed “resigned”, as the protesters lamented. This paper aims to explore the social processes behind this silence in the face of a grave situation and to understand how it could be temporarily broken. I hypothesize that both the organization of labor relations in the factories and the social relations between factories (between workers in the supposedly clean secret factories cajoled by Moscow and workers in the ostensibly polluting local factories; between female workers in light industry and male workers in heavy industry) help to explain this relative tolerance. The transformation of these relationships in the late 1980s under the conditions of perestroika enabled the formation of a short-lived united front against factory management.

Marc Elie is a historian of Kazakhstan at the Center for Russian, Caucasian, East-European and Central Asiatic Studies (France). He works on environmental issues from mudflows in Almaty to droughts in the northern steppes and pollution in industrial cities of the East. He has published L’âge soviétique. Une traversée de l’Empire russe au monde postsoviétique (with Alain Blum, Françoise Daucé, and Isabelle Ohayon, Armand Colin 2021) and Histoire du Goulag (with Juliette Cadiot, La Découverte 2017).