Conspiracies and Cosmonauts: The Baikonur Cosmodrome and Popular Narratives of Ecological Disaster in Contemporary Kazakhstan

In Soviet-era tellings, the Baikonur Cosmodrome was glorified as the most dramatic example of a technological prowess that would catapult society forward into the Socialist future. Irrigation would make the desert bloom, electricity illuminate the village, rockets erase the boundaries between earth and heaven. In present-day Kazakhstan, these narratives often appear in mirror form: technology retains its power to transform both the social and the natural, yet these transformations take the form of disease, social alienation, and climatic disaster. Seasonal droughts and floods, dust storms, the disappearance of the Aral Sea, and the mass die-offs of Saiga antelope in spring 2015 have all been blamed on the rockets launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome. This paper draws on ethnographic fieldwork among mobile pastoralists in rural Kazakhstan in combination with materials gathered from mass media to document popular narratives on the environmental impact of the Baikonur Cosmodrome. In these narratives, fears of climate change and environmental pollution are read as attempts to reckon with the conflicted legacies of the Soviet project.