Probably the project as such, as the idea of creating a documentary film, began with the author’s journalistic research, which began shortly before the 30th anniversary of the closure of the Semipalatinsk nuclear test site.

Initially, I just wanted to write something truly worthy of the merits and memory of those who, even in the conditions of the Soviet Union, decided to speak out loudly and openly, raise their voices in defense of people, the future and the land of their ancestors. But it so happened that each new layer of public, but scattered throughout the network, disparate, dusted with time and hidden under bureaucratic covers sources contributed more and more new facts to the project’s piggy bank.

And there were many of them. And they were terrible, terrifying.

In 1987 alone (I graduated from high school and received my “Matriculation Certificate”) the Soviet Union tested 24 nuclear devices: 1 at the Novaya Zemlya test site, 2 in the Perm region, 3 in Yakutia, 1 in the Aktobe region, and 12 at the Semipalatinsk nuclear test site (and this is far from a record)!

I entered all the openly mentioned (in archives, articles, studies) known tests of nuclear and thermonuclear devices of the USSR into a single table, supplemented it with some additional data (what I could find) and tried to arouse the interest of producers or someone to visualize the project. Alas, neither the virtual map nor the film worked out then, and I wrote an article. I published it on the pages of one of the oldest newspapers in Kazakhstan, “Express K”, but it did not arouse any public interest, there was no resonance, and the newspaper and its website were soon closed by its private owners – so the article disappeared from the public information space.

But “manuscripts don’t burn”, the article remained in my personal archives, like other works, and I think that its re-publication will not be superfluous – so that people can see, so that they know what kind of legacy humanity is capable of leaving behind…

“Not Just Semey — the Whole Land Was a Testing Ground”

The land was vast. So were the silences. A nuclear scar runs deeper than fallout.

I remember it well — how they took us to the army by train, from Omsk through Shchuchinsk, Tselinograd, and then deep into the snowy steppe.
None of us had the faintest idea where we would end up.
At the military enlistment office, they told us only one thing: our unit number referred to artillery. That was all we, the fresh recruits, knew.

It was only after arriving at the barracks — cloaked in secrecy and buried under military euphemism — that one of the senior conscripts revealed where we really were.
We had been brought to a division of the Strategic Missile Forces.

I can’t say how the others felt. But for me — a product of the Soviet system, raised beneath portraits of Lenin and Victory Day parades, with a grandfather’s medals gleaming in a drawer at home — the cold, brutal syllables of that acronym, RVSN, landed hard.
Strategic Missile Forces.
It brought a swell of pride… and fear.
Fear born of knowledge.

I already knew what radiation was, and what it could do — not just from our school’s civil defense classes. In my village, some who went to Chernobyl never came back. Others returned with hollow eyes, decaying skin, and silence in their movements — like ghosts who had seen too much.
And there was my father, who burned out from leukemia just a year after serving at the Totsk camps.
And so it was there, in that RVSN division, that I took my oath.
Then came boot camp, the skill badge, the transfer to an active unit.
A shoulder patch with my crew number.
Combat duty in underground bunkers.
And slowly, the realization sank in: we — soldiers, warrant officers, commanders alike — were guardians of peace.
We stood on the nuclear line against a potential enemy, knowing that even a minor mistake could plunge the world into atomic war.

That army life is now thirty years behind me.
That missile division has long since ceased to exist.
From what I understand, the SS-18 missiles stationed there were dismantled and removed during Kazakhstan’s voluntary renunciation of the nuclear arsenal it inherited from the USSR.
According to rumor — and even Google Maps — that military town was stripped bare for building materials in the wild 1990s and abandoned to dust.

But just a few days ago, I stumbled upon a Wikipedia page listing the nuclear tests conducted by the USSR.
There were several entries, sorted by time period and by military or so-called “peaceful” detonations.
The subject caught my attention. I wanted to dig deeper.

I turned to American and Russian sources: statistics, theories — and, again, discrepancies and silences.
What struck me was the scale.
Entire regions of Kazakhstan scarred, irradiated, forgotten.

The Semipalatinsk Test Site?
Yes. That was hell.
According to various sources, Soviet authorities carried out 456 tests of atomic and thermonuclear weapons there, detonating over 616 nuclear devices.
The discrepancy between the number of tests and the number of explosions is explained by a chilling technicality — “group explosions.”

As defined by the Russian Federal Nuclear Center in their official publication Nuclear Weapons Tests and Peaceful Nuclear Explosions in the USSR, a group explosion refers to two or more separate detonations occurring no more than five seconds apart, with detonation points connected by straight lines — each no longer than 40 kilometers.
A cold bureaucratic precision that hides the scale of destruction.
And Semipalatinsk was just the beginning.

Analysis of open-source data reveals that nuclear testing — both atomic and thermonuclear — took place across a vast portion of Kazakhstan: the regions of Tselinograd, Aktobe, Atyrau, Turkestan, Karaganda, Mangystau, West Kazakhstan, Zhezkazgan, and, of course, East Kazakhstan.
In the Zhezkazgan region — about 180 kilometers west of the city — and in Karaganda at the Sary-Shagan military range, nuclear warheads were delivered by missiles launched from Kapustin Yar in Russia, and detonated at varying altitudes above Kazakh territory.
One warhead over Zhezkazgan was detonated at an altitude of 290 kilometers.
Of the four detonations above Sary-Shagan, three occurred in space — two at 150 kilometers, one at 300 kilometers — and one in the upper atmosphere, 59 kilometers above ground.
These were not underground tests.
They were cosmic detonations — nuclear fire launched into the sky, the echoes of which never truly faded.

One incident stands out — the atomic explosion over the Aral Sea.
“In February 1955, near the town of Aralsk, an underwater (or seabed) nuclear explosion was carried out, which like the others was classified,” wrote Almaty-based author Nikolai Shakhov in Express K (August 27, 1998).
“That killer explosion shattered the fragile sea floor, and water from the Aral Sea began seeping into the surrounding porous sands. That’s how the catastrophe began.”
However, according to the Russian Federal Nuclear Center, the explosion over the Aral Sea actually took place a year later, in 1956 — unless, of course, there were two separate tests a year apart, which remains theoretically possible, though unlikely.
What is confirmed by declassified and publicly available sources is this:
On February 2, 1956, near Aralsk in the Kazakh SSR, a surface detonation of a 0.3-kiloton nuclear warhead was carried out.
The warhead was delivered by an R-5M missile launched from Kapustin Yar — known by its NATO designation as the SS-3 Shyster.
Soviet documentation listed the goal of the test under the acronym IPF — Investigation of the Damaging Factors of Nuclear Weapons and Their Impact on Military and Civilian Targets.
In other words: A deliberate military use of a small-yield, but undeniably nuclear, weapon — right there, in the Aral Sea region.
As for the underwater or seabed hypothesis? It still holds weight.
Not all details were faithfully recorded in public-facing documents — and some were never meant to be.

Incidentally, all nuclear tests outside the Semipalatinsk Test Site — with the exception of the Aral Sea explosion and the high-altitude and space detonations over Zhezkazgan and Sary-Shagan — were carried out after 1963, following the Treaty Banning Nuclear Weapon Tests in the Atmosphere, Outer Space and Under Water, signed by the USSR, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
To comply with the treaty, the tests were moved underground — which, in theory, reduced their destructive fallout compared to atmospheric or surface detonations.
But the absence of public information is already a kind of information.

One of the most heavily affected regions in Kazakhstan — outside East Kazakhstan — was Atyrau.
There, in the Kurmangazy district, the Azgir test site operated between 1966 and 1979.
A total of 17 nuclear tests were conducted — all underground, some of them so-called “group explosions.”
Azgir’s nuclear debut came on April 22, 1966 — a date that appears to have been deliberately chosen to coincide with the birthday of Vladimir Lenin.
That first test involved an attempt by Soviet scientists to create an underground cavity inside a salt dome — by nuclear blast.
The final explosion at Azgir took place on October 24, 1979.

Reading about the so-called “peaceful” nuclear tests of the USSR is enough to make anyone question the sanity of Soviet nuclear science — and the visionaries who dreamed it into being.

The so-called “non-military” atomic and thermonuclear explosions conducted on Kazakh soil were carried out in the name of a wide array of “national economic goals.”
Under the index FMI, tests were designated as Fundamental and Methodological Research.
PV referred to Peaceful Nuclear Explosions and Trials for Developing the Technology to Conduct Them.
OPZ meant Development of Industrial Charges for Peaceful Underground Nuclear Explosions.
In more understandable terms, these goals included:
– Deep seismic sounding of the Earth’s crust;
– Creation of underground cavities in salt formations for gas storage;
– Reservoir creation through borehole detonation;
– Dam construction by collapsing mountain slopes;
– and the creation of sinkhole basins for water retention.
There is even a recorded case in northern Russia — Project Taiga — where nuclear explosions were used to excavate a shipping canal.
A lake remains there today, complete with fish and, according to online reports, plenty of eager fishermen.

Kazakhstan has its own monument to this madness.
On January 15, 1965, the USSR carried out its first industrial thermonuclear explosion at the Semipalatinsk Test Site.
The blast carved out a massive crater, which eventually filled with water.
Today, it’s known as Atomic Lake — or Atomköl.

And as for the supposed safety of underground testing — One incident shattered that illusion.
A military pilot — unable to stay silent — reached out to national writer Olzhas Suleimenov, and reported what had happened: a sudden shift in the wind had carried a radioactive cloud over a populated settlement.
Women. Children. Families.
In 1989, at what was meant to be a quiet book club meeting — which instead transformed into a rally of “people who love life” — Suleimenov stood up and said:
“The last straw for us was the latest atomic test at the Semipalatinsk range.
Radioactive gas was released. It was assumed the wind would carry it toward the Abai district —
but it suddenly shifted toward the military town.
That’s how it became known…
And that cloud maxed out all the Geiger counters…
We were silent for a long time.
But when the first voice rose — I saw — the people gathered.”

That voice became a movement.
The rally grew into something unstoppable — the Nevada–Semey movement.
It crossed the ocean.
It helped bring an end not just to nuclear testing in Semipalatinsk… but also at the Nevada Test Site in the United States.
A historic moment.
An act of defiance.
A people demanding life — and daring to fight for it.

The final nuclear explosion on Kazakh soil occurred on October 19, 1989.
The Semipalatinsk Test Site fell silent.
But the Soviet leadership dragged its feet for another two years before formally considering the people’s demand for permanent closure.
In 1991, during a session of Kazakhstan’s Supreme Council, Nursultan Nazarbayev publicly declared he would take personal responsibility for the matter.
And so, on August 29, 1991, the Semipalatinsk Test Site was officially closed — “forever.”
Two decades later, in December 2009, the 64th session of the UN General Assembly — initiated by Kazakhstan —
declared August 29 the International Day Against Nuclear Tests.

But the story doesn’t end with Semipalatinsk.
East Kazakhstan alone holds 18,500 square kilometers of scorched, irradiated land —
yet the suffering spread far beyond.
According to declassified maps, 33 additional points across Kazakhstan were sites of nuclear or thermonuclear testing:
17 in Azgir, 7 in West Kazakhstan, and others scattered beyond public awareness.
Not all the land around Semipalatinsk will ever return to agricultural or civilian use.
Some zones remain permanently closed — sealed off by radiation, by memory, by silence.
And while the Semipalatinsk Test Site remains under media focus, with clean-up and rehabilitation programs,
many other contaminated zones receive no such attention.
No transparency.
No care.

Even today, many people in Kazakhstan don’t know that atomic explosions took place beyond Semey.
There is no comprehensive public record of long-term health studies or medical screenings of residents in affected regions.
And though our nation’s struggle has become a global symbol of resistance — against militarism, warmongering policies, and inhumanity — the final chapter in Kazakhstan’s nuclear story has yet to be written.