16 Nov 06
Welcome to Karaganda, heartland of Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago, the epitome of Stalin's labour camps. This godforsaken city was built by prisoners in the 1930s, and after the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991 about half the population upped and left to escape a life racked with respiratory hell. On the outskirts the little wooden, pointed-roof huts of the labour camp still exist, and people still live in them.
Karaganda is on the edge of the Hunger Steppe, where nothing much now grows except the dead-looking grass and scrub that sometimes manage to colonise the infertile mud. There's a memorial here 'to the victims of repressions who found the eternal peace in Kazakh soil'; nearby are individual headstones representing the dead of the various nationalities unfortunate enough to have been caught up in Stalin's mad plans.
My Polish friend tells of how his grandmother's sister, from an intellectual family and thus a threat to the socialist paradise, would be chained to a huge plough with dozens of other women and told to plough to the horizon, to be picked up by truck at the end of the day. It's almost beyond belief, but it happened and it happened here.
It's a relief to arrive at Balkhash, centre of copper and zinc mining, its entrance signalled by a fine sculpture of a MiG 21 Fishbed fighter aeroplane. We head downhill along a slightly lumpy dual carriageway to the Culture Centre and the sort of welcome normally reserved for Formula 1 stars. I must have signed 50 autographs by the time I escape from the Mercedes, but to a junior Kazakh the sight of a string of colourful E-classes, headed by a speedy police Lada, must have been quite special.
