The New Great Game

If you want to leave Kazakhstan, learn English. If you want to stay, learn Chinese.          

          What started as a joke in business and government circles in Astana and Almaty has taken on a serious tone as China’s economic, military, and political clout in Central Asia has increased. In the nineteenth century, China watched from the sidelines as Russian and British explorers, envoys, and spies wandered around its western provinces and Tibet, mapping trade routes, building alliances with local leaders, and hatching plots. The Chinese empire, weakened by internal discord and rebellion, could not play in the so-called Great Game. By the end of the twentieth century, the roles were, if not reversed, at least re-balanced, with China vying with Russia and the United States in a new Great Game. Hungry for oil, gas, and natural resources, China has invested heavily in Kazakhstan’s energy sector. It built the pipeline to carry oil from the Caspian Sea east to Xinjiang, and is financing construction of a gas pipeline and a 1,700-mile stretch of highway to connect China with Europe. Russia, Europe, and the United States support pipelines running west to the Black Sea and Turkey. For now, there’s plenty of oil to flow both ways, but the supply will not last forever. Analysts worry about population pressures: if its cities cannot accommodate more people, will China look west to the sparsely populated steppe?

Postcards from Stanland: Journeys in Central Asia (Ohio University Press, 2016) is available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Books-a-Million and other online retailers. Read excerpts at www.davidhmould.com (Travel Blogs) or Facebook /PostcardsFromStanland/ or view readings and interviews on YouTube

             The end of the Soviet Union briefly revived the dream of the Uighurs of Xinjiang of uniting with their fellow Muslims in a Greater Turkestan or caliphate. China leaned heavily on Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan to restrict Uighur political activity and settled the border disputes that had plagued Chinese-Soviet relations. China has reduced the demographic power of the Uighurs by resettling Han Chinese in Xinjiang. With oil from Kazakhstan and gas from Turkmenistan, China no longer has to rely on sea routes that can be disrupted by the United States. China brought the Central Asian republics into the Shanghai Cooperation Organization and exploited new export markets.

            Russia has long-standing economic ties with Kazakhstan. It’s also the economic magnet for thousands of migrant workers from Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, the two poorest countries in the region. Remittances from migrant workers in Russia account for about 29 percent of Kyrgyzstan’s GDP and 47 percent of Tajikistan’s. Russia provides aid and loans and maintains military bases in both countries. With the withdrawal of NATO forces from Afghanistan and the handover of the Manas air base in Bishkek, the United States no longer has a significant military presence in Central Asia, but its economic interests, particularly in Kazakhstan’s oil, gas, and mining sectors and in banking, make it the other major player. Iran and Turkey are also in the game, although only Turkey has so far invested heavily in the Central Asian economies and sought influence through education and social programs.

            What happens in Central Asia as China, Russia, the United States, Turkey, and Iran—and possibly India, making a late entry to the game—compete will affect the world balance of economic and political power. As the journalist Ahmed Rashid, author of two books on Central Asia, remarks: “One of the great dangers for the U.S. and other Western powers will be continuing ignorance and neglect of what is happening there.”

Space junk

Just off the main drag in Karaganda, a coal mining and industrial city in northern Kazakhstan, the EcoMuseum is housed on the first floor of a local government administration building. You have to know where you’re going because there’s no sign on the street, and only a small one on the door. 

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The museum features an eclectic mix of artifacts and interpretive exhibits from central and northeastern Kazakhstan, a region exceptionally rich with environmental problems. There are exhibits on mining, manufacturing, pollution, water resources, and energy conservation. The museum is also in the eco-tourism business, offering guided tours of Central Kazakhstan’s mountain and desert regions and Lake Balkhash, the largest lake in Central Asia.  Its signature “Back in the USSR” tour takes visitors back in time to the region’s prison labor camps, the Semipalitinsk nuclear test site, where the Soviets conducted above and below-ground nuclear tests for 40 years, and the village of Aksu, whose claim to fame is its alley of Soviet monuments with busts and statues of Lenin.    

The museum’s flashiest exhibit—and the one most popular with school groups—is the space center, with its mock-up of the Mir space station control room.  It’s like the flight deck of the Starship Enterprise or a scene from Dr. Strangelove with banks of monitors, flashing lights, control levers and dials and a throbbing, techno sound track.

Mir space station mock-up at Karaganda EcoMuseum

On both sides of the space station, the museum floor looks like a junk yard with misshapen chunks of metal, some partly burned, with barely distinguishable Cyrillic markings.  Most of the items were salvaged from the Soviet military base at Lake Balkash in the south of Karaganda oblast.  When the Soviet Army left its bases in Kazakhstan, it abandoned tons of military hardware—trucks, artillery, mortars, ammunition, communications equipment, as well as huts and furniture.  Economic times were hard, and local people moved in to salvage and sell what they could.  Most of the metal went for scrap, but some ended up at the EcoMuseum.

Credit for the collection goes to EcoMuseum director Dmitry Kalmykov, a trained scientist.  As a child growing up in Ukraine, he loved to collect scrap metal and bring it home.  “When I moved to Karaganda and discovered there was all this stuff from the military and the nuclear test site, it reawakened my childhood interest,” he said.  Dmitry started picking up metal debris during a 1992 scientific investigation at the Semipalitinsk nuclear test site and hasn’t stopped since.

Karaganda EcoMusuem director Dmitry Kalmykov

The gems of the collection are parts of rockets launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome, 550 miles away in the semi-desert of southwestern Kazakhstan.  For the Soviet Union, the remote location—far away from population centers and, presumably, the long lenses of U.S. spy planes—was ideal for its military space program.  From the first human space mission in 1961, when cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin’s brief jaunt stunned the U.S. into kick-starting its own manned space program, Baikonur has been the launch site for all Soviet and Russian crewed space missions and for rockets carrying satellites.

When the Soviet Union collapsed, Russia’s space program faced a difficult problem—its launch site was now in a foreign country.  Although Russia claimed that it should still control the cosmodrome, the military installations and forces guarding them, Kazakhstan insisted that Russia not only agree to joint control but start paying rent on the place.  In 1994, Kazakhstan agreed to lease the complex to Russia for about $120 million a year. 

Baikonur is a commercial success—the preferred launch site for most countries and private companies that want to get stuff (mostly communication satellites) into space.  More than 35,000 people work there.  It’s the no-frills discount store of space launch sites, easily beating the European and Asian competition for price.  Most launches use the cheap and well tested Proton rocket, the workhorse of the Soviet space program since its first launch in 1965 and one of the most successful heavy boosters in the history of spaceflight.

The people of central and northeastern Kazakhstan don’t see much from Kazakhstan’s $120 million-a-year rocket revenue.  But they sometimes see the rockets—or parts of them—out on the steppe.  Rockets are launched in a northeasterly direction from Baikonur, with the first stage burning off over an area that can range from 10 to 90 km wide, depending on the size of the rocket and its payload.  A large region of the steppe from Zhezkazgan in the south to Pavlodar in the north is within the ellipse of the rocket flight path. 

What doesn’t burn up in the atmosphere falls to earth—usually on the uninhabited steppe but sometimes near populated areas.  In 1999, a rocket carrying a communications satellite blew up soon after lift-off, scattering debris and fuel over a wide area.  A large section of rocket fell into the backyard of a house in a village near Karkaralinsk.  “This is dangerous material,” said Dmitry. “The nose of the first stage has an engine with rocket fuel.  It’s like a bomb and the fuel is highly toxic.”

After the 1999 crash, Kazakhstan briefly banned launches, demanding that Russia conduct an investigation and offer compensation.  The row delayed a scheduled supply flight carrying food, water and the navigational equipment to the beleaguered Mir space station.

Dmitry worries about the authorities’ lack of preparedness and emergency plans.  He pulls out a map of the rocket ellipse.  “The akimat [local government] doesn’t have such a map.  If you ask the authorities where the danger area is, they don’t know.  Maybe it’s here, maybe it’s there.  We need to inform the people of the dangers.  If you’re informed, you’re aware.  Information is protection.”

Dmitry says the annual rent paid by Russia is supposed to cover the cost of safety measures—equipment and training for emergency personnel, medical staff and disposal teams, as well as safety precautions for the general population.   In 2001, a parliamentary committee held hearings on safety at Baikonur, and issued a report with about 30 recommendations.  These included low-cost technical fixes, such as installing radio beacons on rockets so that they can be more easily located in the vast steppe.  If radio beacons were used, says Dmitry, it would not have taken three days in 2006 to locate a rocket that spun out of control and crashed soon after lift-off, causing widespread ecological damage.

Despite the dangers, rural residents have resourcefully recycled the space junk that has dropped from the sky.  Rocket bodies have been turned into garages, animal sheds and outhouses, metal panels used for fencing for livestock, and smaller sections sold for scrap. Dmitry shows me albums of photos taken on tours of the steppe. Half a section of an aluminum rocket body makes a pretty good Quonset hut.  There’s an old Moskvich, parked in a garage built from mud bricks, with a rocket body for the roof.  Livestock standing on top of a rocket buried in the sand.  A herder dozing, his back resting against the nose of a rocket. A summer kitchen, with shelves stacked with canned goods and a cook stove.

A rocket body makes a pretty good summer kitchen

I asked Dmitry which government agency was responsible for safety.  “That’s a prohibited question because nobody knows.  The space agency says the space industry is responsible.  The industry says the local akimat is responsible.  The akimat says it’s the Ministry for Emergency Situations.  The ministry says it’s responsible after an explosion or accident, but not before.  In Kazakhstan, no one takes responsibility.”

University Dreamland

Most universities in Central Asia I’ve visited since the mid-1990s are in some state of disrepair—from the curriculum and academic management to the facilities and classrooms. But there’s one where no expense has been spared—Nazarbayev University in Kazakhstan’s capital, Astana. 

Postcards from Stanland: Journeys in Central Asia (Ohio University Press, 2016) is available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Books-a-Million and other online retailers. Read excerpts at www.davidhmould.com (Travel Blogs) or Facebook /PostcardsFromStanland/ or view readings and interviews on YouTube         

I’d read about the heavy investment in construction and the contracts with leading universities in the United States, the UK, and Asia, but nothing prepared me for the view from the entrance portico. A long, wide mall, with fountains, palm trees, and carefully manicured shrubs, all enclosed under a huge atrium (palm trees don’t do too well in an Astana winter). Lining the atrium are five-story blocks, each reserved for one of the international partners. When one researcher showed pictures of the university’s interior to focus groups in Almaty, most participants thought it was a shopping mall.

Photo by Natalie Koch

Why did Kazakhstan spend millions on Nazarbayev University when facilities and conditions at other universities are lacking, when teachers have to take two or three jobs to make ends meet, when there’s no paper for the printer in the dean’s office and sometimes no chalk for the chalkboard? It’s about creating world-class education, of course, to provide the workforce for business and government. But it’s also about Kazakhstan’s image on the world stage.

            Location is everything, and Nazarbayev University is the first complex you pass when you drive in on the airport road. I approached the university from the other direction on the Number 10 bus. Workers were planting flats of flowers in the newly cultivated beds. Vehicles rolled up for the start of the workday, disgorging well-dressed administrators. A luxury bus arrived with what I assumed (by their more casual dress, balding heads, and laptops) were foreign faculty, bused in from apartment complexes in the new city.

            Will the investment succeed? Of course it will. The university has the president’s name on it, so anything short of success is unthinkable.  But how well Nazarbayev University creates the “international education on the steppe” experience remains to be seen. Although instruction is in English, most students are from Kazakhstan so they are not exposed to students from other countries and cultures. And the moment they leave the classroom and get on the bus back into the city they’ll be speaking Kazakh and Russian again. Graduates will certainly have a competitive edge in the job market, but creating an elite group at the expense of improving general standards in higher education leaves other talented students, especially in the regions, at a disadvantage.

The President's Dream City--Ak Orda

The left bank of the River Ishim in Astana is bisected by a broad pedestrian mall. At one end, close to the Pyramid of Peace and Accord, is the presidential palace—the Ak Orda (White House), its blue-and-gold dome topped with a golden spire.

There’s more gold inside in the majestic halls used for state and ceremonial events, including the pessimistically named Hall of Extended Negotiations. Twenty-one types of marble were used for the floor patterns. According to the palace website, “Metaphorically, it reflects a steppe civilization in the mirror of the European culture, a synthesis of arts of the planet’s largest continent—Eurasia.” I have no idea what that means, but it’s typical of the lyrical descriptions of most of Astana’s new buildings. 

Postcards from Stanland: Journeys in Central Asia (Ohio University Press, 2016) is available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Books-a-Million and other online retailers. Read excerpts at www.davidhmould.com (Travel Blogs) or Facebook /PostcardsFromStanland/ or view readings and interviews on YouTube

The President's Dream City--Khan Shatyr

Astana’s monument to consumerism, Khan Shatyr, stands at the opposite end of the pedestrian mall from the Ak Orda (White House) and Palace of Peace and Accord.  Like the Palace, it was designed by the British architect Sir Norman Foster. 

Khan Shatyr has been described as “the largest tent in the world” but to compare it to something you can buy from an upscale outfitter or even to a large marquee is a gross understatement. The needle-tipped structure, 500 feet tall and with a floor area the size of ten football stadiums, is designed to evoke the traditional nomadic dwelling, the yurt. It leans sideways, as if blown by the wind from the steppe. Khan Shatyr is constructed from three translucent layers of a fabric called ethylene tetrafluoroethylene suspended on a network of cables strung from a central spire. The transparent material allows sunlight through, which, in conjunction with air heating and cooling systems, is designed to maintain an internal temperature of 15–30 Celsius (59–86 Fahrenheit) in the main space and 19–24 Celsius (66–75 Fahrenheit) in the retail units.

Khan Shatyr roughly translates as the tent of the khan, or king, but it’s all about business and entertainment, not politics. Underneath the tent is a huge shopping mall with squares and cobbled streets, movie theaters, a botanical garden, boating river, mini-golf, roller coaster, water park, and indoor beach resort, with sand, palm trees, and tropical plants shipped in from the Maldives. If Dubai can have its indoor ski slope, then Astana deserves its tropical beach.

Postcards from Stanland: Journeys in Central Asia (Ohio University Press, 2016) is available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Books-a-Million and other online retailers. Read excerpts at www.davidhmould.com (Travel Blogs and Articles) or Facebook /PostcardsFromStanland/ or view readings and interviews on YouTube

The President's Dream City--Nur Astana Mosque

The Nur Astana mosque in Kazakhstan’s capital, Astana, on the left bank of the River Ishim is the largest in Central Asia, with room for five thousand worshippers inside and another two thousand outside (presumably only in summer).

The glass, concrete and granite structure is 40 meters (131 feet) high, symbolizing the age of the Prophet Muhammad when he received the revelations; the minarets are 63 meters (207 feet) high, the age of Muhammad when he died. Unlike other left-bank buildings, the government did not pay for construction. The mosque was a gift from the Emir of Qatar.

Postcards from Stanland: Journeys in Central Asia (Ohio University Press, 2016) is available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Books-a-Million and other online retailers. Read excerpts at www.davidhmould.com (Travel Blogs) or Facebook /PostcardsFromStanland/ or view readings and interviews on YouTube

The President's Dream City--the Palace of Peace and Accord

The President's Dream City--Bayterek

The most popular destination in Kazakhstan’s capital, Astana, for domestic and foreign tourists is Bayterek, the monument and observation tower in the new city on the left bank of the River Ishim.  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 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 Preseident Nursultan 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.

Postcards from Stanland: Journeys in Central Asia (Ohio University Press, 2016) is available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Books-a-Million and other online retailers. Read excerpts at www.davidhmould.com (Travel Blogs) or Facebook /PostcardsFromStanland/ or view readings and interviews on YouTube

Planet Astana

For many visitors, the capital of Kazakhstan is an astonishing sight—unlike any other city they’ve seen. My first impressions—from the air and then from the airport highway—evoked otherworldly metaphors. Strange shapes rose out of the steppe—spires, domes, globes, ovals, and pyramids in gold, silver, blue, and turquoise. The taxi passed the gleaming facade of Nazarbayev University, then sports stadiums and arenas built for the 2011 Asian Winter Games, with their massive, curved metal and concrete spans. Then triumphal arches, monumental public buildings, upscale apartment blocks, the huge Nur Astana mosque, shopping malls, and manicured parks, most of which on a chilly Saturday afternoon in September were almost deserted.

Postcards from Stanland: Journeys in Central Asia (Ohio University Press, 2016) is available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Books-a-Million and other online retailers. Read excerpts at www.davidhmould.com (Travel Blogs) or Facebook /PostcardsFromStanland/ or view readings and interviews on YouTube

Photo by Natalie Koch

Whatever you think about futuristic architecture (or what it cost to build it, and whether the money could have been better invested in Kazakhstan’s social needs), Astana is unlike any other capital city in Central Asia. Almaty (the former capital) and Tashkent look like other Soviet-era cities with their colonnaded public buildings and monotonous apartment blocks. Bishkek and Dushanbe have similar architecture, but are rougher around the edges. Astana looks more like Dubai. It is growing fast, but even by the latest (2012) population estimate of 775,000, it is still less than half the size of Almaty or Tashkent (each of which has about two million inhabitants). However, the futuristic architecture makes Astana look and feel bigger. Which is exactly what its chief conceptual architect, President Nursultan Nazarbayev, intended.

Photo by Natalie Koch

Like other capital cities throughout human history, Astana is designed to impress visitors. Just as medieval travelers returned home with tales of the fabulous cities of the East, modern travelers to Astana are treated to a visual spectacle. Astana is a twenty-first-century version of Karakorum, the thirteenth-century capital city of the Mongol Empire.  Contemporary visitors to Karakorum were suitably awed, perhaps because they thought the Mongols were too busy rampaging and pillaging their way across Asia and Eastern Europe to actually build anything more than siege fortifications and campfires.

            In 1253, the Flemish Franciscan William of Rubruck, who had accompanied the French king Louis IX on the Seventh Crusade, set out from Constantinople for Karakorum. Louis had given the monk the medieval version of mission impossible—convert the Mongols to Christianity. Whether or not William knew the futility of his assignment, he set out to record his party’s journey in detail, producing one of the great travel narratives of the age, comparable to that of Marco Polo.

            After traveling for almost seven thousand miles William and his companions entered a wealthy, bustling city at the heart of a major trading network, with markets, temples, and a cosmopolitan population, including Christians. The Great Khan even staged a debate at court among adherents of Islam, Christianity, and Buddhism. William’s detailed account of the journey and the six-month stay at Karakorum, and the reports of other missionaries and merchants, helped to counter popular views of the Mongols as a murderous horde.

Photo by Natalie Koch

Like Karakorum, Astana is the concrete symbol of a modern and business-friendly Kazakhstan, an emerging economic and cultural power at the crossroads between Europe and Asia. In his writings and public speeches, Nazarbayev positions Kazakhstan within Eurasia, arguing that the nation embodies the best of the West and the East in its economy, education, religion, civil society, and values. The Eurasian motif is visible in the signature architecture of Astana, where elements of Western and Eastern design are combined. Astana hosts Eurasian conferences and events; businesses claim to reach the Eurasian market; Eurasian National University is the largest institution of higher education in the capital.

Photo by Natalie Koch

For Nazarbayev, Astana was never the otherworldly, utopian fantasy that its critics have claimed.  Astana is a combination of Karakorum and Dubai, the center of a new Mongol empire built, not on military conquest, but on oil and gas revenues, authoritarian government, investments in technology and education, and soft diplomacy with the West, Russia, and China. In a commentary to mark Astana Day, the city’s fifteenth anniversary, on July 6, 2013, Nazarbayev wrote: “The fate of Astana is the fate of all Kazakhstanis who have boldly crossed the threshold between two centuries. This is the fate of independent Kazakhstan, which has walked the great path from the obscure fringe of a fallen superpower known to few in the world to a dynamic modern state which the international community knows and respects.” Astana Day was also (not coincidentally) Nazarbayev’s seventy-third birthday. For the crowds who attended the birthday celebrations and the millions who watched the spectacle on TV, the association between city, country, and president was more than metaphorical. Astana was Kazakhstan. Nazarbayev had created Astana. Ergo, Nazarbayev was Kazakhstan.

This is how Russians live?

          As the train pulled out of Kazakhstan’s capital Astana, Valery opened the first bottle of cognac and was figuring out how much alcohol our compartment would need for the 15-hour overnight trip.  It was only 4:30 p.m. and, with several hours of daylight left, I wanted to look out of the window, not drink.  But to be sociable, I agreed to a couple of shots.   

Postcards from Stanland: Journeys in Central Asia (Ohio University Press, 2016) is available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Books-a-Million and other online retailers. Read excerpts at www.davidhmould.com (Travel Blogs) or Facebook /PostcardsFromStanland/ or view readings and interviews on YouTube

Miles and miles of Kazakh steppe

             Half an hour later, I escaped to the corridor for an hour before returning to the compartment.  Valery and his friend Igor were already almost through bottle number two, and had bought a bottle of vodka from the drinks trolley.  The restaurant car served vodka and cognac by the glass, but for those who want to drink in compartments, a vendor plies the corridors. 

             Sensibly, Valery and Igor were also eating—dark bread, cheese, sausage, piroshky and strong Russian mustard.  Valery slapped mustard on a slice of bread and cheese and passed it to me.  I felt as if my head was going to explode.  “Good for your health—you won’t get a cold,” Valery laughed as I gasped and turned red.  “Here, have more vodka.” 

             As the evening wore on and the alcohol took its toll, the conversation became more animated and difficult to follow.  Valery and Igor were on their way to Kostanai oblast in northern Kazakhstan for a hunting and fishing trip.  I must have skipped the chapter on winter outdoor sports in the Russian textbook because most of the vocabulary was new to me.  There was a lot of extending of arms and simulated “boom boom” gunshot noises as virtual ducks fell to earth. 

             Valery, who said he loved all sports and was wearing a David Beckham T-shirt, wanted to know why I had never served in the military.  He was reluctant to accept my explanation that there was no military service requirement in the U.K. and that I had arrived in the U.S. too late to be drafted for Vietnam.  Military service was compulsory in the Soviet Union, and Valery served in Afghanistan.  “A useless war,” he admitted, yet he still seemed to resent those who, in his opinion, had not served in the military.  My argument that there are other ways to serve one’s country did not impress him.

             By 10 p.m., everyone had settled down for the night.  Then the snoring started.  It didn’t bother me while we were moving because it was drowned out by the sound of the train, but it woke me when we stopped at stations, as we did four or five times after midnight.  At 3 a.m. at an isolated town on the frozen steppe, there’s no traffic and no people.  Only snoring. 

             At 6 a.m., the attendants knocked on the doors to tell passengers we’d be arriving in Kostanai in an hour.  Valery swung down from the top bunk, opened a bottle of beer and offered me another.  I politely refused.  He smiled.  “Now you know kak russkiye zhivut (how Russians live),” he said, with a smile.  I wanted to say I hoped not all Russians lived that way, but recognized the sincerity of the hospitality.  It was another warm memory of a cold winter.  

Cursing the future

 A man waits in line outside a food shop in Moscow. Finally, he’s had enough and tells     his friend: “That’s it. I’m going over to the Kremlin to kill that Gorbachev.” Two hours later he comes back.  “Well,” says the friend, “did you do it?”  “No,” he replies, “there was an even longer line over there.” 

          Through the 1990s, in cities, towns and villages throughout the former Soviet Union, industrial workers gathered in bars, restaurants, chaikhanas (tea houses) and bazaars to “curse the future.”  I credit the phrase to my friend Asqat Yerkimbay, describing growing up in the central Kazakhstan mining town of Zhezdy.  But I had heard a similar story from many other people.

Postcards from Stanland: Journeys in Central Asia (Ohio University Press, 2016) is available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Books-a-Million and other online retailers. Read excerpts at www.davidhmould.com (Travel Blogs) or Facebook /PostcardsFromStanland/ or view readings and interviews on YouTube

          For 75 years, industrial workers were folk heroes, lauded in speeches, newspapers, books, movies and wall posters for their efforts to make the Soviet Union a world power.  Although agricultural production was vital, Soviet industry seemed more glamorous, and definitely more photogenic.  Newsreels and propaganda films recorded the whirring machines of the factory assembly line, the intense heat of the steel furnace, the jagged face of the coal seam, the electricity pylons stretching into the distance.  Each product coming off the line, each steel ingot, ton of coal or megawatt of electricity represented the growing strength of the USSR, the fulfillment of the great socialist dream.  And the dream makers were Lenin’s proletariat—the engineers, coal miners, steelworkers, engine drivers.  Industrial jobs paid better than most professions, and often came with perks such as apartments and vacations to summer resorts in the Kyrgyz SSR. They also helped reinforce the status of women in society.  The Soviet Union never needed a Roza the Riveter because women were always in the industrial workforce.

           And then it all ended.  Despite Gorbachev’s policies of perestroika (literally restructuring or rebuilding), most citizens had no idea of what was coming, or how it would change their lives forever.  With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the central planning system that had supported the economy collapsed too.  In every sector, production was determined by targets and quotas, which usually had little or no relationship to demand.  Factories, mines and collective farms had to meet targets, even if what they produced was not needed and piled up in rail cars or rotted in warehouses.  Managers were rewarded for exceeding targets, fired or demoted for falling short—a system that provided ample incentive for cooking the books on cotton or steel production. 

          In the factories of Central Asia, workers continued to show up, but the targets and subsidies from Moscow had ended and there were few new customers.  Some factories tried to adapt to the market economy, but most lacked the money to invest in new equipment and compete for quality and price with industries in other countries.  Compared with other Soviet republics, the industrial base of the Kyrgyz SSR was comparatively small because Moscow considered the region too remote to become a major industrial producer.  However, factories for agricultural processing, textiles and household goods employed thousands in the Chuy and Fergana Valleys.  By the mid-1990s, most had closed.  Almost all the canned goods, clothes, shoes, pots and pans on the bazaar were imported from China and other Asian countries.

           Kyrgyzstan struggled to adopt the reforms that donor countries and the International Monetary Fund said were needed to qualify for loans and aid and to build a market economy.  The government abandoned subsidies and price controls, and replaced the Russian ruble with a new currency, the som. The pace of reform caused massive economic dislocation; in one year, inflation ran close to 1,000 per cent, devastating people on pensions and fixed incomes. With international support, the government eventually stabilized the currency and brought inflation down to manageable levels, but economic recovery remained slow and poverty rates increased.

           Official reports tell the story of Kyrgyzstan’s economic collapse in sanitized, bureaucratic terms—the language of economists, policy-makers and development experts.  The calculations were at the macro level--cold measurements of Gross Domestic Product, consumer price indexes, output by economic sector, government debt, foreign direct investment, reforms of the financial services sector. In the mid-1990s, it’s questionable whether Kyrgyzstan even had a financial services sector to reform.  The som had been devalued, inflation remained high, and almost no one trusted the banks to keep their money safe.  With few deposits, banks had little money to lend and when they made loans, it was at ruinous 30 per cent interest rates.  If you wanted to start a new business, you asked your family to lend or give you the money.  Even the loan sharks at the bazaar charged less interest than the banks.  

           The economic statistics were sometimes based on questionable data.  One year the government, in an attempt to convince foreign donors and investors that the economy was picking up, declared that the unemployment rate had dropped below 10 per cent for the first time since independence.  Even government supporters were incredulous.  It turned out that in its sample the statistical agency had included every tout hawking cigarettes, pirated cassettes and homebrew on the streets as a “self-employed market vendor.”  The real rate was probably at least 40 per cent. 

            None of the reports and statistics told the human stories of dislocation, especially for industrial workers.  Their skills were not needed in the new economy, and there were few opportunities for retraining.  Some left for Russia, hoping to find jobs, but the situation in many Russians regions was as bad as in Central Asia.  A few started private businesses or worked as drivers.  Some just gave up.  It was not only the loss of income, devastating though that was.  It was the loss of purpose, dignity and respect.  They had been the breadwinners for their families; now they had no jobs and no prospects.  In some families, women became the main wage earners, but while they kept the family fed, their husbands sometimes felt the loss of status even more intensely. Back in the good old days, industrial workers could afford a bottle of vodka or cognac for a party or holiday celebration.  Now some turned to the bottle to try to forget their plight.  Official reports on the economy do not figure in the social costs of alcoholism, depression, broken marriages, domestic violence, and suicides.  It is not surprising that the engineers, miners and steelworkers were nostalgic for the Soviet Union.  They denounced Gorbachev the traitor, and cursed a future that seemed to offer them nothing.  

Lost in Stanland

On the eve of his first foreign trip as US Secretary of State in February 2013, John Kerry, in a speech at the University of Virginia, praised the staff of the State Department and US Agency for International Development (USAID) for their work in the “most dangerous places on Earth.”

They fight corruption in Nigeria. They support the rule of law in Burma. They support democratic institutions in Kyrzakhstan and Georgia.

            Come again, Mr. Secretary? Kyrzakhstan? Aren’t you confusing volatile Kyrgyzstan, where popular protests overthrew two authoritarian leaders in less than five years, with its stable neighbor Kazakhstan, where President Nursultan Nazarbayev has ruled almost unchallenged since independence in 1991?

Postcards from Stanland: Journeys in Central Asia (Ohio University Press, 2016) is available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Books-a-Million and other online retailers. Read excerpts at www.davidhmould.com (Travel Blogs) or Facebook /PostcardsFromStanland/ or view readings and interviews on YouTube

The republics of Central Asia

The State Department transcript of the speech helpfully clarified matters, replacing “Kyrzakhstan” with “Kyrgyzstan.” But not before reporters picked up on the gaffe. Kerry was teased for “creating a new country.” The flub was “all the more awkward,” said the British newspaper The Telegraph, “because Kyrgyzstan is a key ally in the US-led war in Afghanistan and a major recipient of US aid.”

            Russians poked fun in online forums. Among the comments: “I think we need to restore the USSR, so that the American Secretary does not confuse the names.” “Well, if the USA decided so . . . Let there be Kyrzakhstan.” “So what? Kyrzakhstan is a regular country. It’s to the east of Ukrarussia and south-east of Litonia. Not far from Uzkmenia. You should learn geography.” A cartoon depicted Kerry, cell phone to his ear, looking intently at a globe. “Where is that Kyrzakhstan? I’ve been trying to call there for three days.”           

            Of course, Kerry was not the first US official to be, as the Telegraph put it, “tongue-tied by post-Soviet geography.” “Stan-who?” President George W. Bush is reputed to have asked when Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice briefed him about Uzbekistan. In August 2008, he mixed up Russia and Georgia, which at that time were at war, when he warned against possible efforts to depose “Russia’s duly elected government.”

            The confusion is symptomatic of a more general geographical malaise, caused by the collapse of the Soviet Union and the proliferation of countries whose names end in -stan. Kerry is not the first and will not be the last public official to become lost in Stanland.

            So where is “Stanland?”

            The imprecise reference is to a vast swath of Asia, stretching from Turkey to the western border of China, populated by a bewildering assortment of ethnic groups that give their names to an equally bewildering collection of provinces, autonomous republics, and countries. Remembering them all—not to mention finding them on a map—is a challenge, even for people who are supposed to know these things, such as diplomats and international relations experts.

            It’s similar to the geographical confusion brought on by the end of European colonialism in Africa a half century ago. It wasn’t enough for the imperial powers to surrender their political and economic dominance. They also had to learn postcolonial geographical vocabulary. It’s not Upper Volta any more. It’s Burkina Faso, and its capital is—get ready to roll those vowels—Ouagadougou.

            We all construct mental maps of essential information, and our maps are shaped as much by culture and pragmatism as by physical features and political boundaries. Of course, we all know about other places, but they don’t appear in our mental maps, not even on the fringes, unless they seem relevant. Even though Afghanistan has been embroiled in conflict since the Soviet invasion of 1979—or, to take a longer historical perspective, since the first Anglo-Afghan War of 1839–42—it was not on most Americans’ mental maps before September 11, 2001.

            As long as Afghanistan and Pakistan were the only “stans” we had to remember, the map was reasonably manageable. Then Mikhail Gorbachev came along. The collapse of the Soviet Union gave us fourteen new countries (plus Russia) including the five “stans” of Central Asia—Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan. We can be grateful the Soviet Union did not break up any further, or we would have to deal with Bashkortostan, Dagestan, and Tatarstan (now Russian republics). Or that Armenia did not adopt its native name, Hayastan. Or that the Central Asian republics themselves did not splinter, with Karakalpakstan breaking away from Uzbekistan.

            If we struggle to remember the “stans,” is it more helpful to think about “Central Asia”? It depends. In terms of geopolitics, it’s a more elastic region, partly because it is (apart from the Caspian Sea) landlocked, so has no coastline for demarcation. Since September 11, Afghanistan has often been classified as Central Asia. The north of the country, bordering Uzbekistan, has a large ethnic Uzbek population; in the east, Tajiks are a significant minority. By religion, culture, and language, the Uighurs of China’s Xinjiang Autonomous Region have more in common with the Kazakhs and Kyrgyz than with the rest of China, and Uighur nationalists dream of reuniting with their neighbors in a Greater Turkestan region. The Caspian Sea clearly divides the Caucasus republics of Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia, and the Russian republics of Dagestan, Chechnya, and Ingushetia, from Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and Turkmenistan, although some policy experts lump them together as “Central Asia and the Caucasus.” What about Mongolia? Ethnically, Kazakhs and Kyrgyz are Mongols. Unlike other regions that can be neatly subdivided, Central Asia is amorphous, expanding and contracting as it is viewed through different political, social, economic, and cultural lenses.

            In Postcards from Stanland, I use the narrow political definition of Central Asia to refer to these five former Soviet republics--: Kazakhstan, Kyrgystan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan. Since 1995, I have faced the challenge of trying to explain the region to colleagues, students, and friends. After one trip to Kyrgyzstan, a colleague insisted I had been in Kurdistan (which does not yet exist, except in Northern Iraq and in the maps of Kurdish separatist movements).

            “No, K-oe-rg-oe-zstan,” I replied, trying to wrap my tongue around the challenging Russian vowel “ы” in the first and second syllables. I gave the ten-second profile. “Poor country, former Soviet Union, borders China, beautiful mountains and lakes, nomadic herders with sheep and horses, lots of meat in the diet, bad hotels, slow Internet, very hospitable people.”

            You would have thought the conflict in Afghanistan would have focused the attention of Westerners on the countries next door, but unfortunately it hasn’t. Just as medieval European maps tagged vast regions of Africa, Asia, and America as terra incognita, the five Central Asian republics are a geographical blank between Afghanistan and Pakistan to the west and China to the east. To many Westerners, my travels might as well have been on another planet. I had simply been in “Stanland.”

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.

Postcards from Stanland: Journeys in Central Asia (Ohio University Press, 2016) is available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Books-a-Million and other online retailers. Read excerpts at www.davidhmould.com (Travel Blogs) or Facebook /PostcardsFromStanland/ or view readings and interviews on YouTube

         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).

A very well-appointed yurt.  My interpreter, Diana Akizhanova, is third from the right

Shirdaks and traditional Kazakh handicrafts

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 my interpreter Diana Akizhanova, 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.”

Snow days in Astana

          Kazakhstan’s capital Astana is renowned for its futuristic and eclectic (or ostentatious and jumbled, depending on one’s aesthetic) architecture.  It also has a more dubious distinction: it’s the second coldest capital city in the world.

Postcards from Stanland: Journeys in Central Asia (Ohio University Press, 2016) is available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Books-a-Million and other online retailers. Read excerpts at www.davidhmould.com (Travel Blogs and Articles) or Facebook /PostcardsFromStanland/ or view readings and interviews on YouTube

           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 Fellowship began in mid-January and I was prepared.  My wife 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.  As I stood shivering at the bus stop, my U.S. embassy 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 fall on deaf ears.   Alexander, 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 10 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 risk of falling.  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.  At weekends, I would walk 15-20 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 will 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.

The Dubai of the Steppe

Photo by Natalie Koch

Excerpt from Postcards from Stanland: Journeys in Central Asia published by the Ohio University (Swallow) Press in March 2016

            For many visitors, the capital of Kazakhstan is an astonishing sight—unlike any other city they’ve seen. My first impressions—from the air and then from the airport highway—evoked otherworldly metaphors. Strange shapes rose out of the steppe—spires, domes, globes, ovals, and pyramids in gold, silver, blue, and turquoise. The taxi passed the gleaming facade of Nazarbayev University, then sports stadiums and arenas built for the 2011 Asian Winter Games, with their massive, curved metal and concrete spans. Then triumphal arches, monumental public buildings, upscale apartment blocks, the huge Nur Astana mosque, shopping malls, and manicured parks, most of which on a chilly Saturday afternoon in September were almost deserted.

Photo by Natalie Koch

            Whatever you think about futuristic architecture (or what it cost to build it, and whether the money could have been better invested in Kazakhstan’s social needs), Astana is unlike any other capital city in Central Asia. Almaty (the former capital) and Tashkent look like other Soviet-era cities with their colonnaded public buildings and monotonous apartment blocks. Bishkek and Dushanbe have similar architecture, but are rougher around the edges. Astana looks more like Dubai. It is growing fast, but even by the latest (2012) population estimate of 775,000, it is still less than half the size of Almaty or Tashkent (each of which has about two million inhabitants). However, the futuristic architecture makes Astana look and feel bigger. Which is exactly what its chief conceptual architect, President Nursultan Nazarbayev, intended.

Photo by Natalie Koch

        Like other capital cities throughout human history, Astana is designed to impress visitors. Just as medieval travelers returned home with tales of the fabulous cities of the East, modern travelers to Astana are treated to a visual spectacle. Astana is a twenty-first-century version of Karakorum, the thirteenth-century capital city of the Mongol Empire.  Contemporary visitors to Karakorum were suitably awed, perhaps because they thought the Mongols were too busy rampaging and pillaging their way across Asia and Eastern Europe to actually build anything more than siege fortifications and campfires.

            In 1253, the Flemish Franciscan William of Rubruck, who had accompanied the French king Louis IX on the Seventh Crusade, set out from Constantinople for Karakorum. Louis had given the monk the medieval version of mission impossible—convert the Mongols to Christianity. Whether or not William knew the futility of his assignment, he set out to record his party’s journey in detail, producing one of the great travel narratives of the age, comparable to that of Marco Polo.

            After traveling for almost seven thousand miles William and his companions entered a wealthy, bustling city at the heart of a major trading network, with markets, temples, and a cosmopolitan population, including Christians. The Great Khan even staged a debate at court among adherents of Islam, Christianity, and Buddhism. William’s detailed account of the journey and the six-month stay at Karakorum, and the reports of other missionaries and merchants, helped to counter popular views of the Mongols as a murderous horde.

Photo by Natalie Koch

           Like Karakorum, Astana is the concrete symbol of a modern and business-friendly Kazakhstan, an emerging economic and cultural power at the crossroads between Europe and Asia. In his writings and public speeches, Nazarbayev positions Kazakhstan within Eurasia, arguing that the nation embodies the best of the West and the East in its economy, education, religion, civil society, and values. The Eurasian motif is visible in the signature architecture of Astana, where elements of Western and Eastern design are combined. Astana hosts Eurasian conferences and events; businesses claim to reach the Eurasian market; Eurasian National University is the largest institution of higher education in the capital.

Photo by Natalie Koch

            For Nazarbayev, Astana was never the otherworldly, utopian fantasy that its critics have claimed.  Astana is a combination of Karakorum and Dubai, the center of a new Mongol empire built, not on military conquest, but on oil and gas revenues, authoritarian government, investments in technology and education, and soft diplomacy with the West, Russia, and China. In a commentary to mark Astana Day, the city’s fifteenth anniversary, on July 6, 2013, Nazarbayev wrote: “The fate of Astana is the fate of all Kazakhstanis who have boldly crossed the threshold between two centuries. This is the fate of independent Kazakhstan, which has walked the great path from the obscure fringe of a fallen superpower known to few in the world to a dynamic modern state which the international community knows and respects.” Astana Day was also (not coincidentally) Nazarbayev’s seventy-third birthday. For the crowds who attended the birthday celebrations and the millions who watched the spectacle on TV, the association between city, country, and president was more than metaphorical. Astana was Kazakhstan. Nazarbayev had created Astana. Ergo, Nazarbayev was Kazakhstan.

Postcards from Stanland: Journeys in Central Asia (Ohio University Press, 2016) is available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Books-a-Million and other online retailers, or from your local bookstore.  Read excerpts at www.davidhmould.com (Travel Blogs and Articles) or Facebook /PostcardsFromStanland/ or view readings and interviews on YouTube, http://bit.ly/davidhmould

Tagged: Kazakhstan, Astana, capital, architecture, image, Karakorum, 

It's a bird, it's a plane. No, it's only space junk.

Excerpt from Postcards from Stanland: Journeys in Central Asia published by the Ohio University Press (2016)

Mir space station mock-up at Karaganda EcoMuseum

Just off the main drag in Karaganda, a coal mining and industrial city in northern Kazakhstan, the EcoMuseum is housed on the first floor of a local government administration building. You have to know where you’re going because there’s no sign on the street, and only a small one on the door. 

The museum features an eclectic mix of artifacts and interpretive exhibits from central and northeastern Kazakhstan, a region exceptionally rich with environmental problems. There are exhibits on mining, manufacturing, pollution, water resources, and energy conservation. The museum is also in the eco-tourism business, offering guided tours of Central Kazakhstan’s mountain and desert regions and Lake Balkhash, the largest lake in Central Asia.  Its signature “Back in the USSR” tour takes visitors back in time to the region’s prison labor camps, the Semipalitinsk nuclear test site, where the Soviets conducted above and below-ground nuclear tests for 40 years, and the village of Aksu, whose claim to fame is its alley of Soviet monuments with busts and statues of Lenin.    

The museum’s flashiest exhibit—and the one most popular with school groups—is the space center, with its mock-up of the Mir space station control room.  It’s like the flight deck of the Starship Enterprise or a scene from Dr. Strangelove with banks of monitors, flashing lights, control levers and dials and a throbbing, techno sound track.

On both sides of the space station, the museum floor looks like a junk yard with misshapen chunks of metal, some partly burned, with barely distinguishable Cyrillic markings.  Most of the items were salvaged from the Soviet military base at Lake Balkash in the south of Karaganda oblast.  When the Soviet Army left its bases in Kazakhstan, it abandoned tons of military hardware—trucks, artillery, mortars, ammunition, communications equipment, as well as huts and furniture.  Economic times were hard, and local people moved in to salvage and sell what they could.  Most of the metal went for scrap, but some ended up at the EcoMuseum.

Credit for the collection goes to EcoMuseum director Dmitry Kalmykov, a trained scientist.  As a child growing up in Ukraine, he loved to collect scrap metal and bring it home.  “When I moved to Karaganda and discovered there was all this stuff from the military and the nuclear test site, it reawakened my childhood interest,” he said.  Dmitry started picking up metal debris during a 1992 scientific investigation at the Semipalitinsk nuclear test site and hasn’t stopped since.

The gems of the collection are parts of rockets launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome, 550 miles away in the semi-desert of southwestern Kazakhstan.  For the Soviet Union, the remote location—far away from population centers and, presumably, the long lenses of U.S. spy planes—was ideal for its military space program.  From the first human space mission in 1961, when cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin’s brief jaunt stunned the U.S. into kick-starting its own manned space program, Baikonur has been the launch site for all Soviet and Russian crewed space missions and for rockets carrying satellites.

When the Soviet Union collapsed, Russia’s space program faced a difficult problem—its launch site was now in a foreign country.  Although Russia claimed that it should still control the cosmodrome, the military installations and forces guarding them, Kazakhstan insisted that Russia not only agree to joint control but start paying rent on the place.  In 1994, Kazakhstan agreed to lease the complex to Russia for about $120 million a year. 

Baikonur is a commercial success—the preferred launch site for most countries and private companies that want to get stuff (mostly communication satellites) into space.  More than 35,000 people work there.  It’s the no-frills discount store of space launch sites, easily beating the European and Asian competition for price.  Most launches use the cheap and well tested Proton rocket, the workhorse of the Soviet space program since its first launch in 1965 and one of the most successful heavy boosters in the history of spaceflight.

The people of central and northeastern Kazakhstan don’t see much from Kazakhstan’s $120 million-a-year rocket revenue.  But they sometimes see the rockets—or parts of them—out on the steppe.  Rockets are launched in a northeasterly direction from Baikonur, with the first stage burning off over an area that can range from 10 to 90 km wide, depending on the size of the rocket and its payload.  A large region of the steppe from Zhezkazgan in the south to Pavlodar in the north is within the ellipse of the rocket flight path. 

What doesn’t burn up in the atmosphere falls to earth—usually on the uninhabited steppe but sometimes near populated areas.  In 1999, a rocket carrying a communications satellite blew up soon after lift-off, scattering debris and fuel over a wide area.  A large section of rocket fell into the backyard of a house in a village near Karkaralinsk.  “This is dangerous material,” said Dmitry. “The nose of the first stage has an engine with rocket fuel.  It’s like a bomb and the fuel is highly toxic.”

After the 1999 crash, Kazakhstan briefly banned launches, demanding that Russia conduct an investigation and offer compensation.  The row delayed a scheduled supply flight carrying food, water and the navigational equipment to the beleaguered Mir space station.

Karaganda EcoMusuem director Dmitry Kalmykov

Dmitry worries about the authorities’ lack of preparedness and emergency plans.  He pulls out a map of the rocket ellipse.  “The akimat [local government] doesn’t have such a map.  If you ask the authorities where the danger area is, they don’t know.  Maybe it’s here, maybe it’s there.  We need to inform the people of the dangers.  If you’re informed, you’re aware.  Information is protection.”

Dmitry says the annual rent paid by Russia is supposed to cover the cost of safety measures—equipment and training for emergency personnel, medical staff and disposal teams, as well as safety precautions for the general population.   In 2001, a parliamentary committee held hearings on safety at Baikonur, and issued a report with about 30 recommendations.  These included low-cost technical fixes, such as installing radio beacons on rockets so that they can be more easily located in the vast steppe.  If radio beacons were used, says Dmitry, it would not have taken three days in 2006 to locate a rocket that spun out of control and crashed soon after lift-off, causing widespread ecological damage.

Despite the dangers, rural residents have resourcefully recycled the space junk that has dropped from the sky.  Rocket bodies have been turned into garages, animal sheds and outhouses, metal panels used for fencing for livestock, and smaller sections sold for scrap. Dmitry shows me albums of photos taken on tours of the steppe. Half a section of an aluminum rocket body makes a pretty good Quonset hut.  There’s an old Moskvich, parked in a garage built from mud bricks, with a rocket body for the roof.  Livestock standing on top of a rocket buried in the sand.  A herder dozing, his back resting against the nose of a rocket. A summer kitchen, with shelves stacked with canned goods and a cook stove. 

A rocket body makes a pretty good summer kitchen

I asked Dmitry which government agency was responsible for safety.  “That’s a prohibited question because nobody knows.  The space agency says the space industry is responsible.  The industry says the local akimat is responsible.  The akimat says it’s the Ministry for Emergency Situations.  The ministry says it’s responsible after an explosion or accident, but not before.  In Kazakhstan, no one takes responsibility.”

Postcards from Stanland: Journeys in Central Asia (Ohio University Press, 2016) is available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Books-a-Million and other online retailers, or from your local bookstore.  Read excerpts at www.davidhmould.com (Travel Blogs and Articles) or Facebook /PostcardsFromStanland/ or view readings and interviews on YouTube, http://bit.ly/davidhmould