Nowhereness: Baikonur

“On the sixtieth anniversary of the first human space flight, in April 2021, an anniversary launch of a Soyuz MS-18 manned spacecraft, borne into space by a Soyuz-2.1a booster rocket, was carried out at the Baikonur Cosmodrome’s Site 31. The craft was dubbed the Yuri Gagarin in honor of the occasion”

“Our two traveling companions were residents of Kazalinsk (Kazaly), a large town on the shores of the Aral Sea. A station by this name figures in all the stories about the cosmodrome’s construction and, more generally, about the Syr Darya defensive line, as well as about the environmental aftermath of the Aral Sea’s shrinkage”

“Our guides’ entire lives were bound up with the region, which is called Syr”

“They said the area could be understood better if one distinguished between Syr men Qyr—that is, between Syr and Qyr”

“Syr, or Syr Boyi, denotes the valley of the Syr Darya River and the transitional zone to the steppes and deserts of the Saryarka, the so-called Kazakh Uplands. Agriculture, handicrafts, and trade thrived in the valley, prompting the saying Syr – alashtyn anasy—“Syr is like a mother to everything Kazakh.””

“Qyr means hill, plateau, elevation, mountain range, frontier, edge, rib, side, and spine. It is thus the absolute opposite to all the bounty that exists on the banks of the Syr Darya”

“For our guides, Syr was what they wanted to show us—it was an object of pride, the epitome of history, and the essence of the cultural landscape—while Qyr is the domain of the cosmodrome and the desert”

“the cosmodrome in their self-representation as locals was something off the charts”

“It was a place that was not where they were. It was almost a “no place,” like Thomas More’s Utopia”

“Baikonur for our guides was a nowhere and, partly, an unknown”

“Despite the fact that they had lived all their lives in the cosmodrome’s immediate vicinity, they knew just as much about it as anyone who watches TV and sees news reports about rocket launches and cosmonauts landing back on earth”

“I wanted to experience the launch not as a trivial occasion, but as something that no one had seen before and could not understand, as something that would yield new concepts and new optics”

“The entire infrastructure of the approach to the launch pad is extremely old and seems to be turned outwards. You don’t see anything metallic, shiny, dynamic, or hi-tech. Only old Soviet views, as in any industrial estate sporting potholed roads and small hut-like sheds at the railway halts”

“Traveling around a good portion of Kazakhstan’s cities and regions, my fellow memory researchers and I had discussed why we had disliked Baikonur so much. We posited that we had this reaction because over these thirty years of independence we had become accustomed to a different material and visual style that was distinct from the Soviet military garrison vibe preserved at Baikonur”

“As we discussed whether anyone could actually enjoy this freeze-dried Sovietness and admire the functionality of the period’s classic Khrushchev apartment blocks, monolithic nine-story buildings, and town squares resembling military parade grounds, we took a walk around Baikonur in the spirit of Benjamin’s Moscow Diary and Lefebvre’s The Production of Space”

“Strolling down the main drag, Gagarin Street, and talking about possible options for transforming the city, we saw banners stretched over the entire width of the street, sporting slogans such as Glory to the conquerors of the cosmos!, People who don’t know their own past have no future, and Glory to the victorious nation!”

“There are many busts of and monuments to military scientists who are virtually unknown in Kazakhstani cities—for example, the Soviet rocket engineer Mikhail Yangel”

“Kazakh culture is represented by busts of Abai and Zhankozha Batyr and by Saken Seifullin Street. While Abai and Seifullin have been quite aggressively memorialized since Soviet times, the erection of monuments to batyrs, biys, khans, and other figures from pre-Soviet Kazakh history has been the most important recent trend in the way cultural landscapes are denominated”

“These are not abstract heroes from a nationally approved stable of historical figures. Rather, they are local heroes—that is, it is impossible to erect a monument to a batyr if he had no connection to a particular place”

“Infrastructurally, the city is literally falling apart, as if it is about to disappear from the face of the earth”

“In such circumstances, cosmetic improvements to the city—involving murals of booster rockets, portraits of long-dead cosmonauts and chief engineers, and decommissioned rockets—suggest that the cosmodrome, regardless of who runs it—Kazakhstan or Russia—has no future”