Postcards from Stanland

by David H. Mould

  I was caught off guard at the Fulbright orientation session in Washington, DC, when the US embassy education officer suggested I go to Astana and teach at Eurasian National University (ENU). I knew nothing about the institution, and a web search yielded little because most of the web pages were under construction. All I could glean was that there was a Faculty of Journalism and Politology (political science), with faculty with advanced degrees in philology (not journalism or media). I e-mailed a few colleagues. “Why would you want to go there?” one asked. “ENU has no reputation for teaching journalism.” Galiya agreed when I told her of the embassy proposal. Most of the ENU faculty, she sniffed, had been fired by KazNU. She said the government was putting pressure on the embassy to bring in a Fulbrighter to boost ENU’s (and Astana’s) profile. At the time, I dismissed this as a crazy conspiracy theory. Subsequent events indicated that, while there may not have been a conspiracy, there was substance to Galiya’s claim.

  The embassy’s pitch was about spreading the Fulbright wealth. Few US academics check Kazakhstan (or any Central Asian country) on the application box. Most who came to Kazakhstan had worked in Almaty, so now it was time for other cities, including the capital, to benefit. I agreed and started thinking about winter clothing.

  I had a preview of Astana and ENU in September 2010 when I spent a week there conducting a curriculum workshop for journalism educators. ENU’s new academic buildings, housing the science, business, and law faculties, line the banks of a canal feeding into the River Ishim. Unfortunately, journalism is not considered a prestige faculty, and is almost hidden from view down a side street in a former student dormitory surrounded by Soviet-era apartment blocks. The building was once home to the philology faculty. It looked as if the staff had left in a hurry, because several classrooms were still set up as language labs, although none of the technology worked. In smaller classrooms, the blackboards were installed on a side wall; any student behind the third row risked whiplash to read what was written.

  After many years of teaching in Central Asia, I was accustomed to inadequate facilities. What mattered was what I’d be teaching and to whom. The dean, Namasaly Omashev, agreed to the courses I proposed and said that I would be advising master’s and PhD students on their research. This was to be my first and last meeting with the dean. My classes never made it onto the faculty schedule. And I never met—let alone worked with—a single graduate student. But in late September 2010, I was not to know this. I had agreed to teach at ENU, and now I needed to find an apartment.

  Apartment Hunting

  On an afternoon break from the workshop, my interpreter Irina Velska and I took a bus tour of Astana. It was not a tour in the strict sense of the term with a route and a guide. We simply got on a public bus on the right bank, paid the 50 tenge (30 cent) flat fare, stayed on the bus until it reached its terminus on the left bank and headed back. It gave me a sense of the layout of the city, especially the differences between the old and new cities. Most expats work in the corporate sector and live in expensive high-rise apartments with names like Highville and Northern Lights on the left bank. Call me old-fashioned, but I have a soft spot for post-Soviet decay. I preferred to live on the right bank, preferably on a direct bus route to the university. The apartment blocks looked drab from the outside, but I had stayed in enough of them in other cities to know that they were often comfortable inside. On the right bank, I would be close to shops, restaurants, and markets. There, people actually walked on the streets rather than moved between mall levels.

  My preferences did not impress my US embassy liaison. She informed me that because so many people were moving to Astana, apartments were scarce and rents high. She had been lucky to find me an apartment in the prestigious “Diplomat” complex, a new left bank development. The rent was $1,000 a month (utilities, cable TV, and Internet included). This was at the top of my price range, but I reluctantly agreed to take it. However, when she picked me up from the airport, we didn’t go to the “Diplomat” but to another apartment block on the left bank. She said that this was temporary, and that I would be moving to the “Diplomat” in a few days when another American moved out. I slept on a pullout couch and found only one fork, knife, and spoon in the kitchen. As often happens, a family had moved out to make way for me. This was not what I had paid for, and I complained loudly when the landlady told me I would have to stay there for a month until the other apartment was available.

  I was feeling disoriented on the left bank. The next evening, driving back from ENU with my interpreter, Diana Akizhanova, we got lost and had to call for directions. I’d e-mailed Irina about my housing problem, and when I got back to the temporary apartment, she had replied. “Why the hell are you putting up with this apartment?” she wrote. “There are vacant and cheaper apartments nearer the university.” She sent me a link to an apartment rental website. I resolved to start searching for a new apartment in the morning. Then an e-mail from my friend, Hal Foster, a freelance journalist living in Astana, arrived. Hal had just received a job offer in Washington, DC. He was leaving in a week and wanted to see me before he left. And, by the way, did I need an apartment on the right bank? The next day we met for lunch, and I took the apartment. It was spacious, warm, a ten-minute bus ride from the university, and $200 a month cheaper than the “Diplomat” apartment to which I might be moving in a month. I moved the next day, and reclaimed rent from my landlady. She grumbled, telling me that I would not like living on the right bank and warning me about crime. I told her I wasn’t planning to be out on the streets at night. It was just too cold.

  MAP 8.1 My Astana (map by Brian Edward Balsley, GISP)

  Snow Days

  One housewife to another: “I hear there’ll be snow tomorrow.” “Well, I’m not queuing for that.”

  If you’re looking for steady, seasonal work, try snow removal in Astana. In January and February, the city clears snow almost every day. It’s an impressive operation. In some North American cities, snow piles up alongside roads and sidewalks. In Astana they literally remove it. Workers break up the snow and ice with pickaxes, and shovel it into front loaders that dump it into trucks that haul it out of town. I don’t know where they dump it, but if some farmer’s field is still under snow in May, we’ll have a clue.

  Astana is, according to climate data, the second coldest capital city in the world, with Ulaan Baatar in Mongolia (another city where I’ve shivered in April) in first place. It attained this dubious status when it became the capital in 1997, knocking Ottawa out of second spot. Understandably, the government and the tourist agencies don’t talk much about temperatures in their promotional brochures. They’d prefer foreigners to think that other Northern Hemisphere capitals, such as Moscow, Helsinki, Reykjavik, and Pyongyang, are colder.

  Of course, defining “coldest” raises methodological issues. Are we looking at average temperatures across the year, average winter temperatures, or just extreme conditions, when the temperature plunges to, say, minus 40 Celsius? I vote (with my cold feet) for average winter temperatures. Astana has an extreme continental climate with warm summers and long, cold, dry winters. Temperatures of minus 30 Celsius (minus 22 Fahrenheit) to minus 35 Celsius (minus 31 Fahrenheit) are common between mid-December and early March. The city also holds the record for the lowest air temperature ever recorded in Kazakhstan (minus 51 Celsius). Typically, the River Ishim freezes over between the second week of November and the beginning of April. It can feel even colder because of the wind chill.

  My Fulbright began in mid-January, and I was prepared. Stephanie had bought me a warm down coat, an alpaca wool hat, gloves with liners, and two pairs of silk long johns. Unfortunately, United Airlines stored my checked luggage at Dulles Airport for three days before handing it over to Lufthansa for delivery. The long johns, of course, were in the luggage. I ventured out the first morning wearing almost all the outer clothing I had, my legs yearning for those long johns. My first appointment was at the US embassy, a ten-minute bus ride from my t
emporary apartment. As I stood shivering at the bus stop, my liaison nonchalantly remarked that it was “not too cold today—only minus 30 Celsius.”

  Some parts of Astana are definitely colder than others. On the left bank among the high-rise apartments, government ministries, malls, parks, and public squares, the wind blows hard off the steppe, funneling along the boulevards and buffeting the few pedestrians brave enough to be outside. On the right bank in the older city, the buildings are closer together, providing shelter from the wind. Maybe it is partly psychological, but it feels warmer—or, in Astana terms, not as bone-chillingly cold—there.

  On the streets, walking can be hazardous to your health. The snow may be only a few inches deep, but it is hard-packed. However, it’s safer walking on the snow than on the sidewalk, which is often a sheet of pure ice. I moved slowly, looking for patches of snow that would give me a firmer footing. The locals seemed to be equipped with all-weather feet, walking briskly, some of the women in fashionable high heels. My complaints about the winter fell on deaf ears. Aleksandr, a taxi driver, told me the winter had so far been mild. He recalled that when he was growing up in a village in northern Kazakhstan, the snow reached almost to the roof (almost ten feet high) of the family’s one-story home and they had to dig a passage through to the street. He said they never got too cold, because they had an ample wood supply and because the deep snow around the house had an igloo effect.

  Even after my long johns arrived and my legs were reasonably warm, I didn’t walk any further than I had to for fear of falling. Every day, I left my apartment, walked one block to the bus stop, and took the No. 9 or No. 11 along Kenesary Street to the Kazakhstan Supermarket stop. From there, it was another seven- to ten-minute walk to the journalism faculty. I went home by the same route, stopping at the supermarket in the apartment block. In almost three months, I left my apartment in the evening only three or four times to meet friends for dinner, and always took a taxi. On the weekends, I would walk fifteen to twenty minutes along Valikhanova Street to the covered market four blocks away. Sometimes I stopped at a coffee shop that doubled as an English-language library with books and DVDs. It also offered old newspapers and magazines donated by customers. You could learn that “Republicans Win 2010 Midterm U.S. Elections” six months after the fact in case you missed the story. I asked a British couple, Paul and Sarah, what they did for fun in Astana in winter. There was a brief silence. “Well, we often come here, have coffee, check out a DVD and go home and watch it,” said Sarah. This was not encouraging news.

  The government of Kazakhstan has spent lavishly to make its capital a city where people would want to live and work. It has worked hard to brand Astana as a business destination and as a host city for international conferences and sporting events. The city has a modern airport, five-star hotels, new conference and exhibition halls, upscale shopping malls, and the usual range of “international” cuisine—from sushi and tapas bars to the somewhat incongruous Irish pubs. It’s now the sort of city that merits a glossy spread in an airline magazine, the writer gushing about his “24 Hours in Astana, Jewel of the Steppe,” the architecture, museums, and nightlife. But neither government policy nor business investment can change the climate.

  Winter Games

  If you can’t change the weather, make it an asset. That’s what Kazakhstan did in its successful bid for the 2011 Asian Winter Games, although its offer to spend millions of dollars may have been more persuasive than the average daytime temperatures. It’s estimated that the government spent over $1.4 billion building new stadiums or renovating existing ones in Astana and Almaty, upgrading Astana’s airport and improving roads and transportation.

  When I arrived in Astana in mid-January, preparations for the games were in full swing. A total of twenty-seven countries sent teams, and the organizing committee had scoured foreign-language departments across the country for student interpreters. The committee’s headquarters, full of red track-suited volunteers, and the hotel where most of the athletes and officials were staying were just around the corner from my apartment. On my rare ventures along the snow-covered streets, I’d often see a busload of athletes heading out for the newly built stadiums on the left bank.

  Fortunately for the organizers, Kazakhstan topped the medal table, with thirty-two gold, twenty-one silver, and seventeen bronze; Japan, South Korea, and China were the other major medal winners. Ticket prices starting at $100 deterred me (and other Astana residents) from attending events, but they were on TV every night and in seemingly endless reruns through the summer. The only live event I saw was a sideshow in a cavernous exhibition hall where organizers were showing off traditional Kazakh culture to foreign visitors.

  I missed the horsemanship exhibition, in which cowboys raced around a small circus ring, performing daring acrobatics. What I did see were three traditional yurts, probably better appointed and furnished than your average out-on-the-steppe variety, and nice handicrafts (leather goods, ornaments, and carpets). The attempt to re-create the landscape was not as authentic, as I discovered when I leaned on a styrofoam rock and almost pushed over a small mountain. I drank shubat (camel’s milk) and ate traditional snacks (salty or sweet, designed to give that extra burst of energy when you’re rounding up the herd). And I listened to powerful singing from traditional musicians on a stage with a psychedelic light show going on behind. “What’s she singing about?” I asked Diana, who had gamely accompanied me. “I’ve no idea. It’s in Yakut [a Siberian language],” she said. Fortunately, the next performer sang in Kazakh. “What’s she singing about?” I asked again. “Oh, about how to deal with life,” said Diana, not very helpfully. “How much do you know about traditional Kazakh culture?” I asked her later. “Not much,” she admitted. “I’m a city girl.”

  My Favorite City

  It’s time to take a virtual tour of the Astana that Nazarbayev, the government, and the business community would like the world to see. It is the modern business-friendly city where multinational companies have their headquarters, a center for higher education, technology, scientific research and innovation, a cultural hub with galleries and museums, and the host city for international conferences, sporting events, and festivals. As the posters proclaim, Astana is Moy lubimyi gorod (my beloved city). The posters look incongruous in other cities, which are presumably well enough liked by their own residents. But they are everywhere—on bus shelters in Karaganda, street kiosks in Semey, the megamall outside Almaty. Even if you haven’t visited Astana, it must be your beloved city.

  The image on the poster is of Bayterek, the monument and observation tower in the square opposite the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Bayterek represents a poplar tree holding a golden egg, a central symbol in Turkic mythology—the tree of life. Samruk, the magical bird of happiness, is said to have laid its egg in the branches of a poplar tree. Not coincidentally, Samruk is also the name given to Kazakhstan’s sovereign wealth corporation which owns the government oil, gas, and mining companies, the railroad system, postal services, the national airline, and financial groups. In Astana, Samruk literally laid a golden egg. The Economist describes Bayterek, rather unkindly, as “a study in Asian authoritarian kitsch.”11

  FIGURE 8.1 Bayterek monument, Astana (photo by Natalie Koch)

  It’s definitely not kitsch to the thousands of domestic and foreign tourists who visit it every year. The observation deck is 97 meters (318 feet) above ground level, corresponding to 1997, the year Astana became the capital. One level offers 360-degree views of Astana and beyond, with a three-dimensional model of how the city will look in the future. The second and higher level features a wooden sculpture of a globe and a gilded print of Nazarbayev’s right hand. Bayterek has an almost shrine-like quality. It is easy to see that, after Nazarbayev’s death, it will likely become a place of pilgrimage, where citizens, cursing the latest set of scoundrels ruling the country, will solemnly place a hand in that of the Great Leader and ask him to return from the grave to restore national pride. />
  There is an echo of Karakorum at the pyramid-like Palace of Peace and Accord. Just as the Great Khan staged a debate at court among adherents of Islam, Christianity, and Buddhism, modern Kazakhstan sees itself as the cultural crossroads of Eurasia, where peoples, traditions, and religions meet. The palace was constructed (with an eye-popping price tag of $58 million) to host the triennial Congress of Leaders of World and Traditional Religions. Because of the extreme temperatures, engineers designed the steel frame to withstand expansion and contraction of up to 30 centimeters.

  The pyramid is one of two signature designs in Astana by the British architect Sir Norman Foster. Although the idea of a pyramid originally came from a Kazakh architect, Western observers were quick to attribute it to the president. Writing in the Sunday Times in 2005, Hugh Pearman, editor of the Royal Institute of British Architects’ monthly journal, was scathing: “Nothing [Foster] has done to date compares with this latest job. Because nobody asks for buildings like this. Unless you happen to be President Nursultan Nazarbayev of Kazakhstan.” Interviewed after it was opened, Pearman had not changed his view: “It’s an unbelievable folly, in the sense that it’s a grand monument by one man to himself.”12

  FIGURE 8.2 Palace of Peace and Accord, Astana (photo by Natalie Koch)

  The central theme of media coverage, writes Koch, is that “the Pyramid, and indeed the whole Astana project, is a one-man show.”13 Nazarbayev is portrayed as a megalomaniac, an authoritarian ruler bent on adding his architectural imprint to his political and social control. The Pyramid, according to Michael Steen, “juts out into the barren plain” behind the president’s palace, the Ak Orda. “Sounds odd? Astana, a Brasilia of the steppe, is like that.”14