Month: July 2025

In June 2025, Vladimir Putin unveiled a bust of Joseph Stalin in the Moscow metro. That same month, a statue of Lenin was pulled down in Osh, Kyrgyzstan. Between these two symbolic acts lies Kazakhstan, caught in a tug-of-war over the memory of Soviet-era repression.

Between 1920 and 1960, millions of prisoners were deported to more than fifty labor camps across the country, earning it the nickname the “prison of the USSR.” Those who weren’t executed on the spot — political opponents, intellectuals, artists — were forced to work in mines, construction sites, or collective farms feeding Soviet industrial expansion. The death toll remains unknown but is believed to be in the millions.

Today, this dark past draws in history buffs and thrill-seekers. But darktourism.com, the go-to website on the topic, warns them: forgotten cemeteries, ghost villages, crumbling camps — this gulag archipelago is well hidden in the steppes. No sign points the way to the Museum of Political Repression in Dolinka, housed in the former headquarters of Karlag, one of the largest camps of the Soviet Gulag system.

The only other gulag transformed into a museum is ALZHIR, built on the ruins of the Akmola camp near Astana. It commemorates the 18,000 women imprisoned between 1939 and 1953 for being the wives of “traitors to the motherland.” These two museums now stand as official symbols of Soviet repression in Kazakhstan, and, more subtly, as frontline sites in a broader memory war across the former Soviet Union.

Selective Memory

When the museums were nationalized in the 2000s, their message became tightly controlled. Portraits and quotes from former president Nursultan Nazarbayev began to cover the walls. Guillaume Tiberghien, a specialist in dark tourism at the University of Glasgow, calls it a “selective interpretation of history.” The goal? To unify the country’s 160 ethnic groups under a shared narrative of collective suffering. At both Karlag and ALZHIR, guides emphasize acts of solidarity between Kazakh villagers and deportees — hospitality, compassion, bits of cheese tossed over barbed wire fences to feed the starving.

Execution scene recreated at the Karlag museum; image: Manon Madec.

The past is staged. Between wax statues with sunken faces, sound effects mimicking heartbeats, and torture room reconstructions, the visitor is drawn into a visceral experience, sometimes at the cost of accuracy. “You wonder if the museum overdoes it to trigger emotion,” Tiberghien remarks. Margaret Comer, a memory studies expert at the University of Warsaw, explains: “It’s sometimes easier to mourn victims than to identify perpetrators.”

Execution scene and fake blood, reconstructed in the Dolinka museum; image: Manon Madec.

The complicity of local Kazakhs is never addressed. Russian responsibility is blurred behind vague terms like “NKVD” or “Stalinist repression.” At ALZHIR, visitors learn only about Sergey Barinov — a Russian commandant described as cultured, discreet, and caring toward the women detained. The other two camp directors are never mentioned.

In other former Soviet republics — Ukraine, the Baltics, Georgia — such neutrality would be unthinkable. “There, any figure linked to the Soviet regime is fiercely contested,” Comer notes.

Memory Wars

Tensions have sharpened since the war in Ukraine. In the background, Putin has accelerated the rehabilitation of Stalin, architect of the gulag archipelago. His busts are reappearing across Russia. Volgograd’s airport has been renamed “Stalingrad.” In occupied Melitopol, a new statue of the dictator was erected. “We’re witnessing a broad return of repressive memory politics in Russia,” says Tiberghien.

Former Soviet republics have taken note. “In Eastern Europe, especially the Baltics, every commemoration now includes a warning about today’s Russian threat,” Comer explains. Even in Central Asia — typically cautious — the decolonial narrative is gaining ground. In Kazakhstan, “some people now fear that Russia might one day cross the border,” she adds.

And yet, silence prevails. “The country is walking a tightrope,” Tiberghien explains. “It wants to keep things calm, to avoid upsetting Russia.” This balancing act was evident in President Tokayev’s speech on May 31, the official Day of Remembrance for Victims of Political Repression. While calling for the rehabilitation of victims and better access to archives, he also condemned the “instrumentalization” of history and urged the nation to look forward.

Museums mirror this caution. At ALZHIR, the May 31 commemorations are now held indoors, away from public view. A guide quietly admits she’s not allowed to comment on the closure of Russian memorial museums: “It might offend Russian tourists.” At Karlag, between two torture exhibits, visitors learn about inmate-led innovations: giant sunflowers, new cattle breeds, the Chizhevsky chandelier. “There’s an emphasis on what the prison system ‘contributed’ to the nation,” Comer notes. In this anniversary year of the Great Patriotic War, “the focus is more on Karlag’s role in victory than on mourning the victims,” adds Tiberghien.

Collective Amnesia

Why this insistence on what the gulag ‘contributed’? “There are conflicts of interest and truths people would rather not face. What tourists see is a compromise — one that works for the state and local communities,” Tiberghien emphasizes.

As a result, much of the Soviet legacy remains buried. Literally. “Around ALZHIR and in the Karaganda region, there are mass graves everywhere,” Tiberghien notes. The Mamochkino cemetery, near Karlag, is one of the few memorial sites dedicated to women and children who perished in the camps. It, too, lies neglected. Tiberghien speaks of a “collective amnesia” that obstructs historical reckoning.

The Mamochkino cemetery, left abandoned near the Karlag museum; image: Manon Madec

In Karaganda, Dimitry Kalmykov, director of the local Ecological Museum, sees an unspoken deal: “The state doesn’t want to reopen the file, and the Kazakhs aren’t demanding it.” The fear of speaking out, he says, has been passed down across generations. Kalmikov himself learned little about the USSR at school. What he knows, he read on his own.

But resources are fading. The archives are sealed by Russia. “The question isn’t when we’ll get access, but whether we ever will,” says one museum historian.

Gulags are not the only legacy at risk of being forgotten. The Soviet nuclear past is quietly vanishing too. “The Kurchatov museum has been closed to the public since 2023,” says Tiberghien. There, deformed animals preserved in jars bore witness to radiation damage. In Semipalatinsk, visits are increasingly rare, bogged down in bureaucracy. “Even the website listing radiation data has disappeared,” confirms Kalmykov.

In Karaganda, Lenin’s statue, stripped of its name, still stands; image: Manon Madec

What path will Kazakhstan choose? The future of its memory may lie in the hands of researchers, citizens, and akimats — those determined not to repeat the past. For now, the statue of Lenin still stands watch over Karaganda. But for how much longer?

• AI coding tools like Cursor aren’t supercharging development speed, said a general partner at a16z.
• But AI can help create “more robust, maintainable code bases with less bugs,” Martin Casado said.
• AI tools have also made coding feel fun again, the longtime infrastructure investor said.

AI isn’t making software developers dramatically more productive, but it is solving two of their problems: code quality and morale, said a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz.

Martin Casado, who leads the $1.25 billion infrastructure fund at a16z, said on an episode of the “Twenty Minute VC” podcast published Monday that AI coding tools like Cursor aren’t supercharging development speed.

“Every company I work with uses Cursor,” said Casado, who is also an investor in the AI coding startup. “Has that increased the velocity of the products coming out? I don’t think that much.”

“The things that are hard remain really hard,” Casado said. This is especially so for infrastructure companies, where developers still need to make core architectural decisions and trade-offs that AI can’t handle.

Where AI shines, he said, is in eliminating the drudge work for developers: writing tests, generating documentation, and cleaning up messy code.

AI can help create “more robust, maintainable code bases with less bugs,” the longtime infrastructure investor said. “It could really help with the development process.”

Casado also said AI tools have made coding feel fun again, especially for longtime developers.

The investor said he uses Cursor to handle finicky processes like setting up infrastructure or picking the right software packages, which lets him “focus on what I want and the logic.”

“It’s almost like it’s brought coding back,” he said. “These old systems programmers, like, you know, vibe coding at night just because it’s become pleasant again.”

Casado and a16z did not respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.

AI empowering ‘100x engineers’?

Agentic AI coding tools have taken over much of software engineering, writing code for developers, sometimes with minimal human editing necessary.

Tech leaders have been vocal about the productivity boost.

Surge AI’s CEO, Edwin Chen, said the era of “100x engineers” is here.

“Already you have a lot of these single-person startups that are already doing $10 million in revenue,” Chen said on a recent episode of the “Twenty Minute VC” podcast. “If AI is adding all this efficiency, then yeah, I can definitely see this multiplying 100x to get to this $1 billion single-person company.”

“It often just removes a lot of the drudgery of your day-to-day work,” Chen said. “I do think it disproportionately favors people who are already the ’10x engineers.'”

But some industry leaders said the AI coding hype comes with trade-offs.

GitHub’s CEO, Thomas Dohmke, said using AI coding tools might slow down experienced engineers. On a podcast episode released in June, he said a worst-case scenario is when a developer is forced to provide feedback in natural language when they already know how to do it in a programming language.

That would be “basically replacing something that I can do in three seconds with something that might potentially take three minutes or even longer,” Dohmke said.

OpenAI’s cofounder Greg Brockman also said using these tools has stuck humans with the less enjoyable parts of coding.

He said the state of AI coding had left humans to review and deploy code, which is “not fun at all.”