The story about ghost town Chagan and I’m putting our overnight stay there in a separate article, due to the abundance of illustrations and for greater atmosphere.
Having acquired potatoes and onions in the village of the same name, we left civilization behind and headed to the multi-story Chagan along a neglected but almost perfect concrete road.

We passed a stele with a picture of an airplane and the inscription:

A part of our hearts will remain here forever.
Chagan people of different times and countries. 1954-1994.
www.chagan.ru

After all, people, many years after the collapse of everything, got together and put this sign here with their own money. Apparently, indeed, somewhere out there, among the crumbling five-story buildings, overgrown courtyards and mountains of construction waste, a part of someone’s hearts remained.

I recommend to everyone who is interested and does not shy away from reading long texts to visit the site indicated on the stele and get acquainted with the real memories of the Chagan people.

The city on the horizon, indeed, turned out to be a ghost that had nothing in common with what we saw in the place...

The city itself is completely destroyed. Essentially, the same Pripyat, only without radiation. I have never seen devastation on such a scale before.

Dissonant with the general devastation are the smooth concrete streets, almost free of grass and not covered with garbage. This is explained simply: the Kazakhs systematically dismantle everything that can be disassembled for building materials. From several five-story buildings, only pits with parapets of brick and concrete crumble remained. Well, in order to remove the broken goods and deliver people and tools, the roads had to be cleared.

We wandered around the dead city, discussing what could have been in this building before and how life was once in full swing here. We went to the Irtysh and turned back.

Ruin

The sun was noticeably setting, and the question of finding a parking place became urgent.

And here the problem arose. Around the city there is an empty steppe, where our camp, no matter where we put it, will be in full view. There are good places near the Irtysh, but judging by the well-worn roads, there are no guarantees that by nightfall the local bastard won’t come here to devour the yagi.

It was getting dark in the dead city...

In thought, we drove around the town again and somehow gradually came to the idea that the safest place to spend the night would be some kind of apartment. And indeed: it is protected from wind and rain, and from prying eyes too. If only someone would look at the windows of houses with passion... But darkness is approaching, which will completely cover us.

So we moved into an empty room on the first floor of one of the five-story buildings. The room was surprisingly clean: free of construction debris and excrement, despite the fact that the rest of the ground floor was littered with rubble and rubbish.

Here is the view from the window, for example, not bad

Well, a good place. There is a more hidden room with a tree in front of the window, but it needs some major cleaning first, so we took the easier route.

The dinner was royal: boiled potatoes, sprats and green onions. After the already familiar stew with porridge, this was delicious.

The night passed without surprises, although dogs barking and snatches of voices were heard from somewhere in the distance.

Then the wind rose, periodically blowing into our home and, with an alarming rustle, driving clouds of dust along the empty corridors.

How we moved into an apartment in a ghost town (video)

This video is on Youtube

How everything was in Chagan before: videos from people who lived there

I found this video on YouTube completely by accident. For some reason it touched me to the depths of my soul, almost to tears. Briefly, the essence: the men who once served there came to look at their native ashes and reflected all this in an hour and a half film.

If the question is interesting to you, you can watch it first, but I’m presenting a video from the moment 24:37 , where a slideshow of views of the city of Chagan in those distant times was mounted.

There is an amazing lake in Kazakhstan, in which the bottom is like melted glass. The water there is almost black. The carp that live there grow up to a meter, and other fish are wonderful and terrifying. This is Atom-kol, Lake Chagan in the Semipalatinsk region. Knowledgeable people they try to avoid it. Those who come here by chance are surprised by the ominous beauty of this place.

Man-made miracle

Lake Chagan in Kazakhstan is the work of Soviet nuclear scientists. They proposed to purposefully create artificial reservoirs for storing water in arid regions. As planned by scientists on the territory Central Asia At least forty similar lakes should have appeared. In this way it was planned to solve the problem of summer drought and optimize Agriculture in the Kazakh steppes. This is how Chagan appeared, with a capacity of 20 million cubic meters. m of water.

Time for great achievements

In the Soviet Union, scientists developed grandiose projects to use atomic energy for peaceful purposes. The best minds struggled to create ships, planes and even cars whose engines would work as a result of nuclear reactions. Realizing the incredible power of atomic energy, they proposed using this colossal energy to build canals, tunnels and reservoirs to collect gigantic volumes of water.

The enthusiasm of physicists knew no bounds. The program was called “Peaceful Atom”. In the pursuit of scientific achievements, no thought was given to the consequences for the environment and the health of the nation. Shock construction projects and the raising of virgin soil engulfed the entire union. Swamps were drained, rivers were turned back, and new lakes were formed by the will of man in the places he planned. It was a time when man did not expect favors from nature. Now he is paying for his arrogance.

First explosion

In the USSR, the first industrial explosion was carried out on January 15, 1965 in the Semipalatinsk region. At that time there was a test site where nuclear weapons were tested. For the experiment, we chose a place remote from big cities place in the Kazakh steppes.

According to the scientists' idea, the explosion should have formed a giant crater, the edges and bottom of which would have melted from the high temperature. Water from such a reservoir will not seep into the ground, and local residents will be able to use it to water livestock and irrigate surrounding fields.

A targeted explosion was carried out in the area of ​​the small river Chagan, which dries up in the summer. The project was led by nuclear scientist Ivan Turchin.

Powerful explosion

An explosive device was planted in well No. 1004 at the Balapan site in the floodplain of the small Chaganka river to a depth of 178 meters. The operation was scheduled for January 15, 1965. At 5 hours 59 minutes 59 seconds GMT, the morning silence was broken by a deafening explosion. Within 2.5 seconds, the formation of a cloud of hot gases was recorded. After just 5 minutes, it reached a height of 4800 m. 10.3 million tons of soil were thrown into the air, to a height of 950 m. Multi-ton rocks were scattered over a radius of several tens of kilometers. The river bed was blocked.

A giant crater with melted edges was left at the explosion site. Its diameter is 430 m, its depth exceeded 100 m. In his diaries, Turchin wrote that he had never seen a more beautiful sight.

Super Power Bomb

Lake

Already in the spring, equipment arrived at the scene of the explosion to connect the river with a new reservoir. Scientists realized that flood waters could carry radioactive dust from the entire region into the Irtysh and thus contaminate the entire Siberian region. According to scientists, all the water should be collected in Lake Chagan. For this purpose, a dam was built, which did not allow the river water to reach the Irtysh.

In the spring, the funnel was filled with melt water, but the artificial reservoir did not turn out to be a watering hole - the radiation level exceeded the norm by thousands of times.

Lake Chagan in Kazakhstan still exists today. The Chaganka River made a new channel for itself, bypassing the death trap. Residents of the surrounding villages avoid scary place, but shepherds still drive their cattle to water. After all, there is nowhere else.

Infestation area

As a result of the explosion, after which the Chagan nuclear lake was formed, a territory in which there were 11 settlements with a population of about 2,000 people was contaminated with radioactive substances.

The radiation one day after the test exceeded 30 r/h, and after 10 days it reached 1 r/h. Current measurements show 2000-3000 µR/h, while in the rest of the territory the radiation level is 15-30 µR/h.

182 people who came from different parts of the Union worked on the construction of the canal. Despite the measures taken (the excavator cabins were lined with lead), the radiation caused enormous damage to the health of young healthy men. They all received huge doses of radiation. Each of them ended their work shift as a deeply disabled person. Within a few years, the vast majority of them died from radiation sickness and other ailments.

When, many years later, the liquidators showed a copy of the geoscheme on which the explosion data was marked to geoecology specialist E. Yakovlev, he noted that it was worse than Chernobyl.

Population of the lake

When in 1966 the military and liquidators left the test site where an underground nuclear explosion occurred, Lake Chagan became a place of research for biologists. Since the effect of radiation on living organisms was still poorly understood, biologists conducted experiments populating the nuclear lake with various species of flora and fauna. Often atypical for a given region. At the Atom-Kol biological station, experiments were carried out on the effects of radiation on living organisms. 36 species of fish were released into Lake Chagan, including even piranhas from the Amazon, 27 species of mollusks, 42 species of invertebrates, 32 species of amphibians, 8 mammals, 11 reptiles. In addition, experiments were carried out with 150 types of vegetation, most of which were algae.

90% of introduced livestock died due to high level radiation and unusual living conditions. The rest were subject to mutations until they changed appearance offspring and radical transformation of behavior. Thus, carp, which under normal conditions are herbivorous fish, brought into the nuclear lake Chagan (Kazakhstan), became active predators. Here they grow to almost a meter. But eating them is strictly not recommended.

A common crayfish is about the same size as an oceanic yellow lobster. In the natural environment, different species of living creatures were crossed, producing common offspring. Some animal species have mutated so that their descendants are neither like their ancestors nor like each other.

Scientists noted that even herbivorous fish became predators under radiation conditions. In 1974, the research station was closed.

Lake Chagan is an echo of Soviet nuclear tests. After its formation, the leadership refused to repeat such experiments. Although it was initially planned to create a whole network of similar reservoirs. But this experiment is not the only one in the world. In the USA, in Nevada, there is the Sedan crater, which was also formed as a result of an explosion.

But Soviet scientists managed to increase the useful power of the explosion and minimize the destructive impact on environment. Although even with such “achievements,” colossal damage was caused to the region.

Chagan today

Now the territory of the Semipalatinsk test site, including Lake Chagan, is included in the list of areas particularly affected by nuclear tests. water is 300 picocuries/l (with the permissible value being 15 picocuries/l). This water is not suitable for drinking or irrigating fields. But herders bring their cattle to water. The level of cancer and genetic disorders in the region is much higher than in neighboring ones.

Fish caught in Lake Chagan is not recommended for consumption. But clever businessmen offer giant carp in the markets of Semipalatinsk to buyers who happen to be passing through and do not know about the wonderful lake.

The scientists' calculations did not come true. This is a lake with dead water; even after half a century it is unsuitable for human life. Tourists are brought here to talk about the achievements of nuclear technology in the USSR.

Chagan village Country KazakhstanKazakhstan Status ... Wikipedia

Chagan (urban-type settlement in the Kazakh SSR)- Chagan, an urban-type settlement in the Semipalatinsk region of the Kazakh SSR. Subordinate to the Semipalatinsk City Council. The railway station is 80 km north-west from Semipalatinsk. Expanded clay workshop, fur coat factory workshop of the Semipalatinsk leather and mechanical association...

Ulba (village)- This term has other meanings, see Ulba. Ulba village Country KazakhstanKazakhstan ... Wikipedia

Pervomaisky (village in Kazakhstan)- Urban settlement Pervomaisky Country KazakhstanKazakhstan Status ... Wikipedia

Chagan- Chagan: The Chagan project is the first industrial nuclear explosion in the USSR. Chagan Azerbaijani musical instrument. Chagan is the name of several settlements: Chagan is a former military town (Semipalatinsk 4) in Kazakhstan.... ... Wikipedia

Villages of Kazakhstan- As of 2010, 55 (according to the Statistics Agency of the Republic of Kazakhstan for 2011), 145 (according to the Agency of the Republic of Kazakhstan for Land Management for 2012) or... ... Wikipedia have the status of a village (Kazakh Kenti) in Kazakhstan as of 2010

Chagan- I Chagan River in the Orenburg region of the RSFSR and Ural region Kazakh SSR, right tributary of the Urals. Length 264 km, basin area 7530 km2. It originates on the hill of General Syrt. The food is mainly snow. Average water flow of 40 km... ... Big Soviet encyclopedia

, ,

Chagan (Semipalatinsk-4) is a former urban-type settlement in the Semipalatinsk region of Kazakhstan, 74 km. from the city of Semipalatinsk on the banks of the Irtysh River. Was subordinate to the Semipalatinsk City Council. Railway station 80 km to the north-west. from Semipalatinsk. Founded in 1950, abandoned after withdrawal Russian troops in 1995.

During times cold war Soviet Union conducted nuclear weapons tests at testing sites in northeast Kazakhstan in order to study the possibility of using nuclear energy for the purposes of peaceful construction, such as the creation of canals and reservoirs, drilling oil wells and the like. The tests were carried out under the banner of “the use of nuclear explosions in the national economy.” It was the Soviet equivalent of the American Plowshare program.

One of the most famous experiments was carried out in January 1965 in the vicinity of the village of Chagan, near the Semipalatinsk test site in Kazakhstan. It was developed to test the suitability of nuclear explosions for creating reservoirs. This was the first and largest of all the explosions carried out under the national economy program. The device with a capacity of 140 kilotons was placed at a depth of 178 meters in the drying bed of the Chagan River. The explosion created a crater with a diameter of 400 meters and a depth of 100 meters, with a caldera height of 20 to 38 meters. Later it was connected to the river by a canal to fill it with water.

The level of gamma radiation at the edges of the crater by the end of the first day was 30 roentgens per hour, after 10 days it dropped to 1 roentgen/hour, and currently is 2-3 mroentgen/hour (the natural radioactive background of this area is 15-30 microroentgen/hour hour). In the spring of 1965, the river bed was connected to the funnel by a canal, and later a stone-earth dam with culvert structures was built in the left bank part. In total, a reservoir with a total capacity of 17 million cubic meters of water was formed.

In 1995, all military units were withdrawn and the town was handed over to the Republic of Kazakhstan, after which the town was plundered. The bust of V.I. Lenin near the GDO remained in its place for many years, until 2004.

• Location: Almaty, Kazakhstan

Semipalatinsk test site. Part 1: Chagan and Kurchatov

I don’t remember how long ago I knew that somewhere in the endless steppe of Kazakhstan, under the Soviets, entire cities were built without a single inhabitant, only to destroy them with an atomic bomb. Later I learned that this place is called the Semipalatinsk Nuclear Test Site (SNTS), saw it very poignantly, and even discovered that you can get there, as in, as part of an excursion. However, a search on the Internet showed that there is no specific information about tours here, only rare reports from those who have visited, but through a cunning combination of calls to the National Nuclear Center of Kazakhstan and its Institute of Radiation Safety, I learned that three companies are accredited for tours to the Semipalatinsk test site. The most attractive of them turned out to be Togas-Intourservice from Semipalatinsk, where I applied. And since my route from the Russian Altai to the Kazakh Altai ran through Semipalatinsk, I decided to add a visit to the Semipalatinsk test site to my own.

I will talk about the Semipalatinsk test site in two parts. Only in the second will we go where you can’t go without an escort - to the Experimental Field, to the epicenter of the first Soviet nuclear explosion and to the ruins of buildings that survived nuclear explosions. And in the first part I will tell you about the towns of Kurchatov (12 thousand inhabitants) and Chagan on the Irtysh between Semipalatinsk and Pavlodar associated with the test site.

According to the stand in the museum of the landfill, whose phone number is not worth looking up on the Internet, it all started like this. To be fair, the “Beria note”, famous in near-nuclear circles, also had a prehistory - research in the field atomic nucleus were actively carried out in the 1930s both in the West and in the USSR, and the report “On the use of uranium as an explosive and toxic substance” was first presented by Kharkov scientists led by Friedrich Lange back in 1940. Well, after “Beria’s note,” spies worked almost more actively than physicists, so that the USSR had comprehensive information about the structure of the American atomic bomb just two weeks after its first tests. The resolution on the creation of the future Semipalatinsk test site was adopted on August 22, 1947, and already in November Molotov said directly about the “secret of the atomic bomb”: “this secret has long ceased to exist.”

Well, for me it all started with this film, which was shown directly on TV in the wake of Perestroika, when I was walking under the table, and there were demonstrations under the window of my house on Kievskaya. Phrases like “a two-story stone house that stood two kilometers from the epicenter were destroyed to the ground; the rubble was thrown a kilometer away” were imprinted in my memory for the rest of my life. These were tests of the first Soviet "fully functional" hydrogen bomb RDS-37, the most powerful (1.5 megatons) in the history of the Semipalatinsk test site.

This was not my first time in Semipalatinsk, and back in 2011 I talked about this ancient city in three parts ( . || . || .). My train arrived at 10:40 am from Barnaul, and at the station I was met by a representative of the travel agency, Anastasia, and a Kazakh driver, whom we simply called Uncle Yura. Tours to the Semipalatinsk test site are still infrequent, and the few clients so far are overwhelmingly foreigners from foreign countries. Usually groups leave Semipalatinsk at 9 am, and we, taking into account the late arrival of the train and a couple of stops in the city (I needed to at least change currency), left at half past eleven, and nevertheless, looking ahead, I will say that we managed to do everything , although in some places we had to hurry. From Semipalatinsk to Kurchatov it’s about a 2-hour journey along a minor road, which was pretty broken, and in one place also washed out by the summer flood, so that the bridge being repaired had to be driven around along the bottom of the sai:

Monotonous white villages flashed by, built in the twentieth century for Kazakhs who had switched to a settled life; abundant herds; distant dusty mountains. On the right, every now and then the dark Irtysh appeared in the stunted floodplains, in this part it did not at all resemble the great Siberian river; on the left, a train, and sometimes even stations, periodically appeared right out of the steppe grass. Built in the 1940s to a station simply named Konechnaya, it was a dead-end line to serve the landfill, but in 2001 it was extended 184 kilometers to Aksu station, connecting Semipalatinsk and Pavlodar directly.
On the right, 70 kilometers from Semipalatinsk, a ghost town so characteristic of Kazakhstan loomed in the steppe:

This is Chagan, a Soviet military town, unofficially named after the river, but in documents it appeared as Semipalatinsk-4 or simply Polovinki. It was built in 1954-62 as a base for the 79th Heavy Bomber Division, perhaps with an eye to the fact that the aircraft based here would participate in nuclear tests, at the same time practicing dropping atomic bombs on targets. But in 1963, the USSR signed an agreement banning nuclear tests in air, water and space, at the test site a mining machine became more important than an airplane, but the airbase remained, and situations like “yesterday my dad North Pole flew" among Chagan children, now adults and writing memories on the Internet (sometimes, alas, quite dubious), were the order of the day here. At the same time, the airfield, known under the code names "Philon" or "Dolon", was used to supply the training ground and its towns - both materials and equipment for testing, and consumer goods: the “Moscow supply" here was almost the most prosperous corner of the entire Kazakh SSR. But the connection with the test site was also the opposite - from time to time the Halves were covered with a radioactive cloud, and if in 1960- x the locals openly ignored warnings and calmly harvested vegetables and melons, which were ordered to be destroyed as dirty, then (according to unverified data from memories) in 1989, almost with the protest of local officers, the “Nevada-Semipalatinsk” movement, which grew to transoceanic proportions, began, which achieved the closure of the Semipalatinsk test site by the beginning of the 1990s. Then came the turn of Chagan himself - the air base was closed in 1997, the village was resettled, and only the newest TU-95MS, during the division of the army, were secretly replaced with the old TU-95K with Far East- taking off towards each other during the exercise, at the meeting point they changed call signs. The operation was a success - they did not notice the substitution, or rather they turned a blind eye to it, and soon the planes from Chagan were put under the knife. A memorial sign at the entrance to the village has stood since 2004, and in the distance you can distinguish houses among the greenery - in local Shanghai, that is, a private sector area, there are still a dozen and a half families who refused to leave somewhere.

Behind their houses and the operating substation is this Ak-Zhol (“white road”):

Behind these bushes every now and then piles of bricks and rubble appear - it’s easy to think that an atomic bomb was exploded somewhere here at one time. The same street under the Soviets - the population of Chagan reached 12 thousand people:

But from then on, even the good Stalinist House of Officers was not spared:

And only in the middle, along the once perpendicular Oktyabrskaya Street, there is still a block of empty five-story buildings, captured in the title frame of the post:

And although according to statistics, Kazakhs here make up 54% of the population, Russians in Kurchatov still make up 40%, and 1.5% of the population, that is, a couple of hundred people, makes up such a seemingly disappeared minority as the Germans. And I would say that externally Kurchatov is a more Kazakh city, but internally it is more European.

In terms of its architecture and structure, Kurchatov, the city of the nuclear test site, is more similar to towns at test sites like (Sary-Shagan) than to nuclear closed administrative towns like the already mentioned Chkalovsk. But the officers' house was not saved - during the period of devastation, the building burned down and was demolished:

22a. photo from Wikimapia

The main street in Kurchatov is Abai Street, parallel to the Irtysh, in the past apparently Lenin, on which most of the previous shots of the city were filmed. At its corner with the main road is the same abandoned Irtysh. A little further away is the Stalin quarter:

Department store in a state that is incomprehensible to the eye:

And something called "October", now listed on Wikimapia by the market:

The main road itself, connecting the test site, Degelen station, the National Nuclear Center and the main square here is called Kurchatov Street, and the monument to Igor Vasilyevich closes its perspective:

The houses along the road are clearly older, not from the lush 1950s, but timidly getting used to the peaceful life of the 1940s:

The Semipalatinsk test site was founded in 1947, and was initially designated in documents as the mountain-seismic station "Degelen" (along the steppe mountains on that side), and then as Training Site No. 2 or Military Unit No. 52605. During the construction period, its leader was Lieutenant General Pyotr Rozhanovich, but he died in 1948 and was replaced by Major General Sergei Kolesnikov, while the scientific director remained seismologist Mikhail Sadovsky, later the creator of the program for detecting nuclear explosions by ground vibrations. The place for the test site suggested itself: sparsely populated, devoid of obstacles such as forests or mountain ranges, the Kazakh steppe, far from the borders, was ideal for constructing such facilities, and only in Semipalatinsk itself did the Chinese consulate have to be closed... and several thousand people evicted from their native lands. The test site was ready for use in 1949, and in parallel with it, the city was being built, or more precisely, this ensemble of its main square. Behind the monument to Academician Kurchatov is the former holy of holies, the Polygon Headquarters, and now the prosaic akimat (mayor's office):

On the right (if you stand facing the akimat) is one of the offices of the National Nuclear Center of Kazakhstan, and initially - “Kurchatov’s house”, that is, a complex of laboratories (with living quarters) that worked under the direct supervision of Igor Vasilyevich.

Opposite is the House of Culture, I don’t know exactly when it was built, but I really want to present a grandiose banquet in it with the participation of the light of Soviet nuclear physics and Lavrentiy Beria personally on the occasion of what is now “Russ have A-Bomb”.

But still, it’s more likely that the building was built about ten years later:

But this is the view from this square on November 22, 1955, when the RDS-37 hydrogen bomb was exploded at the test site. Its explosion, 70 kilometers from the city, the most powerful in the history of the test site, was about 100 times more powerful than in Hiroshima:

Here is the video from which these screenshots are cut, with the unique humor of that bad era: “We got up early, friends! We’ll have to lie down on the ground again!” - a nuclear explosion generates two shock waves, direct and reflected from the ground. In fact, during tests at the test site, glass in houses was sometimes knocked out even in Semipalatinsk, 200 kilometers from the epicenter, and in Kurchatov, people unmistakably learned about the upcoming tests from glass jars in grocery stores, out of harm’s way placed on the floor. 18.5 thousand square kilometers turned out to be too small a space for a hydrogen bomb, but by that time the second nuclear test site on Novaya Zemlya had been operating for a year, initially organized for testing nuclear torpedoes, and which also served as more powerful “land” ammunition.

At the same time, one should not think that only “damned commies” did such things: the USSR conducted 936 nuclear tests, and the USA - 1054, moreover, starting earlier (1945 versus 1949) and finishing later (the last Soviet test was in 1989, the last American one was in 1992, that is, after the collapse of the enemy). The infamous exercises at the Totsky training ground () were only a response to the American series of similar exercises, the Desert Rock series, and cunning businessmen from Las Vegas sold tickets to observation decks its skyscrapers, admire the nuclear mushroom over the Nevada desert. Then mir-druzhba-zhvachka came, and I regret that I forgot to go beyond the square of the House of Culture, where there is another iconic monument of a completely different era - the American Hotel, opened in 1989, so nicknamed because of the overseas delegations that regularly visited the city. It should be noted that in the first years of independence and the accompanying confusion, it was difficult for the authorities to ensure control over the vast territory of the training ground; looting flourished there (which the Kurchatov special police fought to the best of their ability), and in 1996-2012 the United States (and since 2002 Russia) launched the test site has an entire secret program to collect plutonium and other potentially dangerous materials and objects to prevent them from falling into the hands of terrorists.

But, alas, the American Hotel completely slipped my mind, and from the square I almost mechanically walked towards the Irtysh, to the high and still neglected embankment:

Its architecture clearly shows how unusual the town Bereg was:

Beyond the bend is the village of Grachi, whose residents clearly knew more than the official ones. It was no coincidence that the same Chagan pilots were teased by colleagues from other units as “deaf and dumb.”

The remains of some kind of monument, or maybe just a sculpture on the embankment. A monumental school building rises above the floodplains:

Having made a circle, I went to Victory Square:

With a tall military obelisk, I don’t know exactly what year it was erected. The new defenders of the fatherland, the smiths of the “nuclear shield”, worked here...

Another monument. On the flag on the right are the contours of the polygon. “Victims of nuclear tests” in Kazakhstan are a very large group of beneficiaries, and how many people the test site killed - as in the case with, is impossible to calculate. No one here got to the point of acute radiation sickness, and the doses of radiation received mainly from emergency situations at the test site and their own irresponsibility in everyday life only undermined their health in a thin trickle - it’s just that people here aged earlier, got sick more seriously, and “burned out at work” more often.

Behind the monument, in the park between Victory Square and Kurchatov Square, lies a small Kazan Church:

It was rebuilt in 1992-93 from the “Beria House” - the mansion in which Lavrenty Palych stayed during the first Soviet nuclear tests on August 29, 1949. Viewed from here, Beria is by no means an ominous executioner, but the creator of a nuclear shield, which to this day remains Russia's main geopolitical asset.

There is a young and very friendly priest in the church, but, according to him, there are few parishioners. On the ground floor there is a refectory, a utility room, a church shop, on the second floor there is the temple itself:

There is also a mosque in Kurchatov, between the Irtysh restaurant and the department store, opposite the library, and was rebuilt from a pharmacy:

But the walk around the city was my own initiative, although if I have free time, Togas-Intourservice will show the city. At some point, Aisulu, a guide from the Semipalatinsk Test Site Museum, called us, and Uncle Yura took us back to the National Nuclear Center of Kazakhstan. Now they are trying to make a kind of “Kazakhstani” out of Kurchatov with a complex of nuclear institutes founded back in 1992, simultaneously with the closure of the test site, and now everything is serious here - since 2010 they even have their own small tokamak (experimental prototype fusion reactor, that is, a small man-made star), created for materials science tasks. He is in a low building on the right behind the bushes, and on the left is a complex of radiation technologies (2009) - radiation exposure can be used for, for example, cross-linking polymers or sterilizing medical devices:

The NNC includes the Institute of Nuclear Research (founded in 1957 in Alma-Ata), the Institute of Atomic Energy, the Institute of Radiation Safety, the Research and Production Center for Explosive Works and the Baikal design enterprise. And this is the business center at the National Nuclear Center - Kazakhstan is trying to keep up with the scientific and technological revolution and stimulate the implementation scientific developments into business. Unfortunately, I don’t know how effectively all this works.

And opposite them, in former town of the same military unit No. 52605 - the tall building of the Institute of Nuclear Research and the blue Stalinka of the Institute of Radiation Safety. We are interested in the latter - visits to the nuclear test site by outsiders are under his jurisdiction:

In the frame above you can see the checkpoint - it’s not easy to get inside, and the burly guards at the entrance studied our passports, checking them against the list, for several minutes. But here we are on the territory, the actual program of the tour to the Semipalatinsk test site from Togas-Intourservice begins - first an hour at the museum, then a 3-4-hour trip to the Experimental Field. Just then the wind rose, ripping my hat off and throwing it about twenty meters away - it was going to be a fun trip...

The backyard of the IRB, from which the excursion “loaf” with a driver, guide and dosimetrist departs. The blue building of the IRB is the former command of the military units of the training ground, followed by laboratory and administrative buildings.

The museum is on the second floor. I remember how I scoured half the Internet, trying to find his contacts, but I never found it. Because the museum is purely departmental, and without the mediation of a travel agency or akimat (if you are a respectable guest) you cannot get into it. At the entrance there is Igor Kurchatov’s office with authentic furnishings:

Here is a photograph of another laboratory building where Kurchatov worked when he came to Semipalatinsk-21, which was later named after him. It is located in the depths of the town of IRB, and tourists are not taken to it.

But I will leave most of the exhibits of this museum for the next part, adding them to the Experimental Field - the place where they were directly used. For now, I will show only a couple of objects, just to make it clear what kind of POWER we are going to:

This piece of pumice is nothing more than fused underground nuclear explosion granite, and this metal bow is a pipe crushed by an explosion: