Our trip to Astana was full of eye opening contrasts. We saw the somewhat forgotten Soviet right bank of the Ishim River and the futuristic left bank. We saw the way that English interacts with Kazakh and Russian at Nazarbayev University where all classes are taught in English. Even in the ballet we watched, Giselle, the first and second acts contrast the world of the living and the world of the ghostly willies. Our first day was warm and sunny, albeit exhausting. The temperature was comparable to Almaty and it seemed as though all of the hats and coats we had brought would be left in our suitcases. We walked around the left bank with our necks craning to look up at the shiny structures and our eyes squinting from the sun. There was a breeze, which I assume is a relative constant on the steppe, but it was nothing compared to what we would be met with the next morning.
We woke up on Friday to dark clouds and a light rain. The bleakness of the day, while unfortunate for travel, was suitable for our morning excursion. We took a bus out of the city towards the ALZHIR museum. ALZHIR is an acronym in Russian for Akmola Camp for the Wives of Traitors to the Motherland. In essence, a GULAG specifically created for wives, sisters, and other female relatives of victims of the Stalin’s Purges.
We arrived at the museum midmorning. The wind and rain had picked up. I was surprised to see that very few, if any, of the original buildings from the camp remain. There were patches of grass but most of the ground surrounding the museum was covered with bricks. The water from the rain collected between them.
On the museum’s property there are a couple outdoor exhibits, including a train car, which would have been packed with women on their way to ALZHIR and a guard tower complete with a sculpture of a watchman and guard dog. There is also a large arched monument to those who were sent to ALZHIR over its years of operation and a wall covered in their names.
The museum itself is a gray circular building. It is the shape of a large cone, sliced in half horizontally so that only the bottom remains. There are no windows. To me, it looked more like the entrance to an underground bunker than a museum. It seemed as if instead of holding and preserving history, the building was designed to hide classified information. This, however, was not the case, and we walked into the museum, damp from the rain. Our tour guide led us through the museum and gave us an overview of each exhibit, before we were able to walk around again at our own pace.
Among the many documents, there were many photographs of women who were held at ALZHIR. I was surprised to see that many of the women at the camp were quite successful and prominent Soviet citizens. While I suppose it makes sense that the wives of political figures were also successful in their own right, it struck me to see ballet dancers, actresses, doctors, authors, and other accomplished professionals among the faces of the victims of ALZHIR. Not only were these women active in their work lives, many left behind young children when they were taken. Children under the age of three were allowed to accompany their mother to ALZHIR, but older children were forced to live with relatives or were put into orphanages.
On the museum walls, many letters are displayed. The letters were from school aged children to their mothers in ALZHIR. The letters from children to their imprisoned mothers were heartbreaking. In their letters, the kids expressed concern about their parents, most of them had no idea where their father went. The letters, judging by vocabulary levels and handwriting, were written by children of all ages. Many had little illustrations of homes and family members.
When reading the letters, it was impossible to ignore the fact that everyone was affected by the purges. The men who were accused, their wives, children, relatives, and friends. These letters are proof of the suffering that the children of accused enemies of the people endured.
The web of implications and accusations that lead to the arrests of these women and their husbands was described in Dombrovsky’s book, The Keeper of Antiquities, in a way that evoked a feeling of the world becoming smaller and closing in. Once accused and sentenced, however, enemies of the people were sent to camps all around the USSR and their children were distributed to orphanages. Whether accusations forced a person to isolate from their relatives or their designated camp was geographically far away from their loved ones, being isolated from one’s family seems to have been a marker of the Terror years.
“Hello my darling mama. (?) Mama, do you know where papa is? Mama, I’m studying in 2nd (?) grade. Mama, I have been sick with ringworm (?) for a long time. I am alive and well. Mama, you wrote that you don’t have paper. Mama, I will send (?) you some. Mama, I miss you a lot. There is nothing more to say. Mama, this is my house.”
In the early afternoon, we re-boarded the bus and made our way back into the sparkling city of Astana. Again, the contrast between the memorial and the modern capital was striking. We had planned to visit Karaganda and another GULAG museum on Saturday, but the weather had turned from rain to snow overnight. With the snow came the eternal winds of the steppe that we had been warned about. Out of fear of road closures, we opted to stay in Astana for the day and leave by train in the evening. The harsh weather, even in mid-April, made me think of the women who had been taken by train to ALZHIR no matter the weather. Without their families, alone on the steppe, approaching a barren patch of land with straw barracks and guards. It is unimaginable.
