Introducing Astana

Love it or hate it, Astana is here to stay as Kazakhstan’s capital. Just a medium-sized provincial city known for its bitter winters when President Nazarbaev named it out of the blue in 1994 as the country’s future capital, Astana replaced Almaty in 1997. Since then its skyline has grown more fantastical by the year as a reported 8% of the national budget is lavished on transforming vast acreage south of the Ishim River into a new governmental-administrative zone, with daring buildings combining Islamic, Soviet, Western and wacky futuristic influences.

Ministries and functionaries were obliged to make an early move to Astana and are now in the process of shifting again to their permanent quarters from temporary ones in the old centre north of the river. Foreign embassies are still trickling in. The old centre, which retains a feel of the provincial city that it was, is due to live on as Astana’s commercial and cultural centre when the new government complex is fully operational: the target date is 2030, by which time Astana will boast a population of over a million.

Astana has undergone several identity changes since it was founded in 1830 as a Russian fortress called Akmola (a Kazakh name meaning either ‘white tomb’ or ‘white plenty’). When Nikita Khrushchev announced his Virgin Lands scheme, Akmola became the project’s headquarters and was renamed Tselinograd (Virgin Lands City) in 1961. After the USSR collapsed, Akmola got back its old name, and would have kept it if Nazarbaev’s plan to shift the capital here hadn’t attracted such unfavourable comments. Cynics jibed that Akmola would be the president’s own political ‘white tomb’. Thus the place became simply Astana – Kazakh for ‘capital’. Reasons cited by Nazarbaev for the change were Astana’s more central and less earthquake-prone location than Almaty, and better transport links with Russia.

Some people find Astana impersonal, and compare the poverty in which some Kazakhs still live with the billions spent on fantasy architecture. But many Kazakhstanis are clearly proud of their new capital, and as an exercise in nation building its merits are obvious. It’s a fascinating process to witness.