A HISTORY OF INNER ASIA

236 A history of Inner Asia
they still occupied considerable tracts in the country’s center and east.
At the end of the 1920s and beginning of the 1930s the Soviet government
launched forced collectivization of their herds and imposed their
own sedentarization.The nomads met this campaign with resistance,
often destroying their livestock, and the ensuing famine in turn decimated
the Kazakhs’ population by at least one million souls.By the late
1930s, the percentage of the Kazakhs in their own republic fell to 29
percent.The vacated or sparsely populated territories became that
much more inviting for further influx of Slavic settlers, which culminated
in the celebrated “virgin land” campaign launched by
Khrushchev in the late 1950s and early 1960s.The economic wisdom of
this policy was questionable at best.The area seems to lack adequate
rainfall for full-scale farming, whereas it was suited for a pastoral
economy.There appeared ominous signs of soil erosion and
desertification, but that did not bother the authorities any more than the
many other forms of environmental degradation caused by ruthless
exploitation such as strip mining.
The province of Semipalatinsk in eastern Kazakhstan was chosen as
the area for Soviet nuclear experiments, but neither the testing nor the
damage it caused to the health of the people were even mentionable
before the dawn of glasnost and perestroika.The testing has ceased, but its
consequences are still very much there, and the Kazakhs can point to it
as yet another example of violence done to their country by the alien
who had conquered it a century ago.Moreover, it appears that other
parts of Central Asia were used as dumping grounds of toxic waste.One
such site apparently was in the vicinity of Chirchik, a town some thirty
kilometers to the northeast of Tashkent.According to the Uzbek writer
Dada Khan Nuriy, the officials – Uzbek officials – tried to cover up the
existence of this dump, and the eventual confession is worth quoting:
Now that we have glasnost, then so be it: the truth is, comrades, that in 1985, on
instructions from higher authority, arsenic wastes were brought from the
Ministry of Electronics Industry in the Moscow region and buried....I had to
obey orders.” 3
Whether it was cotton fields with which Moscow blanketed vast tracts
of Central Asia, or kolkhozes where Slavic settlers were brought to grow
maize, or dumping grounds for toxic waste, the policy had smooth
sailing among the native politicians of Central Asia.The generation of
3 J.Critchlow, Nationalism in Uzbekistan (Boulder, 1991), pp.92–94.The author refers to an article
published by Dada Khan Nuriy in the newspaper Özbekistan adabiyati va sanati, 15 December 1989.