Kazakhstan: Poisoned Legacy

Shymkent is a drab and largely unremarkable town, except for one thing – its highly polluted environment. The dust blowing through its streets and the soil beneath the feet of its inhabitants contain such high concentrations of lead and other toxic elements - cadmium, antimony and arsenic - that they would surely generate a major scare if detected anywhere else.

Here they just cause endemic health problems that the local people are forced to live with. Take lead poisoning, for example, the most obvious ill effect. It is simply rife here – particularly among young children.

The culprit: a decrepit lead smelting plant right in the heart of the city. Built in the 1930s at the height of Soviet industrialisation, it went on to play a crucial role in the USSR’s fight against Nazi Germany – making most of the tens of millions of bullets fired by the Red Army during World War II. But while the factory was celebrated in propaganda films during and after the war as a paradigm of socialist achievement, little was ever said about its truly appalling environmental record, not even when Kazakhstan achieved independence in 1991.