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Logo Muzeum Pamięci Sybiru w Białymstoku
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Photojournalism: Past and Present in the Steppes of Kazakhstan

15/02/2023

Elżbieta Dziuk-Renik

I went to Kazakhstan to meet the descendants of Poles deported to the steppes – to the lands that are part of the area defined in the Polish historical narrative as Sybir.

I wanted to see the villages that their fathers and grandfathers had founded years ago. I wanted to feel the atmosphere of these old settlements. I wanted to see the clay huts that were built over time and which replaced the simple dugouts made years ago by the ancestors of the current inhabitants. I went to smell the steppe herbs drying in these huts and the smoke curling out the chimneys at dusk.

Read the text in Polish here: Link

It has been a long time since dugouts and clay huts, built by the deportees years ago, have been replaced by wooden and brick houses in Yasnaya Polyana
In the settlements of northern Kazakhstan, also in Yasnaya Polyana and Green Grove, the country roads are still muddy in spring, and following them is not pleasant.
At the Museum of Agricultural Vehicles and Machinery in the Green Grove, the memory of the past is present in an exhibition of old tractors and old agricultural equipment.
The Museum of Agricultural Vehicles and Machines in the Green Grove recalls the history of the cars used at the former kolkhozes and sovkhozes.
The agricultural complex in Yasnaya Polyana is an example of modernity; the stables housing five hundred cows each came from Germany, the cows from Canada.
Canadian cows have already produced offspring at the agricultural combine in Yasnaya Polana. The dairy farm has more than a thousand animals.
The Yasnaya Polyana plant is headed by Anatoly Rafalski, a Pole and descendant of people deported to the Kazakh steppes in the 1930s.
The head zootechnician on the dairy farm is Wladyslaw Lukawski, who proudly points out that more than thirty Poles work here. They say about us – this is where the Poljaks work.
Modern cowsheds and state-of-the-art machinery are the trademark of the agricultural combine in Yasnaya Polana, which employs Poles as well as Germans. All the employees are descendants of deportees.
Modern harvesters are used to harvest the fields belonging to the agricultural combine in Yasnaya Polyana and covering an area of more than 105,000 hectares.
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