Koreans – Generation P: Edward Crabtree's blog.

`And you may find yourself living in another part of the world/And you may ask yourself: `How did I get here? ` (Talking Heads `One in a Lifetime’).

Should you ever visit Kazakhstan there are three cities worth getting to know. Astana, the capital, seems still very much under construction with building works on every corner. The place does showcase some singular contemporary architecture, but the busy highways barging through it, the spaced-out topography and the absence of hustle-and bustle lend it an air of a Zamyatin type dystopia. The former capital, Almaty does still feel like the capital but with it radiates a strange kind of comatose gentrified hipsterism.

For me Kazakhstan’s Jewel-in-the-Crown is to be found in the far south near the border with Uzbekistan. The historic city of Shymkent is buoyant, full of character and even a bit eccentric.

Poor relation.

But…oh, there is one more city to mention. It is little visited by tourists and perhaps for a reason. This is Karaganda (the name is pronounced with the stress on the last syllable). People even exist who imagine Karaganda to be a fictional location owing to its close association with a well-known saying – but more of that later. I have been here for over a year now and can assure you that it is for real.

How Karaganda got its name seems something that none can agree on. Does it derive from a Turkic word meaning `dark place`? Is it a Kazakh word for `black blood` (referencing coal)? Or does the word derive from a yellow flower said to be common in the region? Whatever, Karaganda represents the prototypical medium sized Soviet city. Furthermore, it is to be found bang in the middle of Eurasia in the midst of interminable steppes.

Despite having a large Russian populattion, Karaganda is still a majority Kazakh city.

Having become an official city in 1934, Karaganda is the outcome of coal getting found in the local strata. Much of the population came here as slave labourers working in the mines. Many of these were Volga Germans (that is, a part of the ethnic German community in Russia) but a great many of them left when the Soviet Union collapsed. Now the population consists of 45.8% ethnic Kazakhs and 40% Russians with the remaining 15% per cent being evenly divided between Volga Germans, Ukrainians, Tartars, Koreans and others.

Karaganda’s main industry was put on the map a few years ago – and for all the wrong reasons. One cold day in October two years ago a blaze broke out at Kostenko coal mine. This ensured that 45 mine workers would never see the light of day again. Unions had been complaining about lax safety standards at ArcalarMittal – the global steel company overseeing the mining operations – for some time. This was not the first, just the worst mining accident in Kazakhstan. The mines have now been taken up into government hands.

City of distinction?

For those into misery-tourism, or just history, the site of the former Soviet labour camp, KarLag, is a half hour bus ride from the city and is the must-see `attraction` of the area. One Alexander Solhenitsyn spent time there and it is even said that `A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich` was based on KarLag.

Gone but not forgotten: a view inside the KarLag museum.

In the centre of this centreless city lies a statue of a Second World War pilot. This is Nurken Abdirov and the street which the statue welcomes us to, is also named after him. This Kazakh pilot, aged 23, became a `Hero of the Soviet Union` after ending his own life by becoming a sort of bespoke kamikaze pilot. Finding his plane engulfed in flames after having been shot at, he aimed his doomed craft at a column of German tanks. This serves as a grisly reminder, if one were needed, that the Kazakhs too made sacrifices in battles on the side of the Allies in that war.

Other luminaries with a Karagandinian connection include Gennady Golovkin, the boxer and Katia Ivanova, the former `Big Brother` reality TV show contestant and girlfriend of Ronnie Woods.

Karaganda has also functioned as a rest stop for cosmonauts on their way to being fired into outer space. Baikonur Cosmo drome is the launchpad closest to the city and the Cosmonaut Hotel was constructed just to cater for cosmonauts. . For a price, you can now stay in a room once inhabited by a space explorer. As well as that, an imposing monument to Yuri Gargarin himself can be admired in the central part of the city.

Indeed, for devotees of `Soviet core` Karaganda functions as a big open -air gallery. Here you will be met by mosaics and tapestries galore alongside other paraphernalia from that era.

One of the many public art works that enrich the city.

Monument to an idiom.

The unique statue to`Where? Where? In Karaganda!`

However, the signature statue of Karaganda is more up-to-the-minute. Tucked away in a garden outside a restaurant one can find a polymer statue called Where? Where? In Karaganda!' Constructed in 2011 by Marat Mansurov and Vikenty Komkov, it has a place in the Guinness Book of Records for being the first statue erected in honour of an idiomatic phrase. The saying can be traced back to a time when Russians who had served time at KarLag, needed to account for gaps in their employment history. As well as implying that Karaganda is a place `in the middle of nowhere`, there is also (to a Russophone) a bit of untranslatable wordplay in the phrase.

Inhabited island.

This dismissive saying about Karaganda does become palpable after a year spent in the city. The total lack of any kind of `expat community’ here is something I can live with. In the right frame of mind this can even be framed as a part of the place’s charm. However, there are only two small museums here and one small art gallery and the biggest bookshop devotes but a quarter of a shelf to books in English and many of those are graded.

I have had three tickets to see Russian bands play live cancelled in advance. My guess is that a combination of an expected low turnout and the relative inaccessibility of the place encouraged bands to strike Karaganda off their list of tour destinations. Likewise, if I want to visit my home country, Britain, I have to get to Astana, stay the night there and then arrange transport to the airport there which is some way out of the city.

The climate is something most Normies would add as another reason to spurn Karaganda. The four-month long gusty deep freeze whiteout of a winter is a challenge to those of us from gentler climes, but for me the existence of recognizable seasons here is a plus and in particular, the sparkling trees and cool breezes during the slow arrival of spring.

Hidden nuggets.

The snug retreat of a beer-bar is essential to survive such an environment. If I had to pick out one of my most loved it would be Wurst Depot Grill Bar on 25 Nurken Abdirov. This faux-German beer hall is lit in a cunning way with soft amber lamps and the attentive, no-nonsense staff serve you Praga beer (a Czech style non-hop beer produced by EFES-Kazakhstan). It is the buzzing but calming townie atmosphere that is the real draw though.

The eateries consist of, for the most part, unpretentious `greasy spoon` places dealing in low priced and nutritious fare. However, Langzhou – the central Asian food chain -is also to be found here so that you can fill up on lagman – a scrumptious Uygur dish consisting of noodles, beef and lightly fried vegetables.

As for street food, samsa take-aways are ubiquitous. (Samsa being a puff pastry pasty). However, if you look around you can find Shawarma and Chibureki joints too (Shawarma being a sort of kebab and Chibureki meat or cheese within fried dough). None of this is healthy eating to be sure, but the city does boast one vegetarian restaurant.

The four cinemas here do provide a good service. Whilst none of them could be called `Art house`, they do all roll out a range of films from different countries above and beyond the routine Hollywood fare.

The cultural focal point of the city must be the Eco Museum. Set up in 1995 to gather information for study and research, this distinctive initiative is the brainchild of Dima Kalmykov, a geologist who had partaken in the clean-up operation following the Chernobyl disaster. Here, in a hall stuffed with a random load of industrial and military junk you can pick your way through displays from radar stations and mines (complete with sounds) and – their piece de resistance a used Proton rocket which, when activated, rises up from the floorboards.

When Karagandinians wish to breathe some actual air all they need to do is to climb aboard a bus which, within three hours, whisks them away to Karkaralinsk. This functions as the local beauty spot, resembling a more wooded version of the Lake District in the U.K.

Karaganda then. This is no tourist destination, but the city is anything but snooty and is peaceful in every sense of the word. In particular one of its achievements is to create an amity between so many different ethnic groups.

Catholic church constructed on behalf of the Volga German population in Karaganda.

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On a street in Almaty there is a brass statue of Viktor Tsoi. Here’s why.

You stroll along the wide street called Abay Avenue which leads towards the Abay monument (dedicated to the poet, composer and reformer Abai Qunanbaiuly). You have a different poet and composer in mind, however, and just before you reach the gaping mouth of the Abay metro, you hang left and find yourself facing a large statue of a seated man and behind that an impressive fountain.

This is the entrance to the street which you take. The statue was of the composer Mukan Tulabaevich – the first Kazakh classical composer and author of the Kazakh national anthem. You, though, have another monument to another musician in mind and continue down the street You find yourself on a downward incline with trees on either side of you.

All of a sudden you are in the midst of some familiar verses as you are flanked by plaques all along the leafy pathway and these feature quotations from certain songs. You recognize some words from the legendary song Change.

Then you encounter the dark bronze statue. It has its back to you so you pass it and turn and find yourself facing an iconic tableau of a man in the centre of the path in the act of lighting a cigarette. Beneath him are the engraved word `Igla` – `The Needle`.

Soviet Cinema’s turning point.

From Kazakhfilm in 1988, The Needle was a film which kickstarted an all too brief trend of Kazakh New Wave cinema. Taking its cue from French New Wave films, this trend was willing to grapple with less than ideal social conditions (The Last Stop from 1989 about a soldier returning to his home town is another key example from this era).

For all its Avant-garde gestures The Needle brought in the punters, becoming the most watched film over the coming year. Furthermore, it made a superstar out of the leading man, who plays a character just known as Moreau. He is played by Viktor Tsoi, the lead singer and songwriter of the band Kino. Soviet Screen hailed this relative newcomer to the silver screen `the cinema actor of the year`.

Directed by the then 34-year-old Rashid Nugmanov, The Needle was shot in Alma Ata (then the capital of Kazakhstan, now known as Almaty and relegated to being `the capital of the South`) and took the St Petersburgian Tsoi to the land where his Korean father grew up. (There are many Koreans in the Central Asian states having resided in the Far East at the end of the Nineteenth Century).

One one level the film is a topical thriller. In it, an enigmatic stranger returns to his hometown to meet up with a past girlfriend and becomes embroiled in a feud with drug dealing gangs (this theme being something of a hot potato of the late Soviet period). Then again, the narrative uses the stylistics that are more common to modernist theatre than popular cinema. For example, Moreau’s girlfriend spends one sequence wearing a mask without explanation. In another scene, Moreau and some allies arrive to make a revenge attack on one of the drug dealers who is in a bath house. The men simple stand stock still on the edge of the pool and in this way some kind of violence is implied rather than depicted. Moreover, extended shots the parched wasteland of what was once the Aral Sea anchor the whole production in a dreamlike landscape.

Nor is The Needle just a showcase of Kino’s music. Sure enough, there is the presence of Kino’s mid-tempo interwoven guitar melodies here, but the songs do not dominate the tale. (Review of a Kino Album here)

The most famous song (written for the film) is `Blood type` which plays at the film’s denouement when Moreau stops to light a cigarette just before being knifed by one of his drug baron enemies.(This is the very scene recreated by the statue – which has been erected on the precise locale where it had been filmed some three decades earlier).

Eurasian superstar.

Viktor Robertovich Tsoi came into the world in June 21^st 1962 into a respectable family composed of an engineer father and P.E teacher mother. One crucial fact is that he spent his formative years in Leningrad (now St Petersburg). The proximity of this city to Finland made for a lot cultural interpenetration between it and Western Europe. Tsoi, somewhat set apart from his peers by his Asiatic appearance, came to idolize Bruce Lee. He was also enamored of the pop-rock scene of the Eighties in Britain and was familiar with such bands as Joy Division, The Smiths and Duran-Duran. He would flog his own hand-drawn reproductions of album covers to people in his circle.

Later under the moniker Garin and the Hyperboloids – a reference to a Spy-fi thriller by Alexei Tolstoy which was both filmed and serialized on Soviet television -became a part of the officially sanctioned Leningrad Rock Scene (a period of history examined in the film Summer – my review here).

We should be grateful for the Soviet policy which insisted that bands could not do covers of Western songs but had to write their own material – without this edict one feels that Tsoi and others of his ilk might well have remained cover bands.

Instead, throughout a twelve-year period, from 1978 to 1990 Tsoi, with a lean black-clad rock-hipster-cum-Kung fu fighter persona, put Russian rock on the map through his guitar, bass and piano playing and, of course, his portentous low register voice – but above all his zeitgeist laden lyrics. Kino would release some four hundred songs, many of them still sung by young buskers throughout Eastern Europe and Central Asia. They played to a huge crowd as Luzhniki stadium in Moscow before Tsoi met his end in a car accident in Latvia in 1990.

In the meantime, a great deal of `Kinomania` had been generated. It is said that some fans took their own lives on hearing of the loss of their hero. In the longer term, conspiracy theories abound as to the exact nature of Tsoi’s death. There is also much lively debate about just what Tsoi would have made of the end of the Soviet Union, which he had got so close to but never got to see.

There is also a deep irony in the fact that some of Tsoi’s songs have been requisitioned by the Putin regime and turned into pro-war anthems sung by military choirs! (Needless to say, Tsoi was a draft dodger).

Metal Ghost.

In the presence of Nugmanov, the lead guitarist of Kino band Yuri Kaspyarin and (a real sign of the times) the Mayor of Almaty, the statue was unveiled on the thirtieth anniversary of The Needle’s release – June 21^st 2018. The sculptor – one Matvey Matushkin was born on the year that Tsoi embarked on his musical career.

Tsoi’s metal ghost continues to haunt this former country of the Soviet Union, forever lighting a cigarette in grim reflection….

Tag: Koreans

TOWN ZERO: A year in Karaganda – a model (post) Soviet province.

A LEGEND FOR THE LOST.

On a street in Almaty there is a brass statue of Viktor Tsoi. Here’s why.