In 1989, after fifty years of Soviet nuclear testing at the Semipalatinsk test site, Kazakh civil society mobilised to form the Nevada-Semipalatinsk movement, which called for a ban on nuclear tests on Kazakh land and beyond. The leader of the movement, the prominent Soviet Kazakh poet and politician Olzhas Suleimenov, was the first to draw widespread attention to the consequences of these tests. On February 26th, 1989 in Alma-Ata (present-day Almaty), Suleimenov replaced his electoral speech for the Congress of the People’s Deputies of the USSR with a public address on the drastic impact of radioactive gas leakage. For decades, Soviet atomic tests were conducted on the habitable territories of East, Central and North Kazakhstan. People living in nearby villages were mostly unaware of the lethal risks until the Nevada-Semipalatinsk movement made it public. On the cold winter day of February 28th, 1989, thousands of people gathered outside the building of Writers’ House in Almaty to express their resistance to Moscow’s policies.
Nevada-Semipalatinsk was originally formed as an international movement advocating not only for an end to Soviet nuclear testing at Semipalatinsk, but also for global anti-nuclearism and transnational solidarity. How might this single case of a short-lived anti-nuclear resistance movement, which was not limited to local Soviet Kazakh activism, offer a different perspective on studying internationalisms from the grassroots?
Firstly, it allows us to see how Soviet internationalism and engagement with the decolonising world gave rise to cultural elites like Olzhas Suleimenov and others, who later used their social capital to promote anti-nuclearism at the civic level. Secondly, it invites engagement with the people’s history of the Semipalatinsk test site, where the trauma of nuclear testing persists through the drastic consequences of the atomic tests today. The latter presents a significant challenge, as a now fourth generation of atomic test survivors are living with the aftermath of Soviet negligence. My research demonstrates how Nevada-Semipalatinsk challenges state-centred practices of internationalism and the top-down idea of peace promoted by the Soviet Union. It reveals the role of people’s power to end nuclear testing and engage in internationalist activities from the grassroots, while highlighting both the possibilities and tensions that lie within the statist ideas of peace and solidarity linked to Soviet internationalism.
The movement remains active today under the original name ‘Nevada-Semipalatinsk’, a direct reference and reminder of the test site itself, despite the official renaming of Semipalatinsk to Semey in 2007 by Kazakh authorities. In literature and in the media, the movement is also often referred to as ‘Nevada-Semey’. The nuclear test site was originally named ‘Semipalatinsk-21,’ located in eastern Kazakhstan but absent on all official maps. There, the USSR conducted 456 atomic tests in total.
The naming of the ‘Nevada-Semipalatinsk’ movement was derived from and rooted in transnational solidarity with indigenous anti-nuclear activists of Western Shoshone in the Nevada desert, where the US government conducted more than 900 nuclear tests between 1951 and 1992. Thus, the Kazakh movement was initially named ‘Nevada’, with some suggestions to name it ‘Nevada-Kazakhstan’. Kazakh activists added ‘Semipalatinsk’ instead, to emphasise the connection between the two test sites in the US and the USSR. The idea of solidarity between Soviet Kazakh and indigenous American activists was reflected not only in naming, but in the movement’s logo. Art critic Umit Sakhariyeva and immunologist Jamil Isin depicted an indigenous man from a Western Shoshone tribe and an old Kazakh man (aksakal in Kazakh). In this way, activists aimed to forge connections not only via a shared trauma, but also through culture and customs striving for peace, justice and solidarity.
During 1989 and the following years, Kazakh delegations visited Western Shoshone tribes and toured American cities from New York to Nevada. In addition to the movement’s leader, Olzhas Suleimenov, its vice president, and Murat Auezov, and other officials, the delegations also included artist Karipbek Kuyukov. He was born without arms due to radiation exposure in the village of Egindibulak in the Karagandy region, around 100 kilometers west of the Semipalatinsk test site. Kuyukov became a prominent advocate of global anti-nuclearism. Later on, Kazakhs invited indigenous activists from the US to Kazakhstan. In the next few years, Nevada-Semipalatinsk activists also visited Japan, Germany, China and France, raising awareness of Soviet atomic tests and sending a message to the global community to urgently and immediately stop nuclear testing. As a result of these efforts, Semipalatinsk Polygon (the common name for the test site) was closed on August 19th, 1991, becoming the first ever nuclear test site to be shut down.
This successful example of internationalist, grassroots, anti-nuclear resistance complicates the Soviet project of peace and internationalism beyond statist ideas of solidarity and peace. On the one hand, Nevada-Semipalatinsk emerged amidst the political opening generated by Mikhail Gorbachev’s policies of democratisation and civil society liberalisation during the periods of perestroika and glasnost in the Soviet Union’s final decade. At the same time however, it was rooted in earlier Soviet attempts to promote peace and denuclearisation through organisations such as the Soviet Peace Committee (SPC). Established in 1949 by the Soviet Communist Party, the SPC was part of the World Peace Council and functioned as the main organisation coordinating peace movements across the Soviet Union. It was the principal body responsible for mobilising mass signatures for the Stockholm Appeal – a significant global initiative in the 1950s that called for the prohibition of nuclear weapons.
Yet, the SPC-led Soviet campaign for promoting peace failed to mention the tests that Soviet scientists were conducting on their own land, particularly in Semipalatinsk. While I do not claim that there is a direct correlation, the SPC was in decline in the 1980s – the same decade in which grassroots anti-nuclear activism began to emerge across the Soviet Union. In addition to the Stockholm Appeal, regional branches of the SPC engaged writers, intellectuals, and cultural workers in promoting peace advocacy. For instance, prominent Kazakh writer Mukhtar Auezov – the father of Murat Auezov – was affiliated to the SPC and travelled to Tokyo as part of the Soviet delegation to the Third World Conference Against Atomic and Hydrogen Bombs (Gensuikyo).
The SPC’s involvement of Mukhtar Auezov in the Gensuikyo conference was part of a broader Soviet attempt to not only promote the Stockholm Appeal but engage and build connections with the decolonising world. Cultural elites were a significant part of Soviet internationalism and the previously mentioned Olzhas Suleimenov is a vivid example of this. Prior to initiating the anti-nuclear movement, Suleimenov was an active member of the Soviet Afro-Asian Solidarity Committee as a writer and activist, and head of the Kazakh Committee responsible for forging connections with Asian and African writers. Murat Auezov was also an active participant there. By the time Nevada-Semipalatinsk was formed, leaders of the movement had gained enough influence and authority to not only mobilise Kazakh civil society, but to make sure it received institutional support.
The movement’s anti-colonial character can be seen as partly emerging from these Soviet ideas and practices of peace and internationalism, while also challenging them. Central Asian intellectuals mostly embraced their identity as Soviet citizens and did not necessarily treat the Soviet Union as a colonial entity. Olzhas Suleimenov, for instance, referred to the Semipalatinsk test site as the ‘industrial military complex’, emphasising the arms race concept. The notion of colonialism or the anti-colonial character of the movement did not appear in my interviews with senior members of Nevada-Semipalatinsk, nor with grassroots activists in Kazakhstan. For institutional leaders, Soviet-ness was part of their day-to-day identity and work. Yet, for victims and survivors of the Semipalatinsk nuclear tests, it remained a living trauma shaped by colonial practices and nuclear colonialism. In my analytical interpretation therefore, the movement can be understood as an anti-colonial struggle undermining Soviet statist ideas of internationalism even if activists themselves did not frame it in these terms.
Beyond elite cultural figures and Soviet ideas of peace lie the untold stories of anti-nuclear resistance that also made up the Nevada-Semipalatinsk movement. One example is that of Bolatbek Baltabek, a teacher from Sarzhal, one of the villages closest to the test site. Baltabek heard Olzhas Suleimenov’s speech announcing the new movement on television and subsequently mobilised people into the movement by collecting donations for the movement’s fund, as well as their signatures in his personal notebook. Similar efforts were undertaken by people living in the cities of Oskemen, adjacent to Semipalatinsk, such as Kairkan Baigundinov or the late Zhenis Sadykov, who led a local branch of Nevada-Semipalatinsk. The stories of these activists are often missing from the official narrative of the movement, but their efforts were central to mobilising the public. I had the opportunity to collect their stories during my fieldwork in Kazakhstan in the spring and autumn of 2025. While their names and activism are not documented in existing archives, they live on in personal memories. At this point in my research, I realised that there is still a long way to go to collect and incorporate their voices into official narratives of Kazakh anti-nuclear struggle, as well as into a larger framework of international peace movements.
An important insight I draw from this overlooked case of Kazakh anti-nuclear activism is how it was primarily grassroots people’s resistance to nuclear testing that led to significant institutional decisions such as the closing of the Semipalatinsk test site. The Nevada-Semipalatinsk movement challenges the top-down idea of Soviet peace and its elitist gaze on its history. The cultural and social capital of elites was of course pivotal in mobilising the public. Yet, the grassroots activism of ordinary people who gathered in front of Writers’ House in Almaty in February 1989 and who organised events and activities in the affected villages close to Polygon are important. Even though the language of activism they used rarely included the terms ‘anti-colonial’ or ‘internationalist’, they were fighting for peace on their own land and in their own way.