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Published: August 21st 2008
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I’m in Astana now which is the new capital of Kazakhstan. I arrived here via Almaty which is where I originally started and ended my biking trip and which had been the historical capital of Kazakhstan…at least for the last few hundred years anyways. To know why I believe this is important or even mention it let’s start with a quick Kazak history lesson.
Kazakhstan was largely just a nomadic collective of tribes until around the mid 16th century when the Kazaks formed as the predominate ethnic group and then like most predominate ethnic groups of the era, killed off all the other ethnic groups and formed a nation. From here they had a good three hundred year or so run until the Tsarist Russians said, “hey this big area to our south looks interesting” and they took over. To understand just how big that “big area to the south” was, Kazakhstan is ninth largest country in the world and the largest landlocked country in the world. Being large and landlocked has had a considerably significant effect on Kazakhstan since the Russian take over though.
Not soon after the Tsarist Russians took over, the Red Russians took over the Tsarist
Russians, and eventually Stalin came into power. Stalin, and proceeding Soviet leaders, liked that Kazakhstan was big for two reasons:
One, it made a great dumping ground for ethnic groups Stalin didn’t like (you got to admit at least he was a 20th century man, it used to be we just slaughtered the ethnic groups we didn’t like…instead he just mass deported them to a big area he didn’t like). Actually you can still see the result of these actions in the country today; Kazakhstan is one of the most culturally diverse countries in the world and currently only about 30% of the population is Kazak by heritage. As you walk down any street in Almaty or Astana it amazing all the different faces you see.
Two, because it was big and had plenty of steep, he thought, “hey this place should be a breadbasket”, and forced the nomadic Kazaks and various other ethnic he didn’t like to form collective farms and grow wheat. Interestingly enough you can also still see the result of these actions in the Kazak population today as it’s estimated that over 1 million people, or 22% of the population, starved to death during this
period. The current population is just over 16M and estimated that had it not been for this period the population would be over 20M today.
So why is any of this important? Because the profound impact of this soviet or Russian dominance still resonates in every aspect of Kazakhstan today. Kazakhstan was the last old soviet bloc republics to declare independence (1991) and the last guy the soviets had tagged to the run place, Nursultan Nazarbayev is still the unfairly elected (this according to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) President today. Opposition party leaders are still often imprisoned and “uppity”journalist still disappear in Kazakhstan today. So not long after Kazakhstan declared independence and Nazarbayev became president, he announced that the capital of Kazakstan was going to move to then tiny city Astana. If you ask people they’ll tell it’s because the Russian’s wanted the capital close so they wouldn’t have to travel to far in working with the Kazak government and its budding oil industry. I say this is only half true…I think the Russians wanted to keep Nazarbayev on a short leash and they know they’re artillery is not that accurate. You see the
Wedding Party
There was park across from our hotel that always had 10+ weddings taking place problem with the old capital of Almaty is that it was not only about as far from the Russian boarder as you get, it’s only about fifty mile from the Chinese boarder...and the Ruski's don't wont to mess with the Chinese!
I really enjoyed the Kazak country side and the people in it…unfortunately I can’t say the same for the two major cities I visited. I found Almaty an architecturally bland city of old soviet style buildings- all ugly concrete structures with small blacked out windows. As opposed to Astana where I found the new “modern” architectures to be just a bunch of silly cheap structures trying too hard to look modern…they still kept the small blacked out windows though!
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