Elżbieta Dziuk-Renik
I travelled to Kazahstan to meet the descendants of Poles who had been deported to the steppes – to lands which, in Polish historical memory, are often referred to collectively as Sybir.
I set out to see the villages once established by their fathers and grandfathers – to feel the spirit of those long-ago settlements. I wanted to see the clay houses that gradually replaced the humble earth dugouts built long ago by the forebears of today’s villagers. To take in the scent of sun-dried steppe herbs and the smoky air curling from chimneys as evening fell.
Upon reaching northern Kazakhstan, I came upon the very villages I had long hoped to see. I took photos of cottages that echoed the architecture familiar to me from Zhytomyr, Podolia, and Volhynia – in Jasna Polana, Zelyony Gai, and Ozernoye. I photographed the endless fields of crops, across which the silhouettes of tractors and farming machines moved in the distance – like ships gliding across an ocean. For me, it was a sign that northern Kazakhstan is undergoing a transformation. In spite of muddy roads and countless bumps and potholes that the old, battered old Soviet-made Zhiguli struggled to overcome, I made it to the regions I had set out to find. Its suspension groaned pitifully – as did my spine – and only the thick layer of foam in my reporter’s backpack saved my cameras and lenses from the same fate. I had the feeling that, during that ride, I had travelled back in time – into the Soviet past…
And then came the surprises.
The cottages were mostly wooden or brick – no longer made of clay. I used my lens to capture newly built village churches and chapels. Buildings that once had no place here, forbidden under Soviet rule. My camera recorded scenes of modern cowsheds, where cows were milked by automated rotary systems. I saw a modern fitness club, restaurant and hotel in Jasna Polana. And I turned my lens toward the people as well. Dressed in modern clothing – in denim jeans and quilted, puffer jackets. I was moved by the sight of young trees lining the settlement’s main square, budding with the first signs of spring. Years ago, you wouldn’t have found anything like this in this Polish-German village…
Thus, I saw modern life starting to establish itself in the villages and settlements of northern Kazakhstan. Formerly kolkhoz and sovkhoz settlements – collective and state farms of the Soviet era — they now form part of vast agricultural enterprises. Therefore, rather than a fully nostalgic photo essay focusing solely on the past of villages founded by deportees on the Kazakh steppes, I created a photographic glimpse that reflects both history and modernity.
The past, preserved in the Museum of Vehicles and Agricultural Machinery in Zelyony Gai, and the present, marked by modern farming and the dairy cows brought to Kazakhstan all the way from distant Canada. Was it a disappointment that, instead of photographing dilapidated huts and dugouts reminiscent of the exile dramas, I found myself photographing cows and modern barns? No, because in present-day Kazakhstan, within the community of descendants of those deported in the 1930s from Podolia and Volhynia, the memory of a tragic past – the deportations and forced labor endured by their forebears – exists side by side with the country’s ongoing modernisation and the increasing influence of modern life in their daily reality.
Text and photographs: Elżbieta Dziuk-Renik – explorer and photographer
Translated by Małgorzata Giełzakowska
