Semey

• 1. Introduction

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  Semey sits on the Irtysh River in eastern Kazakhstan, 1,000 km north of Almaty and just 700 km from the Russian city of Omsk. Its name changed three times in the span of a century: from Alash-Qala to Semipalatinsk to, finally, Semey in 2007. That last renaming was not accidental. When the Semipalatinsk City Council voted unanimously to drop the old name, the chairman offered a plain explanation: the existing name had negative associations because of the extensive atomic testing nearby. What kind of testing leaves a name so poisoned that a city votes to erase it? And what made this particular bend of a Siberian river worth naming, fighting over, and irradiating in the first place? Those questions run through everything that follows.

• 2. A Fort Among Ruins

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  Russia built the first settlement here in 1718, constructing a fort beside the Irtysh near the ruins of an ancient Buddhist monastery. Seven buildings still stood among those ruins, and the Russians named the fort for them: Semipalatinsk, meaning Seven-Chambered City. The Irtysh had a habit of flooding badly each spring, as snowmelt swelled the river past its banks. By 1778 the situation was untenable, and the fort was moved 18 km upstream to ground that flooded less easily. Around that relocated fort, a small city grew. Its earliest economic purpose was practical and unglamorous: it served the river trade running between the nomadic peoples of Central Asia and the expanding Russian Empire. The construction of the Turkestan-Siberia Railway in the early 20th century gave the city something larger. The railway made Semipalatinsk a major transit point between Central Asia and Siberia, and on the 19th of May 1854 it had already been designated the capital of the Semipalatinsk Oblast within the Russian Empire.

• 3. Revolution and Its Aftermath

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  The city was one of the main centers for the publication of books by the Kazakh intelligentsia, a distinction that gave it cultural weight before the political upheaval of 1917. After the October Revolution broke out in Russia, a largely unrecognized state called the Alash Autonomy declared itself and operated from 1917 to 1920. During those years, Semipalatinsk served as its capital and carried a different name entirely: Alash-Qala. Red Army forces loyal to Petrograd ended that experiment in 1920, taking control of the area and folding it into Soviet administration. The city moved between administrative designations over the following decades, serving as a regional center until the Semipalatinsk Oblast was eventually merged into the larger East Kazakhstan Region on the 23rd of May 1997, with Oskemen as that region's capital. During World War II, the city's position near the Russian border gave it one more temporary role: from October 1941 to July 1942, a Polish diplomatic post connected to the formation of the Anders' Army was located there.

• 4. The Test Site

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  In 1949 the Soviet atomic bomb programme chose a site on the steppe 180 km west of the city as its weapons testing ground. At the center of that range sat Kurchatov, a secret city named for Igor Kurchatov, described as the father of the Soviet atomic bomb. Many of the brightest minds in Soviet weapons science lived and worked there. The Soviet Union operated the Semipalatinsk Test Site from the first explosion in 1949 until 1989. Over those four decades, 456 nuclear tests took place: 340 underground and 116 atmospheric. The atmospheric tests proved the more damaging to the surrounding population. Nuclear fallout contaminated land around Semey, and workers who lived close to the test site were exposed without adequate controls. The consequences were measurable: high rates of cancer, childhood leukemia, and birth defects appeared among residents of the neighbouring villages. Those health effects were still visible long after the Soviet Union ended operations at the site, and they were the direct reason the city council moved to shed the Semipalatinsk name in 2007.

• 5. Writers, Boxers, Thinkers

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  Fyodor Dostoevsky, who was born in 1821 and died in 1881, spent time in Semipalatinsk, and the city has maintained a notable relationship with his legacy ever since. The Museum of F. M. Dostoevsky in Semey opened on the 7th of May 1971, established by Resolution of the Council of Ministers of the Kazakh SSR No. 261. Of the seven museums in the world dedicated to Dostoevsky, this is the only one located outside Russia. A street in the city also carries his name. The poet, composer, and philosopher Abai Qunanbaiuly, born in 1845 and died in 1904, is commemorated by a separate museum in the city. Other notable figures born in Semey include the Ukrainian boxer Wladimir Klitschko, born in 1976; the oceanographer and defector Stanislav Kurilov, born in 1936; and the writer Pavel Bazhov, born in 1879. The city also has a direct connection to Belgian city Ypres through a formal twin-towns relationship, an unlikely pairing that links a steppe river town with a Flemish city defined by its own history of catastrophic warfare.

• 6. Semey Today

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  The Semey Bridge, a suspension bridge across the Irtysh, connects the two main halves of the city. Construction began in 1998, and the bridge opened to traffic in November 2000. Its main span runs 750 m, and its total length is 1,086 m. The city's population is recorded at 312,764, though estimates of a bustling university town place it above 350,000. Semey Medical University is the city's most prominent institution of higher education, described as a leading provider of health specialists for the region and the country. Because of its proximity to Russia and the large scientific community historically attached to the test site laboratories and the university, Semey is said to carry a more Russian character than most other Kazakhstani cities. President Tokayev selected Semey in March 2022 as the prospective capital of a new administrative region, and that decision came into force on the 8th of June 2022 when Abai Region became an official region of Kazakhstan, with Semey as its administrative centre.