Postcards from Stanland

by David H. Mould

  Deconstructing the “Other” in Astana

  An expensive government PR campaign, including glossy spreads in travel magazines and advertising supplements in Western newspapers, has failed to convince most Western journalists of the legitimacy of Nazarbayev’s vision. The Economist critique is typical: “Astana has all the weirdness of Pyongyang. . . . It is a collection of monuments and boulevards on a scale that screams ‘L’état, c’est moi.’”4 “Despite the president’s efforts to highlight Astana’s ‘reality,’” writes Natalie Koch, a Syracuse University geographer, “the city is consistently read and interpreted by Western observers as a ‘Potemkin village’ or ‘utopia.’”5

  She provides a sampling of unflattering labels—“Nowheresville” (New Yorker), “the space station in the steppes” (Guardian), “the Jetsons’ hometown” (Slate Magazine), “Tomorrowland” (National Geographic Magazine), and “the Disneyland of the steppe” (German magazine Merien). Such negative images infuriate a government that is still battling the “Borat effect.” In the 2006 satirical film, Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan, and in his Da Ali G Show on TV channels, British comedian Sacha Baron Cohen plays Borat Sagdiyev, “the number two” television reporter in Kazakhstan, where, he says, the favorite hobbies are “disco dancing, archery, rape, and table tennis.” In the movie, Borat travels through the United States recording real-life interactions with Americans, who believe he is a foreigner with little or no understanding of their customs. Many viewers understood that Cohen was satirizing political and cultural intolerance. In Kazakhstan, both government officials and citizens took it literally, believing it portrayed the country as backward and intolerant; some accused Cohen of being the agent of a foreign power. Borat was banned, of course. The government redoubled its own PR efforts, launching the multimillion-dollar “Heart of Eurasia” campaign to rebrand Kazakhstan and its capital.

  Unlike many, I did not make a flying visit to the city to report on an event or the opening of a new building. I lived in Astana for six months, traveled and walked in the city and talked with residents. In June 2011, Koch was in Astana, completing research for her dissertation, “The City and the Steppe: Territory, Technologies of Government, and Kazakhstan’s New Capital.” Her perspectives point to the dangers of jumping to conclusions about the city.

  Koch argues that describing new city projects as utopias or Disney-style theme parks is stigmatizing. “From Dubai to Shanghai to Tokyo to Astana,” she writes, “the political language of ‘utopia’—fantasy and extravagance—is in full force in much Western writing about these cities. In the hegemonic interpretive frame, ‘underdevelopment’ is seen to propel Eastern ‘others’ to pursue extravagant, overwrought, desperate attempts to achieve an impossible modernity. The discursive frame, however, only allows these (urban) spectacles to be facades, covering up a lack of modernity ‘underneath.’”6

  Academics will excuse me for skipping the next step in building an argument for what Koch describes as the “political bordering” of Astana. This involves parading the usual cast of theoreticians—Foucault, Gramsci, Said, and others—to outline (sorry, I meant to say “explicate”) their theories and critiques of hegemony, orientalism, poststructuralism, postmodernism, postcolonialism, and post-other-isms. They are important thinkers, but they make for heavy reading, and I’m not going to let them slow down this narrative. Let me leave them where I know they’re welcome (in the theory and literature review sections of dissertations and journal articles). I’ll return to Koch’s analysis of the real, stigmatized Astana.

  Koch reviewed about forty articles in the English-language (US and UK) and German press from 1997, the year the city became the capital. The most common themes described Astana’s “inhospitable environment, bad weather, barrenness of the steppe,” characterized the city as “strange, utopian, fantastic, and futuristic,” or “as somehow false, a façade, a Potemkin village,” and connected the city “to Nazarbayev’s megalomania” or to Kazakhstan’s oil wealth. Articles also mentioned the unpopularity of the decision to move the capital from Almaty, the rushed speed of development, divisions between the new (left bank) and old (right bank) cities, and other criticisms of the project.7

  That’s not the way many residents view Astana. Thousands have moved to Astana in search of jobs and business opportunities. For them, the city is not a theme park; it’s where they live, work, and raise their families. Although living costs are higher than in other cities (except for Almaty), wages and city services are better. “I’m from Shymkent,” one taxi driver told me. “There are no jobs there. I miss my family, but I can earn enough picking up fares from people like you at the airport to live and send money home. Why would I go back?”

  For longer-term residents, seeing the city grow in size, wealth, and prominence has been a source of pride. My Russian teacher, Galiya Suleimenova, moved from Almaty in the early 1990s for her husband’s health. In winter, Almaty has high levels of air pollution, and the clean air of the steppe improved his breathing. “When we arrived, this was just a small, sleepy town,” Galiya told me. “There were few businesses, few cars on the street. We’ve seen it grow so fast. There are more jobs, more people, just more life and activity. And it’s still growing. We’re proud to live in Astana.”

  In 2010, Koch commissioned a survey research company to conduct doorstep interviews with more than 1,200 citizens over the age of eighteen in all sixteen of Kazakhstan’s provinces. Eighty-one percent (996) said that Astana has improved Kazakhstan’s international image. The government has worked hard to brand Kazakhstan, as represented by Astana, as modern, progressive, and open for business. The city has hosted major international conferences, festivals, and sporting events, and established special economic zones and technology parks. “The goal is to have people talk about Astana like Dubai,” the city’s master planner, Amanzhol Chikanayev, told Koch.8

  But Please Don’t Write about Astana

  In the summer of 1997, I took the four-hour marshrutka ride from Bishkek to Almaty to work with my colleague Elizabeth Sammons. We’d been asked to write the Central Asia chapter for a book on global journalism ethics, and Elizabeth had arranged interviews with Almaty journalists.

  Journalists in Kazakhstan, as in other Central Asian countries, face threats and dangers—from harassment by the police and security forces to libel actions and economic pressure from owners and advertisers with political alliances. Inevitably, such pressures result in self-censorship, with journalists either not covering topics that can get them into trouble or covering them in such a way that hackles are not raised.

  Which are these touchy topics? Over the years, I’ve talked with journalists in many countries and developed a standard question: Which topics, not specifically prohibited by law, such as state secrets or military information, do you not cover, or cover only with extreme caution? In Almaty in 1997, there was virtual unanimity on the “prohibited” or “report-only-with-care” list. In rough priority order, the topics were:

  1. The private life (including the health) of President Nazarbayev and his family

  2. The transfer of state property to private ownership

  3. Private companies, such as banks, in which government officials and other prominent figures have financial interests

  4. The financial status of government officials

  5. Interethnic and racial issues

  6. Problems in Kazakhstan’s new capital, Astana

  Quttyqadam Seydkhamet, a politician who wrote a column for the Kazakhstan edition of the Russian-language weekly Argumenti y Fakti, told me that the first five topics had been on the list since independence. Number 6 was new. Government sensitivity on the topic had been growing since the move was announced in 1994. Now, in the summer of 1997, with ministries scheduled to move by October, criticism was viewed as, if not exactly treasonous, at least unpatriotic.

  Opposition politicians had questioned the price tag of moving government ministries
when the country faced a budget deficit and major economic and social problems. In 1997, the cost was estimated at between $500 million and $1 billion, the sheer range indicating that either the cost was a state secret or, more likely, that no one had the faintest idea of what it would be. Foreign diplomats and businesspeople did not relish the prospect of leaving comfortable, sophisticated Almaty, with its moderate climate, for a remote city on the northern steppe. Journalists were discouraged from reporting on these issues or on infrastructure problems in the new capital—gas, electricity, and water shortages, and the eviction of residents to provide apartments for government officials.

  Why did Nazarbayev decide to move the capital? The government claimed Almaty was overcrowded, prone to earthquakes and too close to China. However, the main reasons were economic and political. The move put the capital, with its good rail links to Russia, closer to Kazakhstan’s industrial region and mineral resources. Most important, it would be easier to govern the predominantly Russian north of the country.

  There’s no law of political geography that says you have to locate a capital city in the middle of the country, although some such as Brussels, Madrid, and Ankara are reasonably centrally situated. However, few capitals were further away from the geographical center of their country, or so close to the border with a politically unstable neighbor, as Almaty. The city is tucked into the fold below the Zailiskiy Ala Too in the southeast corner of the country, close to China and only 150 miles by road from Bishkek. The nearest large city in southern Kazakhstan, Shymkent, is 450 miles away.

  After independence, the new government realized that trying to govern the country from its far southeastern border was too great of a geographical, logistical, and political challenge. The most immediate concern was the northern provinces where most ethnic Russians lived. The area—from the uranium processing city of Ust Kamenogorsk in the northeast, through the coalfields of the Karaganda region to the wheat-growing region of Kostanai and the Cossack town of Uralsk—had historically closer links with Southern Siberia and the Urals industrial region than with the rest of the Kazakh SSR. Most of the country’s coal and iron resources and industrial plants were in the region, and oil exploration had begun in the northern section of the Caspian Sea. The north also had a more dangerous Soviet legacy—a stockpile of around a thousand nuclear warheads, more than a hundred rockets, forty bombers, and the Semipalitinsk Polygon, the site of Soviet above- and below-ground nuclear tests.

  In the early 1990s, Russian nationalist politicians on both sides of the border—including the popular and anti-Muslim Vladimir Zhirinovsky, who was born in the Kazakh SSR—openly advocated that the northern provinces secede from Kazakhstan and rejoin Mother Russia. Nazarbayev and his advisers knew it was vital to the country’s economic and political future to build a sense of national unity. One way to do this was to move the capital north.

  Aaarghmola

  First it was called Akmola. Then Tselinograd. Then Akmola again. Today it is Astana.

  The place has been on history’s center stage before. Until the 1950s, Akmola, about 150 miles northwest of the industrial city of Karaganda, was a small mining settlement, an undistinguished demographic dot in the steppe. In the 1950s, Khrushchev selected it as the center for his Virgin Lands campaign, a scheme to convert almost 100,000 square miles of grassland into arable land and make Kazakhstan (with Ukraine) the breadbasket of the Soviet Union. Thousands of Soviet citizens were moved to the region, and Akmola was symbolically renamed Tselinograd, the “City of the Virgin Lands.”

  Soviet economic planning was never sensitive to the lessons of history. If it had been, Khrushchev’s agricultural advisers would have studied what happened in the American Dust Bowl of the 1930s. The ecosystem of the steppe is similar to that of the plains of Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, and Nebraska, where hardy prairie grasses reach down to hold the thin topsoil together. Except for some areas near rivers, the arid land is best suited for livestock grazing. That’s what the Kazakhs had been doing for hundreds of years. Plowing up the steppe to plant grains exposes the topsoil to wind erosion. Although northern Kazakhstan has never experienced a catastrophic dust bowl, much of the land originally designated for wheat has now been returned to grazing. Within a decade, the USSR had moved onto other grand schemes. The Virgin Lands campaign was forgotten by most Soviet citizens, except for those who ended up in Tselinograd.

  At independence, the name was changed back to Akmola. In Kazakh, ak means “white.” There’s disagreement over the precise meaning of mola. In 1997, government historians declared that it meant “abundance of white,” apparently a reference to dairy products. A more plausible version, confirmed by Kazakh colleagues, is that it means “way,” making Akmola the “White Way,” a suitably inspiring name for a future capital. More skeptical sources claim it means “death” or “tomb.” In 1997, this interpretation was a convenient fit for those who did not want to leave Almaty. They could complain over cocktails in Almaty’s bars that they were being sent to their “white death” on the northern steppe. The Economist summed up their angst in a July 1997 article playfully entitled “Aaarghmola.” “Bureaucrats, diplomats and businessmen generally felt no desire to leave relatively sophisticated Almaty . . . for remote and inhospitable Akmola. Many people hoped that Mr. Nazarbayev would think again—after all, he has to live there too.”9 The president didn’t change his mind, and the government quickly settled the semantic issue by renaming the city Astana, which in Kazakh means “capital.” This gave Kazakhstan one more international distinction. It is the only country in the world where the capital is called, in the native language, capital.

  Akmola, with a population of about 300,000 (70 percent of them Russians, Ukrainians, and Volga Germans), was situated on the right bank of the River Ishim. To create a futuristic new city on the site would have involved tearing down blocks of khrushchevkas and older, single- story houses, displacing thousands of residents. It was easier and cheaper to make a fresh start on the undeveloped left bank. The right bank was not neglected, however. New government buildings were constructed on Akmola’s main square as temporary homes for the parliament, ministries, and presidential administration; later, they became the lavish quarters of the oblast and city administrations. The railroad and bus stations were renovated, new hotels built, roads repaired, and the main north-south drag, Virgin Workers’ Prospekt, was renamed Republik Prospekt. But most of the construction was under way on the other side of the river.

  For several years, Western journalists (as indicated in Koch’s analysis) stressed the Potemkin-village quality of the place. “It’s all a show,” a construction company owner told a New York Times correspondent in November 1997, a month after the official move. “The buildings have three sides and no back.”10 The evocation of the final scenes of Mel Brooks’s Blazing Saddles, where the false storefronts collapse and the fistfights spill onto other movie sound stages, seems harsh. The right bank, even with its new government and commercial buildings and improved roads and sidewalks, still looked like an ordinary Soviet-era city. The left bank was another matter—a huge construction site with a steadily rising skyline. Most of the contracts went to foreign companies, with Turkish concerns the big winners; on the sites, many workers were poor migrants from Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan.

  It was a good time to be in real estate in Astana, with land prices rising fast. Of course, all the embassies had to move. Most ended up in an embassy row, a gated compound of almost identical McMansions distinguished only by the national flags outside. The United States needed more land than embassy row could offer to build its cookie-cutter Fortress America mission with high walls, topped with menacing spikes, and independent security systems. In 2010, a foreign service officer boasted to me that the United States had entered the real estate market early and secured a prime location for the embassy. “Prime” seemed a relative term to me. In September 2010, I asked a taxi driver to take me to the US embassy. He assured me he knew where it was. After half an hour of
driving around unnamed streets on the left bank, he admitted he didn’t know, and stopped to ask pedestrians. None of them knew. Eventually, I called my embassy contact who, rather like an airport traffic controller, guided us in to land by the main gate. I still don’t know the street name.

  The multinational companies, especially those in the oil, gas, minerals, and banking sectors, moved their headquarters from Almaty and provided apartments for staff. They realized that even though Astana did not yet have a large business sector, it would grow quickly because the government was there. As the foreign service officer put it, in succinct realpolitik language: “The power has moved here, and the money will follow.”

  Fulbright Conspiracy Theory

  Astana interested me enough to want to spend a few days in the city. I never planned to spend six months there. When I applied for a second Fulbright Fellowship in the summer of 2010, my plan was to teach in Almaty. I had visited the city regularly for workshops and university teaching, had friends there, and had a letter of invitation from Dean Galiya Ibrayeva of the Journalism Faculty at KazNU, the leading mass media department in the country. I expected to guest-lecture at other universities, do workshops for journalists and media managers, and spend spring weekends relaxing in coffee shops and hiking in the mountains.