About a year into my field research in Kazakhstan, I went to the city of Kurchatov, once the secret command center of the Soviet nuclear program , to make some photocopies. On the ground floor of an apartment building I found a store whose owner had a copy machine as well as several glass display cases selling souvenir stickers, magnets and other objects featuring hammers and sickles, stars and mushroom clouds.
These kinds of trinkets were not particularly surprising to me. You can find them in many places. But a bright yellow button about the size of my palm stopped me in my tracks: "I am a radioactive mutant" ("Ya radioaktivnyy mutant"), read its simple message.
I laughed to myself, thinking that the button was meant to be funny, that a tourist would buy it to wear ironically and tell stories about having been near a nuclear test site.
But the button's message is also true for the thousands of people who live in this area. Residents actually say, "I am a mutant," when they talk about their bodies, their family histories and their radioactive environment.
As a cultural-medical anthropologist , I study health and illness as life experiences. I've spent many months in villages around the Soviet-era Semipalatinsk test site in Kazakhstan, known locally as the Polygon.
In my book " Atomic Collective: Radioactive Life in Kazakhstan ," I explore how the people here have created new forms of mutual aid and camaraderie in the shadow of nuclear catastrophe. Their stories weave together fallout, the Cold War and secret government agencies, international aid workers and scientists, and everyday life in the Anthropocene.
Scale of nuclear testing in Kazakhstan
The Polygon is a roughly 7,000-square-mile (18,000-square-kilometer) area, close to the size of New Jersey, that was the Soviet Union's primary nuclear testing ground for 40 years.
Between 1949 and 1989, more than 450 nuclear tests took place here with a total explosive yield of 2,500 Hiroshima bombs. The most devastating were the above-ground tests, 116 of which were detonated between 1949 and 1963. I've seen the archival footage : mushroom clouds rising over the steppe, shock waves knocking people down dozens of miles away.
Today, this history is etched into a landscape pockmarked with deep craters and atomic lakes, contaminated with radioactive isotopes cesium-137, strontium-90 and plutonium-239 that can remain dangerous for thousands of years .
I brought the mutant button to show Burkut. At 78, he was the oldest resident in the village of Koian. A pensioner, he was once a tractor operator on a massive Soviet state farm. He and others of his age watched bombs going off in the distance as they worked.
He laughed at the button, and we sat down for tea. His wife boiled the water longer than needed - as was explained to me as a matter of fact, everyone in the village does this "for the radiation."
When nuclear testing ended and the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, the Polygon was closed and then simply abandoned. Kazakhstan became an independent nation stuck with legacies of nuclear testing. No cleanup, no warnings, no evacuations - just a vast, contaminated landscape left to nature, metal scavengers and whoever called it home.
This abandonment has never been formally addressed: As of today, there is not a single international body with a mandate to assist communities like Koian. What residents experience as personal abandonment is also a global policy failure .
When I talk about my fieldwork, many Americans are shocked to find that "living on a nuclear test site" is even a logical statement. But thousands of people do still live in scattered villages and homesteads around the test site's borders or inside the official perimeter, with some settlements just a thousand feet from atomic craters that have become watering holes for livestock.
A landmark 2025 report released by Norwegian People's Aid estimates that atmospheric nuclear tests are on track to cause at least 2 million additional cancer deaths worldwide , a figure that includes the region around the Polygon.
What is particularly devastating about the Polygon's story is that Soviet state institutions knew about the health impacts of radiation exposure early on. In the late 1950s, secret medical clinics monitored nearby populations, under the pretext of treating animal-borne diseases as they cataloged radiation-induced illnesses and tracked death rates. This went on for almost 40 years and affected mostly ethnic Kazakhs.
Burkut is one of many people around the Polygon I came to know who lived through it all - the mushroom clouds, the shaking house. He buried neighbors and family members who died of strange cancers or what doctors called "mysterious illnesses." The same doctors blamed their problems on "unsanitary lifestyles" and never mentioned nuclear fallout .
Only during the Soviet policy of glasnost (openness) in the 1980s did information begin to appear.
Embracing radiation
Health studies , albeit partial, document elevated cancer rates throughout the region, and the Kazakh state officially recognizes Burkut and over 1 million others as radiation victims . So the state has enshrined victimhood in law, even though the science remains contested.
Bodies respond to radiation exposure differently, and decades of secrecy mean that exposure documentation is partial at best. Science can't draw a clear line between residents' headaches, dizziness, intestinal issues and kidney problems, let alone the cancers and radiation. Burkut and the rest have local antidotes for the problem. Boiling water is but one.
My first question about life in the Polygon was always, "Why do people stay?"
As Burkut and others explained without jest, "Our organism is different now." They would tell me, "Clean air is our death," meaning that the radioactive environment as they know it has changed them so they now depend on it.
I found that people live in what I call an " atomic collective " - a community bound together by contamination and cultural, political, economic and social abandonment. Their logic for staying is not rooted in denial but in affirmation and adaptation. Decades of shared experience in a place where scientific uncertainty runs deep has galvanized local perceptions. "People who move to the city can survive only two years - maximum," Burkut told me. "Only two are still alive of those who left."
Those who have tried relocating to cities faced discrimination as "people of the Polygon," or were thought of as backward peasants who end up cleaning floors and living in moldy apartments. Where Burkut focuses on the dead, Ainur, a 40-year-old woman who grew up in the shadow of the test site, focuses on staying put. "At least here we can grow our own food, raise animals, and the air is clean," she explained.
They're affected by their ecosystem, Koian's residents will say, but they've survived. "We're used to it," many people told me.
Refusal to be victims
When I lived in Koian, I watched neighbors share everything from gasoline to food to medicine. Everyone helps cut grasses in the fall and build towering piles of it on the village's barns for winter feed. Together, their herds of horses, cows and sheep number in the thousands. Networks are everything when alternatives don't exist.
Some of the younger men work in mines in the region, some even within the Polygon itself. Others have scavenged metal from grown-over nuclear sites. These prospects are dwindling, though. "We can survive on our livestock," one herder explained, rejecting how outsiders see their impoverished life. These descendants of Kazakh nomadic herders, who once moved freely across the steppe with their animals, now speak of staying put as a mark of strength rather than constraint.
No one is asking for paved roads, new schools, emergency services or clean land. When electricity is knocked out by the common winter blizzards, they light candles. Outsiders may see apathy. During my time in Koian I understood this as their collective refusal - a community's decision to reject systems that had abandoned them and instead create their own terms for survival.
"I am a radioactive mutant" isn't just a darkly humorous button - it is a declaration of collective strength that emerged from collective abandonment.
Today's policy debates about resuming nuclear testing largely ignore these stories. But the atomic collective is the living present, not ancient history - and a future that any new testing will necessarily produce.
"Radioactive mutant" is not some abstract concept - it's what human beings call themselves after surviving what strategists deemed necessary. Kazakhstan's Polygon offers a warning: There is no such thing as a limited nuclear test, only communities left to become self-sufficient by abandonment, on their own by necessity, enduring what others decided was worth the cost.
Magdalena Stawkowski received funding from the Wenner-Gren Foundation, IREX, Social Science Research Council Eurasia Program, The Danish Institute for International Studies (Danish Council for Independent Research).
