Apples Are from Kazakhstan: The Land That Disappeared

Farther north, he visits a toxic area where nuclear weapons were tested and interviews a survivor of one of the country’s Stalin-era labor camps. Robbins breathes life into this history by drawing on the accounts of prior visitors, from Dostoyevsky, Trotsky, and Solzhenitsyn, who were exiled there, to dissident physicist Andrei Sakharov, whose horror at the nuclear tests he witnessed turned him against the weapon he had helped create. Among Nazarbayev’s futuristic plans for Astana, Kazakhstan’s decade-old seat of government, is a yurt-shaped pleasure dome complete with golf course, underground shopping mall, and sandy beaches.