Everything about Semipalatinsk totally explained
Semey (; also
transliterated as
Semij or
Semei, and known by its former name of
Semipalatinsk (Семипалатинск)) is a city in
Kazakhstan, in the northeastern province of
East Kazakhstan, near the border with
Siberia, around 1,000 km north of
Almaty, and 700 km southeast of the Russian city of
Omsk, along the
Irtysh River.
History
The first settlement was in
1718 when the Russians built a fort beside the river
Irtysh, near a ruined Buddhist monastery. The monastery's seven buildings lent the fort (and later the city) the name Semipalatinsk (
Russian meaning
Seven Chambered City). The fort suffered frequently from flooding caused by the snowmelt swelling the Irtysh, and in
1778 the fort was relocated 18 km upstream to less flood-prone ground. The small city grew around the fort, largely servicing the river trade between the nomadic peoples of
Central Asia and the growing
Russian Empire. The construction of the
Turkestan-Siberia Railway added to the city's importance, making it a major point of transit between Central Asia and Siberia.
In
1949 a site on the
steppe 150 km (100 miles) west of the city was chosen by the
Soviet atomic bomb programme to be the location for its weapons testing. For decades
Kurchatov -- the secret city at the heart of the test range named for
Igor Kurchatov, father of the soviet atomic bomb -- was home to many of the brightest stars of Soviet weapons science. The
Soviet Union operated the
Semipalatinsk Test Site (STS) from the first explosion in 1949 until 1989; 456 nuclear tests, including 340 underground and 116 atmospheric tests, were conducted there.
Semey has suffered serious environmental and health effects from the time of its atomic prosperity: nuclear fallout from the atmospheric tests and uncontrolled exposure of the workers, most of whom lived in the city, have given Semey and neighboring villages high rates of
cancer, childhood
leukemia,
impotence, and
birth defects.
Modern Semey is a bustling university town with a population nearing 300,000. Its proximity to the border, and the large expatriate scientific community attached to the university and the STS labs, gives Semey a more Russian character than other Kazakh cities.
The oblast (oblysy) of Semipalatinsk has been merged with the bigger
East Kazakhstan Province whose capital city is
Oskemen.
Famous residents
- Abay Qunanbayuli, father of modern Kazakh poetry, received his Russian schooling at Semey.
- Writer Fyodor Dostoevsky, whose exile included five years military service as a corporal in the Seventh Line Battalion at the Semipalatinsk garrison, beginning in 1854. Residents claim the details of particular descriptive passages in Dostoevsky's subsequent books, including his highly acclaimed The Brothers Karamazov, are recognizable as taken from his time in Semey.
- Boxer Wladimir Klitschko, who was born there in 1976.
The city has a museum to commemorate
Abay Qunanbayuli, and has both a museum of, and a street named after, Dostoevsky.
Population
1881 17,820
1897 26,353
1910 34,400
1926 56,100
1939 109,700
1959 149,800
1979 270,400
1989 317,100
1999 269,600Further Information
Get more info on 'Semipalatinsk'.
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