North Kazakhstan Region

I'm not sure how exactly it is related to the increased import of the Russian gas there.

Probably not, because the project is still to be completed, I think, in 2030 or so, but not related to Northern Kazakhstan.

Generally, we see that the NEMAD is going up, and the Kazakh government really does a lot of work to provide its citizens with gas around the country.

There's a small semantic issue here which has often tripped me up because for years I would see this word gasification in Russian and I wouldn't really understand what it meant.

listeners!

In late June, my guest today and I traveled to Azjornoye, a village in northern Kazakhstan.

It was a special occasion, the 90th anniversary of the deportation of ethnic Poles from the eastern borderlands of the Soviet Union to Kazakhstan.

Azjornoye is a small village with a Catholic church and a small lake.

The figures are debated, but 1.5 million human losses either died of starvation or migrated to other places, to other Soviet republics or beyond the borders of the Soviet Union.

which is essentially one third of the pre-hunger population of the Kazakh Republic.

So you have the region of northern Kazakhstan that is heavily depopulated because of this man-made hunger.

Moreover, the Soviet state in the 30s saw pastoral nomadic economic activity as archaic and not as efficient as sedentary agricultural production.