Karaganda

Coal was known on this part of the steppe long before anyone lived here in numbers: tradition credits a young shepherd, Appak Baizhanov, with finding it in 1833, and small mines worked under Russian and then British and French ownership in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Nothing resembling a town existed until the Soviet drive for industry. From 1930 the state developed the Karaganda basin into one of the Soviet Union's principal coalfields, with a dozen mines and a town planned for tens of thousands of workers; the settlement became a village in 1931 and was granted city status in 1934.

Its builders were largely people sent here against their will. Peasant families deported during collectivisation, Volga Germans, Poles, Koreans, Chechens and Ingush, and prisoners of Karlag — the Karaganda Corrective Labour Camp, run from Dolinka between 1931 and 1959 — dug the mines, laid the railways and put up the first settlements. A camp for the wives of men condemned as enemies of the state operated at Akmol to the north. By 1939 the city held about 100,000 people, some half of them prisoners. The mining villages scattered across the coalfield were gradually joined by a planned centre of avenues and colonnaded buildings laid out to the south-east of the old workings.

Coal carried the city through the Soviet decades: Karaganda supplied the steel plant at Temirtau, grew past 600,000 people and gained universities, theatres and a medical school. Independence in 1991 brought closures, emigration — most of the German population left for Germany — and a sharp fall in population, followed by partial recovery as mines and the steel works passed into private and later state hands. Mining accidents, including a fire in 2023 that killed dozens of miners, have kept safety at the centre of public debate.

Karaganda's character comes from the mixture of peoples the twentieth century deposited here. Kazakhs and Russians form the majority, but the city also has Ukrainian, Tatar, Korean, Polish, Chechen and German roots, and the German community left behind Catholic and Lutheran churches that still function; Karaganda is the seat of a Roman Catholic diocese, unusual in Central Asia. Russian is the common street language, though Kazakh is taught and used more widely each year.

Mining is the city's shared identity. Monuments to miners stand on the avenues, Miners' Day at the end of August is the largest local holiday, and families measure their history in pits and shifts. Alongside that sits the memory of the camps, which is public rather than hidden: the museum at Dolinka and the memorials around the coalfield draw descendants from across the former Soviet Union and are visited on national days of remembrance.

Everyday manners are Central Asian and Soviet at once. Guests are fed immediately and generously; tea is poured in small amounts so it stays hot and the cup can be refilled; elders are greeted first and given the best seat. Kazakh traditions — the naming of ancestors, the spring feast of Nauryz, horse games at summer gatherings — are practised in a city otherwise built on Soviet lines, and the football and ice hockey clubs give the mining districts something to argue about through the winter.

Just under half a million people live in Karaganda, the fifth-largest city in Kazakhstan and the administrative centre of Karaganda Region. The population is smaller than in the late Soviet years, when emigration and the closure of mines cut it sharply, and it now grows slowly as people move in from surrounding towns and villages.

Coal remains the base of the economy, together with the steel plant at nearby Temirtau, engineering, food processing, and a thick layer of universities, colleges and hospitals that draw students from across central Kazakhstan. Employment has broadened into retail, transport and services, but mining wages and mining risks still set the tone, and the fatal accidents of recent years touched families all over the city.

Life is arranged around the long winter. Flats are heated from district boiler houses, buses run crowded between the microdistricts and the centre, and shopping is done in bazaars and shopping centres rather than on the street. When the weather turns, the city empties towards dachas, fishing on the region's lakes and weekends in the pine hills of Karkaraly to the east. Air quality in winter, driven by coal heating and industry, is a standing complaint, as is the drift of young people to Astana and Almaty for work.

Karaganda eats like the steppe and like the Soviet Union at the same time. The Kazakh table centres on meat: beshbarmak, boiled mutton or horsemeat served over wide squares of pasta with onion broth, is the dish for guests and holidays, often preceded by kazy, a horsemeat sausage, and kuyrdak, offal fried with onions and potatoes. Sorpa, the broth left from the boiling, is drunk from bowls, and baursak, small pieces of fried dough, come with tea.

The deportations left the city with a broader kitchen than most. Russian and Ukrainian home cooking supplies borscht, pelmeni, pickles and pirozhki; Korean families sell morkovcha, the spiced carrot salad invented by Soviet Koreans, and kimchi by the kilogram at the bazaars; Tatar and Uzbek cooks make manty, samsa and plov; and German baking survives in the city's bread and cakes. Canteens inherited from the mining era still serve all of it cheaply at lunchtime.

Drink means tea above all — black, strong and usually with milk, poured repeatedly into small bowls. Kymyz, fermented mare's milk, and shubat, made from camel's milk, are sold in season and treated as tonics. From the south come the products of Lake Balkhash: zander, bream and carp, smoked or salted and sold at market stalls and roadside stands, one of the few things in central Kazakhstan that does not come from a herd or a mine.