Postcards from Stanland

by David H. Mould

  While the Kazakh language is gaining ground, another thorny debate is under way: Which alphabet to use? In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Kazakh language was written in Arabic script. It was replaced by the Latin alphabet in 1929, but it was in use for only a decade. In 1940, Cyrillic was introduced as a common alphabet for all the Soviet republics; Kazakh is written in a forty-two-letter version of the Cyrillic alphabet (with nine extra letters). After independence, Uzbekistan switched to the Latin alphabet in an effort to distance itself from Russian cultural influence. In the 1990s, some Kazakh academics and nationalists proposed following suit, but the idea lacked support because Russian was still the dominant language, and political and economic ties with Russia remained strong. The debate has rumbled on in the media but gained new impetus in late 2012 when Nazarbayev announced that the switch would take place—but not until 2025. The change, he said, would provide “an impulse for the modernization of the Kazakh language” and promote “our global integration.”10

  The proposal was criticized by Kazakh-language supporters who argued that it would widen the linguistic divide. In a letter to the president, a group of sixty-six writers, academics, and journalists said the change would discourage Russian speakers from learning Kazakh. Some linguists argued that the change would free Kazakh, a Turkic language, of syntactic and semantic influences from Russian. In writing, Kazakh sentences often follow the rules of Russian syntax. And then there’s the issue of spelling. Let’s take the example from the preface: the country and its people. When the Russians decided in the 1920s that the Kazakhs were not Kyrgyz after all, they needed to distinguish them from the similar-sounding Cossacks. They did so by using the Cyrillic letter “х” (transliterated as “kh”); in English, the country becomes Kazakhstan and its people Kazakh. In the Kazakh [sic] language, both “k” sounds are hard (“қ”—a “k” with a diacritic, transliterated as “q”), so the correct transliterations are Qazaqstan and Qazaq. To fervent nationalists and some scholars, the continued use of the “x” and “kh” is another sign that the country has not escaped from Russian cultural imperialism; to many others, it’s just normal spelling.

  Crisis? What Crisis?

  In July 2009, in the midst of the global economic crisis, I asked friends and colleagues how the region was weathering the storm. The most perceptive comment was shared by Tarja Virtanen, director of UNESCO’s Central Asia office, who had asked her driver, Yuri, the same question. He replied laconically: “Crisis? You don’t understand. I’ve been dealing with crises most of my life, so I don’t see any difference now.” Yuri remembered the early 1990s when the factories closed, thousands lost their jobs, and the currency suffered a massive devaluation, making savings and pensions virtually worthless. Today, he spends most of what he earns because he does not believe that savings can be protected. People in Central Asia were not particularly shocked by the global crisis because they had seen it all before.

  The sense of resignation was expressed in proverbs, jokes, songs, and media. It was epitomized by an Almaty-based opposition weekly newspaper in the late 1990s. Its name, probably a take-off on the 1968 Soviet romantic film, Dozhivyom do Ponedel’nika (Let’s survive until Monday) was Nachniom c Ponedel’nika. It means simply “Let’s Start from Monday.” In uncertain times, you try to get through the day, hope that next week will be better, and never think too far ahead.

  Walking around downtown Astana or Almaty today, with their high-rise office buildings, luxury goods stores, and expensive restaurants, it’s difficult to imagine just how bad conditions were in the 1990s. You begin to grasp the economic and social reality better as you move to the outskirts of a city and see an industrial wasteland—shuttered factories and warehouses, weeds growing in cracks through the concrete foundations and walls, abandoned vehicles and equipment rusting on muddy, trash-strewn land and railroad sidings.

  Small, single-industry towns such as Asqat’s Zhezdy were hit hardest; when the factory or mine closed, there were no other jobs. By the mid-1990s, conditions were desperate. “In winter, it was freezing,” Asqat recalls. “There was no heating, electricity, or water. We did not have money for bread. We just boiled macaroni every day.” The story of Zhezdy was repeated in cities, towns, and villages throughout Central Asia. Factories and farms closed, and no other jobs available. Families surviving on what they had saved or could sell, shivering through subzero temperatures with no heating, light, or water. Teachers and government officials showing up for work, even though they hadn’t been paid for months. Street crime, drug and alcohol use rising. What Asqat saw as a child, coupled with his religious beliefs, turned him firmly against alcohol. “My generation was not raised well because many of the parents drank. It’s still a problem in towns in central Kazakhstan where they consume a lot of alcohol.” But he understands how deeply the loss of jobs and dignity affected his father’s generation:

  People didn’t have anything except their miners’ jobs, and they lost all confidence in themselves. My father’s friends just sat around drinking and cursing the future. They did not believe in anything anymore. They became addicted to alcohol, and so many families were ruined. There were a lot of suicides. The father of one of my friends got drunk and collapsed in the street. When they found him, he had frozen to death.

  seven

  Father of Apples

  Welcome to Almaty?

  For travelers in the mid-1990s, Almaty airport was not a welcoming port of entry. Flights from Europe arrived in the wee hours of the morning, and passengers trudged bleary-eyed through a seemingly endless series of document inspections. At one counter, my customs declaration was scrutinized and stamped; at the second, the stamp was inspected and initialed; at the third, an official tore off part of the form; finally, another reattached it. The process was observed by uniformed police and unsavory looking characters in leather jackets, whose scowling faces made you think you were doing something illegal, even if you weren’t. Kazakhstan wasn’t thinking about customer service rankings on global tourism surveys.

  On my first visit in 1995, the US embassy in Bishkek sent a driver to pick me up. We drove into Almaty on an almost deserted highway, the darkness broken only by an occasional light from a house. Even in the downtown area, few lights were on. At 2:30 a.m., I checked into the Hotel Almaty and quickly fell asleep, my six-foot frame wedged sideways on the five-and-a-half-foot bed.

  I was awakened around 8 a.m. as morning sun filled the room. In my late-night stupor, I had forgotten to close the drapes. I stepped out onto the balcony and literally gasped. Before me was a mountain panorama unlike any I had ever seen before. The winter sun illuminated the rugged snow-covered peaks of the Zailiysky Ala Too. I almost forgot about the grim airport and undersized bed and pinched myself to make sure I wasn’t dreaming. No, I was not. I was in Central Asia.

  I didn’t see much of Almaty on that trip. It was not until 1999, when I was doing media research for USAID, that I spent more than a couple of days in the city. Although Astana had become the capital two years earlier, there was no sense that Almaty faced an uncertain future. It was the largest city in the country and its commercial hub, with headquarters for domestic and foreign companies, universities, hospitals, and a lively music and arts scene. New hotels, restaurants, shops, and supermarkets were opening, and a growing middle class was flaunting its wealth, building houses in the new suburbs toward the mountains and driving imported cars. Since 1999, I’ve been to Almaty half a dozen times, for periods from a week to a month, and have seen the city grow, its population increasing to close to two million.

  Although some Soviet histories suggested that Almaty was not much more than a wide place in the road to Tashkent until the Russian army arrived in 1854, there’s evidence of prehistoric settlements in burial mounds from the Saka period (from 700 BCE). By the eleventh century, the settlements were part of the Silk Road network, trading agricultural produce and crafts. An area called Almatu was first mentioned in thirteenth-century books.
Although academics don’t agree on the origins of the name, the most likely explanation (and the one accepted by many Almaty residents) is that it comes from alma, the Turkic (and later Kazakh) word for apple. The wild varieties found throughout southeastern Kazakhstan and across the mountains around Issyk Kul are said to be ancestors of the modern domestic apple. In Soviet times, the city was called Alma-Ata, a combination of two Kazakh words meaning Father of Apples.

  The region witnessed fierce fighting in the early eighteenth century, as the Kazakhs tried to repel the Dzungar invaders. In 1730, the batyrs won a major victory in the mountains northwest of Almaty. Although the three hordes accepted Russian protection, southeastern Kazakhstan fell under the control of the Khokand khanate until 1854 when Russian troops built a fort and named it, in homage to the tsar, Verniy (faithful). The population grew, with Russian and Cossack farmers arriving, particularly after the 1861 emancipation of the serfs, and Tatar merchants and craftsmen established a settlement. In 1867, the fort was incorporated as a town and divided into residential districts according to a city plan. Although it was devastated in an earthquake in 1887, it was quickly rebuilt.

  After the 1917 revolution, southern Kazakhstan became part of the Turkestan Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic (ASSR), which included most of Central Asia. Northern Kazakhstan and southern Siberia were in a separate Kazakh ASSR. In 1924–25, the Kazakh ASSR was enlarged to include the rest of present-day Kazakhstan, with its capital at Kyzylorda in the barren southwest. After two blisteringly hot summers, the ASSR administrators moved the capital to the more moderate climes of Alma-Ata.

  The town grew rapidly over the next two decades, especially after the completion of the Turkestan-Siberia Railway, the Turksib. The line, first proposed in 1886, was built to carry cotton north from the Fergana Valley to the Trans-Siberian Railway and cheap grain south, and to reinforce Russia’s economic and military presence along the Chinese border. The northern section from Novosibirsk on the Trans-Siberian to Semipalatinsk was opened in 1915, but World War I delayed construction of the rest of the line to Tashkent. During the civil war, the White Army extended the northern line by almost ninety miles. The Red Army tore it up, an action it was to later regret because it had to be rebuilt. Construction resumed in 1926, and the Turksib, over one thousand miles long, finally opened in 1930, a construction feat celebrated in Soviet newsreels and the classic 1929 documentary Turksib. Alma-Ata became an important railway and industrial center, with the Turksib giving its name to a mixed industrial and residential district. The city grew rapidly, with construction of government buildings and apartment blocks.

  During World War II, Alma-Ata’s location, far from the front line, spurred its growth. The Soviets packed up more than thirty factories—equipment, supplies, and workforce—and moved them to the city. Fifteen universities, institutes, and technical schools, eight hospitals, theaters, museums, and motion picture companies from Leningrad, Moscow, and Kiev were relocated. The influx of industry and scientific and artistic talent turned a provincial capital into a manufacturing and cultural center. Its major economic sectors were agricultural processing (meat, flour, cereals, milk, fruit, tobacco, and alcohol), light industry (textiles, footwear, printing) and heavy industry (iron and steel, building materials). The building boom resumed in the mid-1960s as apartment blocks—khrushchevkas and later brezhnevkas—sprang up in the microraions. New hospitals, theaters, and sports stadiums were opened, and a dam was constructed across the Malaya (Lesser) Alamatinka River above the Medeo winter sports complex to prevent mudslides and avalanches.

  Renamed Almaty in 1991, the city became the ready-made capital of independent Kazakhstan. It was a pragmatic choice. The new government simply took over the buildings that had housed the SSR government, Communist Party, and other institutions, hoisted the turquoise and yellow flag of the new republic and changed the signs on the doors. Many officials made a similarly effortless transition to government service; some did not even have to move out of their offices. Chief among them was Nazarbayev, who had risen in the party ranks in the 1980s to become prime minister of the Kazakh SSR. In 1989, he succeeded the unpopular Gennadiy Kolbin, whose appointment had precipitated the Zheltoqsan riots, in the top job—First Secretary of the Communist Party. In December 1991, he became president of independent Kazakhstan. In the difficult years after independence, when the country faced economic dislocation, out-migration by Russians and Germans, and social unrest, governing from Almaty provided a sense of continuity between the certainties of the Soviet past and an unpredictable future.

  Almaty was laid out on a grid pattern, with broad north-south and east-west avenues. As in Bishkek, the mountains are always south (see map 6.2). In places, high-rises obscure the view, but if the road or sidewalk is rising gently, you can be confident you are heading south. It’s a pleasant walking city, especially in spring and fall, with tree-lined streets, shady parks and squares, and outdoor cafés and restaurants. In some cities, Soviet-era public architecture seems ludicrously out of scale, dwarfing apartment and commercial blocks; in Almaty, except in the ostentatious Republic Square, it’s more modest, in harmony with other structures. With the economic recovery, the real estate market has picked up, and new commercial and residential buildings have gone up. Most older buildings are at or below the khrushchevka maximum of five stories. For Almaty, the issue was not so much one of construction cost, but safety. The city is in a region of seismic activity; earthquakes in 1887, 1889, and 1911 destroyed many buildings.

  The Pollution Bowl

  Moroz y solntse, dyen’ chudesnyi

  [Cold frost and sunshine, a wonderful day]

  —Opening line of Aleksandr Pushkin’s 1829 poem, Zimneye Utro (Winter Morning)

  This is the kind of line you write in the middle of a long, cold, dark Russian winter to keep up your spirits (and those of your readers). Pushkin describes a cold morning when the sun shines brilliantly on the snow, lifting your mood (if not the temperature). That’s the feeling I experienced on my first morning in Almaty in December 1995. I’ve had a few more Pushkin-like mornings in Almaty, but not many. Kazakhstan has a continental climate with hot summers and cold winters. Sheltered by the mountains, Almaty never gets as hot or cold as cities in the north where temperatures can rise to 40 Celsius (104 Fahrenheit) in July, and drop to minus 40 (both Celsius and Fahrenheit) in January, but it’s chilly from November through March, with snow on the ground for an average of 111 days a year. On milder days, the snow turns to rain and freezes, leaving a thin layer of ice on the sidewalks. Many days, it’s simply overcast, the clouds mixing with the smog.

  In the basin below the mountains, rain and fog combine with industrial and power plant emissions and smoke from household fires to raise the pollution level. There’s no wind to move the air, so it just hangs over the city like an unhealthy blanket. At street level, it’s difficult to see the air quality, although residents complain of throat and eye irritation. For perspective, you need a bird’s-eye view from the Shymbulak ski resort or another mountain perch; on a sunny day, the views across the mountains are clear, but the city is shrouded by a blanket of haze or smog. And pollution is just one of the environmental problems the city faces. Higher in the mountains above Shymbulak, the glaciers are retreating.

  Climate Change? What Climate Change?

  In 2009, a long, cold spring delayed the snowmelt in the Zailiysky Ala Too. Driving in from the airport, Feodor, a travel agency owner who was taking me to my rented apartment, told me there was still snow at lower altitudes. Feodor knew this was a blip in long-term weather patterns, and that the glaciers were retreating. Other Almaty residents looked at the mountains and wondered why the scientists and environmental groups were making a fuss. Although the more serious newspapers reported on long-term scientific predictions, there were plenty of naysayers on the Internet and in the zholti (yellow or tabloid) press.

  I wasn’t sure that people would buy the “climate change is a hoax” story line until I heard
other rumors spread in the media. One driver asked if it was true that Barack Obama would be the last president of the United States. Why did he think so? Because the United States was destined to break up into separate states, just as the Soviet Union had done, he said. He was likely referring to the apocalyptic vision of the Russian academic Igor Panarin, a former KGB analyst and dean of the foreign ministry’s academy for future diplomats, that mass immigration, economic decline, and moral degradation would trigger a civil war and collapse of the dollar in 2010. The United States would break into six regions. The Atlantic states might join the European Union; the new Texas Republic (southern states) would become part of Mexico or under Mexican influence; the Californian Republic (from Arizona to Washington) would become part of China or under Chinese influence; the Central North American Republic would become part of Canada or under Canadian influence; Hawai’i would go to either China or Japan, and Russia would reclaim Alaska.1 Panarin’s prediction, eagerly embraced by the Kremlin and Russian state media, was reported in Central Asian media, usually without his caveat that the risk of disintegration was 45–55 percent. Anyway, if you believed that the end was nigh for the United States, it wasn’t difficult to accept that climate change was a Western invention, the latest fiendish plot to enslave the developing world by reducing its industrial growth through caps on carbon emissions.

  I was in Almaty to try to counter bad science and rumors about the environment. The UNESCO Central Asia office had hired me to lead a workshop for scientists on communicating climate change issues to public (nonscientific) audiences. The challenge was not only to persuade the scientists to abandon jargon and explain complex processes in language ordinary people could understand. That’s a problem for scientists everywhere. I was also up against the venerable Russian literary tradition of long sentences packed with dependent clauses, parenthetical phrases, and passive constructions. We discussed the use of short declarative sentences, active verbs, strong leads, and the inverted pyramid, but the scientists’ models were still the Russian literary greats of the nineteenth century, whose elegant sentences are painstakingly dissected for their literary merits.