Karaganda & Temirtau
Following the bizarre unreality of Turkestan and our time spent as battery hens on the train here, the city of Karaganda was a welcome sight indeed. Not what you’d describe as a lovely place, being very much a remnant of its Soviet past with vast rectangular apartment blocks, it was at least a real, functional city where people can walk the streets in the cooler climate. The city was quite fascinating in many ways, with a deep rooted mining heritage and a remarkable connection to the Soviet space programme, primarily as the landing site for missions originating at the Baikonur Cosmodrome. Friezes, murals and statuary all over the city celebrate the association, including several monuments to Yuri Gagarin.
Typical apartment block, Karaganda
Gagarin monument, Karaganda
Cosmonaut frieze, Karaganda
We met Nadya, a lovely and brightly made-up Russian lady in overly tight clothing, at the entrance to a run-down residential block. She took us up to the top floor and showed us round our flat, a strangely appealing combination of New York loft, with a London vibe and white painted bricks dedicated to Pink Floyd with ‘Off the Wall’ faithfully transcribed in black lettering. We arranged our trip to Dolinka and Termitau with a local taxi driver, who just happened to be her husband, Vladimir, for a bargain price.
Vladmir, sporting a bright red AC/DC t-shirt, duly picked us up the next day and we travelled down to Dolinka to the strains of several Pink Floyd tracks. This part of the country feels less exposed to the benefits of the recent oil boom years, but the heavy industries in operation here are still vital elements of the economy, despite their dilapidated appearance. We drove past decaying factories, decrepit cranes and rusting railway equipment, over modern roads and roads in marked need of improvement, listening to ‘Shine On You Crazy Diamond’. The incongruity of the sights and sounds somehow felt typical of our experience in this country so far – you never really know what to expect or what you can pin down as being quintessentially ‘Kazakh’ – you just have to go with the flow…
Karaganda Flamingo Land
Just as hard to get the teddy-bear even with a bigger grabber
It took an hour or so to reach the Karlag (Karaganda Labour Camp) museum in the heart of Dolinka, a rather grand building with a pseudo neo-classical facade. This was the nerve-centre of the whole of the Kazakh gulag system, an area the size of France where the supposed detritus of the Soviet Union was sent either as prisoners of the state or as depossessed deportees left to fend for themselves. The majority sent here were convicted of pretty much any ‘crime’ you might imagine, from murder to theft to political dissidence, or simply for being a member of the intelligentsia, even for reading bourgeois literature. All were housed together in barracks without distinction – unsurprisingly, you were just as likely to suffer demise at the hand of your fellow prisoners as from the conditions or lack of food.
Karlag museum, Dolinka
The museum itself was well laid out, with English speaking tours covering the horrors of the Asharshylyk famine in Kazakhstan and Stalin’s purges in the 1930s. It covered camp life & conditions – from barrack style housing for most, through to punishment cells for the intractable. Particularly troublesome inmates were kept in 3 metre deep wells with standing water to prevent them falling asleep. Either that or they were simply killed. Conditions for wives and families was a big feature – many inmates were simply considered guilty by association and experienced the same deprivation as that of their convicted husbands & fathers. Babies born in the camps to such families were abducted and forcibly adopted by villagers in the surrounding countryside.
Vladimir accompanied us on our tour around the museum and afterwards suggested that most of what we’d heard was complete fiction. Over a rubbery hot-dog in a local cafe back in Karaganda we asked him why he thought as much. It turns out he used to be the secretary of the local Komsomol (the old Soviet Youth movement) for many years and was at pains to show us how life really wasn’t so bad ‘back then’. Along with the party secretary in Karaganda he used to love listening to The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Sweet, and later, Pink Floyd. He wore jeans and considered himself ‘free’. He made jokes about Khrushchev (though he’d met him in the late 60’s and was impressed) and showed us photos of himself and his friends from the 70’s. He got assigned an apartment at the age of 23 and recalled the benefits of free education and medical care. We tried to point out that the horrors of Karlag were long gone by then (it was closed in the mid 1950’s), but he was keen to extol the virtues of the USSR in general, I suppose to counter the diet of repression we’d just been fed. I asked him if he’d like to see the Union reinstated somehow. He considered it. “No,” he said after a while, “It was very beneficial, but had a lot of shortcomings. I want a return of the attitude of the people back then – looking out for each other, being kind and considerate. Not like now.” Fair enough, we concluded.
We ventured to Temirtau after lunch. Not your archetypal tourist destination, it’s a relatively small town completely dominated by its gargantuan steelworks – one of the biggest in the entire country – and has a reputation for being one of the most polluted places in the region. Sounds delightful, you’re probably thinking. Maybe not, but for anyone with an interest in industry and its heritage, it’s a fascinating place. I failed to convince Helen of the fact but she came along anyway, no doubt remembering her joy a few years back at having to tour the oil fields of Azerbaijan with its massive arrays of nodding donkeys….
The Qarmet plant at Temirtau (the Karaganda Metallurgical Combine) is truly massive and dominates to such an extent that it appears on the horizon long before the town as you approach from the south. Vladimir had not been here before, but managed to find a road into the works and get us as close as possible. I got out to take photos. Massive belching chimneys all around me, those distant slightly obscured by the pollution from those in the foreground. Huge works of indeterminate purpose everywhere, with miles of twisting pipes like enormous industrial intestines. Many looked derelict, but others seemed to pulse with energy as if alive. The smell was appalling – a sulphuric miasma clogging the nose and throat. At close quarters it was nightmarish – the very image of an industrial distopia, but real and right in front of you. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t thrilled by the experience. It was awful, yet exhilarating at the same time. Perhaps I might have been on my own with that one…
Temirtau steelworks – a behemothic nightmare of industrial unloveliness
We drove around and tried to get another vantage point. On the way we encountered a very sleek modern works railway – a little white tram with images of the modern steel worker and his workplace, completely at odds with the reality all around. Alas, our first stop was the closest we could get, though we managed to find a fabulous vantage point above the town from where the entire plant in its sulphuric splendour could be seen, neatly juxtaposed with bright domestic housing in the foreground.
Termitau’s Costa del Smog skyline
The centre of town manages to remove itself from most of the smell & smog and proudly celebrates its purpose in the world with an impressive monument to metallurgy – two square jawed figures engaged in smelting beside a mirror like pinnacle. The next door Steelworker’s Palace of Culture does the same, incorporating bright molded tin heads into the facade of the building. Some are steel workers themselves, some are soldiers, some are cosmonauts – all are Soviet in the extreme and wonderful for it. The building is also graced with a ‘tin empress’, no doubt meant to embody the virtues of industry and progress..
Metallurgical moument, Temirtau
Temirtau’s tin empress
The rest of Temirtau is exactly what you’d expect from a Soviet styled town. Concrete apartment blocks everywhere, some adorned with fading motifs or murals. All copies of each other and all drab in the extreme, though perhaps not so much in the sunshine and to be honest, not to my eyes either. I think I have a fondness for this kind of thing. Again, might be on my own there too….
Termitau des res apartments
Personally I loved Karaganda and Temritau. It was everything Turkestan was not. Unpretentious, abundantly and startlingly real with people trying to make the best of the surroundings they find themselves in, which in some places are not too great. That, coupled with the wonderful and interesting company of Vladimir on our excursion, made the whole stop-off the best experience in Kazakhstan so far (cue very loud protests from Helen).
We’re moving on to Astana next for another complete contrast as we explore its bonkers and much celebrated futuristic architecture….
Simon (20th July 2025)
Definitely Simon territory this one!!
I’d be interested to see how big the Teddy bears in the grabber are
Ha ha – they’d be be worth your 50p for sure….