Life on an Atomic Collective

Abstract

This article is a case study of Koian, a former livestock and agricultural collective farm overlapping the border of the Semipalatinsk Nuclear Test Site in Kazakhstan. I examine how, despite economic hardships, village residents have reinvented their collective farm as a “collective bank” on a post-Soviet agro-nuclear landscape. Although informal economies and social networks play an important role in ameliorating a lack of state commitment to the region, the village has become a relatively stable economic unit and a lynch pin of a broader strategy of upward mobility for family members who move to cities.