FEATURE - Soviet nuclear tests still haunt Kazakhs

By Maria Golovnina

BUDENE, Kazakhstan (Reuters) - Suddenly, a flash of blinding light burst on the horizon, a deafening roar ripped across the steppe and a huge nuclear mushroom cloud slowly unfurled in the sky.

This image still haunts Zheyembek Abishev who was a child when the Soviet Union tested its first nuclear bomb near his village in northern Kazakhstan where generations of his ancestors grazed horses in the quiet wilderness of the steppes.

"I was born in 1947 and the explosions started in 1949. I remember it all very clearly," said Abishev, whose village is perched on the fringes of the Semipalatinsk Nuclear Test Site.

"All the kids had to lie face down in the ditches during those explosions to keep safe. But I watched anyway. Everything trembled, and the wind was very strong. It was very scary."

Moscow tested about 500 bombs here between 1949 and 1989, exposing 1.5 million people like Abishev to extreme levels of radiation and contaminating an area roughly the size of Germany.

The Soviet Union conducted its last test here in 1989 and the facility was officially closed in 1991 as the Soviet collapse brought the global nuclear arms race to an end.

Twenty years on, the Semipalatinsk test range is silent, a steppe wind blowing gently through the abandoned site dotted by ruined concrete buildings and giant hunks of rusty metal.

But hundreds of thousands of residents, subjected to the equivalent of 20,000 Hiroshima bombs during 40 years of Russian experiments, are still sickened by the legacy of their past.