SIBERIAN EXILES Part 3 - The story of Marfu and the legacy of the Atomic Gulag

On 25 March 1949, Marju and her mother were deported to Siberia close to the border to Kazakhstan while Marjus father was send to a Gulag camp. In August 1953, Marju was out on the far steppe when she saw clouds surging and boiling in the distance. An incredible storm then blew up and everything went dark. She had never seen anything like it. In the early 1990s, Marju read about the Semipalatinsk nuclear test site. She realized that she had been living next to this nuclear test site during her deportation. A mere 400 km away, surface tests were carried out, mushroom clouds rose into the sky, and the earth was contaminated with radioactivity. Between 1949 and 1989, the Soviet Union carried out a total of 456 nuclear tests at Semipalatinsk. According to the Kazakh health authorities, more than 1.6 million people were exposed to fall-out from the nuclear explosions. Marju understood that she had probably witnessed the detonation of the first hydrogen bomb on the steppe that day in August 1953. Claudia Heinermann travelled to Kazakhstan in search of traces of the Gulag camps where Marju’s father and other Baltic nationals had been imprisoned, and to uncover the history of the Semipalatinsk nuclear test site. During her travels Heinermann spent several days at the nuclear test site and visited Kurchatov, the former administrative centre of the test site. She talked to former employees, who had worked on the test site under an obligation of secrecy, and went to the villages that had been located in the fall-out zone for years. She spoke to eyewitnesses who in their youth had seen the mushroom clouds rise and felt the earth shake. But most important, she learned how the Gulag system was used to develop the Soviet Atomic Project. Without the prisoners the Soviet Union could not have developed Nuclear bombs in such a short time. Laboratories, nuclear reactors, factories, and uranium mines were needed. The test site Semipalatinsk was established so that the bomb could be tested. Gulag camps were set up at strategic locations to build the necessary infrastructure at lightning speed. To achieve this, the NKVD supplied thousands of forced labourers.