The Miners' Glory Monument stands at the heart of Karagandy's civic centre, a large Soviet-era sculpture celebrating the workers who built this city out of the steppe. The monument is typical of its genre: heroic figures, industrial imagery, the confident visual language of socialist realism. As a piece of public art it is handsome enough. As a historical document it is more complicated.
The miners being glorified were, in the early decades, largely prisoners and deportees — people with no choice about being here. The Karlag camp system stretched across a vast area around Karagandy, and at its peak held hundreds of thousands of people. After Stalin's death many of the survivors stayed, simply because they had nowhere else to go. Their descendants still live here. Standing at this monument and knowing that history gives the heroic figures a different weight: these were real people, and their story was far stranger and darker than the monument admits.