Someone was asking where the 2 villages on the Kaz-Uzb border were, that
declarted independence as a protest over the boundary demarcation there.
I have been unable to locate those villages on Soviet 1:500,000 topographic
mapping, but they may well have changed names since then, as several
villages in the region are called Communism or 30 October, etc.
Attached is a tracing from a 1:500,000 sheet, number K-42-B. The tracing is
about A4 size (i forgot to put a scale on it)
It shows a lake formed by damming a river in the 1950s, and this may relate
to the reference in the news article about Krushchev giving land fomr one
republic to the other in 1956.
Note the pene-enclave, a very large one (50-65km across), formed by the
lake. Early 1950s Soviet atlases have little detail, but tend to show a
straight W-E line in the vicinity before the lake was formed. Note how the
boundary follows the lake shore now.
The Arnasai region mentioned in the newspaper article appears to be the
protrusion of Uzb towards the lakeshorebetween the Kazakh pene-enclave and
the southern dam. There is a rilawya station here called by that name. There
is only one named village shown on the map, "Nostakhi", in this protrusion.
I suspect that the villages of the article are either in this protrusion, or
else in the boundary squiggle on the SE side of the lake.

The attached tracing shows the lake, main rivers, railroads, and the
boundary 9as a doble line). Larger towns are named. The pene-enclave
boundary is 50% formed by large canals, esp the southern side. But in other
places there seems no physical object to pin the border to, and o theree may
well be room for argument over realigning it, which seems to be the cause of
the current dispute.

BW

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