Karaganda

For a different view of Kazakhstan, take a day trip to Karaganda.

This working-class town is dominated by mines and smoke-belching chimneys, so it initially comes as a surprise Karaganda has 4 theatre companies serving an obviously cultured city populace. This all has to do with the KarLag, part of the larger GuLag system of Stalinist labour camps.

Many of the Russian intellectuals condemned to hard labour by Stalin ended up here, and stayed if they survived. Solzhenitsyn himself, the prime documenter of the Gulag, served his time in Kazakhstan. Visiting the Dolinka museum and the Alzhir monument, you can learn more about a time in history which saw the greatest destruction of human talent, perhaps of all time.