The Fortress and the Frontier: Mobility, Culture, and Class in Almaty and Astana

Alima Bissenova

School of Humanities and Social Sciences

Nazarbayev University

53 Kabanbay Batyr Ave.

Astana, Republic of Kazakhstan 01000

abissenova@nu.edu.kz

Abstract

As the seat of the Kazakh government and a booming city since 1998, Astana has attracted hundreds of thousands of

migrants; as a cultural and financial capital, Almaty also continued to boom, drawing comparable numbers of migrants

from different regions of Kazakhstan. However, varying historical trajectories and historically constructed notions of

the urban and rural, as articulated by the cultural elites and policy-makers, as well as different preparedness of the

government for migration flows in the 1990s and the 2000s, in Almaty and Astana respectively, have resulted in quite

diverse attitudes toward mobility and different perceptions about how urban order should be achieved.

Anthropologists and sociologists who have conducted research of urban areas in Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan have noted

that rural-urban divisions often figure as the most salient class distinctions in the post-Soviet cityscape (Nazpari 2002;

Schroeder 2010; Yessenova 2010a; Zabirova, 2002a, 2002b, 2006; Flynn and Kosmarskaya 2011; Laszczkowski 2012;

Panicciari 2012; Mamedov 2014). In some way, these distinctions reflect the transformation that post-Soviet cities,

particularly the capitals of the post-Soviet republics, have undergone after the dissolution of the Soviet Union – the out-

migration of Slavic and other European populations and the influx of rural people from the ‘titular’ majorities

(Yessenova 2005, 2010a; Grant 2010; Darieva 2011; Humphrey & Skvriskaja 2012; Panicciari 2012). The increasing

mobility of the masses from the national majorities left representatives of the national elites feeling under siege in cities

that had been their familiar cultural milieu for decades (Yessenova 2010a; Grant 2010; Darieyva 2011; Flynn &

Kosmarskaya 2011; Panicciari 2012, Flynn, Kosmarskaya, & Sabirova 2014). This nationalisation of former Central

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Asian Soviet republics’ capitals took place both from above, by the nationalising state (e.g. through language policy,

renaming of streets) and from below by the incoming migrant masses who were often (mis)-perceived by the

established and second generation urbanites as lacking in properly urbane cosmopolitan qualities and representing

nothing but national backwardness and unpreparedness for ‘civilization’ (Dave 2007; Grant 2010; Yessenova 2010a;

Darieva 2011; Flynn & Kosmarskaya 2011; Diener and Hagen 2013, Flynn, Kosmarskaya & Sabirova 2014).

In this article, based on my ethnographic research from June 2008 to December of 2013 in Almaty and Astana (first-

hand observation of the urban transformation and ‘enculturation’ projects enunciated in both cities, as well as

participant observation of public debates and interviews with the civil society activists, prominent city residents, and

government officials involved in their respective city’s cultural policy making), I argue that in the post-Soviet period

different varieties of cultural policies towards migrants have characterised Kazakhification and migrant integration

processes in these two Kazakh capitals. Many of my interviewees, mainly, but not exclusively from Almaty, make

constant reference to history so I, too, generously complement my ethnographic investigation with research and

citations from historical and literary archival sources that together help to produce a representation of inter-ethnic and

inter-cultural relations in both cities during the Russian imperial and subsequent Soviet eras.

In the first part of the article, I attempt to reconceptualise the internal migration processes that have taken place in

Kazakhstan during the last 25 years not just as rural-to-urban but also as small-town-to-large-city and regional-centre-

to-capital migration. Based on historical and contemporary sources, I also argue that the perception of migration as rural

and as detrimental to the city is particularly prevalent in Almaty, a city that from its founding was conceived of as a

proper imperial city against the background of native backwardness and as a bulwark of European civilization on the

edge of the empire. In Astana, on the other hand, the ‘rural’ and the ‘native’ were incorporated into the identity of the

city from its very inception and throughout its development have been seen as an integral part of the city rather than the

‘pollutant’ against which it has to prevail. Furthermore, in examining the history and structural position of Almaty and

Astana in Russian imperial and Soviet times, I argue that these two cities, despite having their origins in Russian

colonial settlements, stand as two different representations of modernity: modernity as an inherited and established

tradition that has to be guarded from encroachment of un-modern elements versus modernity as a frontier and as a

middle ground with the potential of creative destruction and renewal. The stability of the markers and symbols of

modernity in Almaty when compared with their fluidity in Astana make the latter a more attractive space for social

mobility.

Because of various visions of proper urban order, and different configurations of centre-periphery relations in

these two cities, two distinct patterns of incorporating migrants into the cityscape emerge. In Almaty, migrants, most

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of them ethnic Kazakhs, have been arriving seeking jobs ‘quietly encroaching’1 upon the urban city centre from the

outskirts – the areas of Barakholka, Aksai, and Shanyrak2 – whereas in Astana, the very centre of the city has been

moved to the so-called ‘left bank’ to accommodate the newly arrived (notably, this is not the first time this has

happened in the city’s history). In her work on kazakhification of urban space in Almaty, Giullia Panicciari (2012)

exposes its urban class conflict as the tension between the mainly Russian-speaking (including urban Kazakhs)

centre and the periphery populated by Kazakh-speakers. According to Panicciari, in the perception of newly arrived

Kazakhs, ‘Kazakh people cannot afford to live in the best parts of the city’ and have to settle in the periphery in

districts that are isolated from the main part of the city and are stigmatised as being underclass (2012, pp. 41, 55-56).

This peripheral existence becomes the lot not only of unskilled, uneducated village migrants but also of the higher

educated who might even work at universities (Panicciari 2012, p. 41).

Whereas Almaty, in Giulia Paniaccari’s words presents ‘the story of difficult urbanisation of the Kazakh-

speaking population’ (2012, p. 52), Astana presents a different case where migrants, many of whom are Kazakh-

speakers,3 might find themselves a little bit more welcome for structural and cultural reasons. The public housing

program allows migrants with formal, even low-paid jobs (e.g. low-level public servants, doctors, nurses, and

teachers) to acquire subsidised apartments in the city centre affording them a chance to get a hold in the city and

ascend into the urban ‘middle’ class if not by income level at least by the fact of ownership of the apartments they

1The term ‘quiet encroachment’ describing the strategies of the urban poor to claim and expand their space in the

city was first introduced in Asef Bayat’s Street Politics: Poor People's Movements in Iran (1997) and then further

developed in the Urban Informality: Transnational Perspectives from the Middle East, Latin America and South

Asia (2004).

2Barakholka means flea market in Russian (also black market in the late Soviet era), and it is quite an ironic

misnomer for what has become the largest open-air market in Kazakhstan, in the west of Almaty. Aksai is a low-

prestige micro-district in the South-West of the city. Shanyrak is an illegal settlement on the outskirts of Almaty

(next to Barakholka), which is now being gradually legalised.

3 According to the official statistics, by the beginning of 2015 ethnic Kazakhs comprised 75% of Astana’s

population while ethnic  Russians  made 15,63%; in Almaty the proportion was 57,17% for Kazakhs and 28,46,96%

for Russians. Out of the four largest Kazakhstani cities – in descending order Almaty, Shymkent, Astana,

Karaganda – Astana currently has the highest Kazakh population. See ‘Chislennost’ naseleniya Respubliki

Kazahstan po otdel’nym etnosam na nachalo 2015 goda,’ available at: http://stat.gov.kz/getImg?id=ESTAT101215,

accessed 1 November 2015 3

inhabit. Today, Astana is a city with the largest amount of various subsidised housing schemes, which include

housing through workplace arrangements, public housing program, buy-for-rent housing (arendnoe zhil’yo s

vykupom) and others. Subsidised public housing program (Gosudarstvennaya zhilishchnaya programma), under

which housing eventually turns into a private property of applicants, favours certain categories of citizens with

modest salaries but permanent jobs. In particular, it targets workers of the social sphere (teachers, doctors, street

cleaners) and young families, who married quite early. A category of ‘young family’ which qualified for public

housing until recently was defined as one in which both spouses were under 29, with children (the more, the better).

In Almaty, on the other hand, for many reasons, such as transportation problems, prohibitive housing prices4 a

clear hierarchy and great social distance5 between ‘upper’ and ‘lower’ districts mirroring pollution distributions in

the city, a limited number of subsidized public housing is usually only available in ‘lower’ non-prestigious districts

far-removed from the city core, impeding migrants from scaling the urban social ladder and claiming full inclusion

in the cityscape. ‘What can Almaty offer to Kazakhs?’ asked one of my interviewees, a well-known Almaty urban

planner. ‘Only life in places like Shanyrak…Of course, they had better go to Astana!’6

As we see from the abovementioned quote, many urban and regional planners were convinced that Astana could

become a panacea saving Almaty from its overcrowded-ness, environmental problems, and brewing class conflict.7

However, the relocation8 has not stopped the influx of migrants to Almaty. The population of Astana has grown

4

Despite the relocation of capital to Astana, the housing prices in Almaty remained much higher throughout the

2000s.

5 The social distance between the upper and lower districts was already established in the Soviet Master Plans of the

city. For example, 1963 Master Plan developed by the ‘Lengiprogor’ Design Institute from Leningrad stated that the

lower parts of the city were to be inhabited by workers, the middle part (from the current Prospect Raiymbek to Tole

Bi) by people working in the service sector, and the central part of the city (From Tole Be and higher up) by the

Communist party and government apparatchiks, as well as the representatives of academics and the arts. See

Bobovich, G. pri uchastii T. Basenova. General’nyi Plan g. Alma-Aty. (1963) ‘Lengriprogor’

6 Interview with the prominent Kazakhstani urban planner in Almaty, 25 July, 2012

7 This has been aggravated by ecological pressures. In fact, in the Master Plan of Astana (2001) authored by the

Japanese team of experts led by Kisho Kurokawa, environmental pressure was cited as one of the five main reasons

for the transfer of the capital. See General’nyi Plan Razvitiya Goroda Astany. (2001) Japan International

Cooperation Agency. Tom II. Ob’’yasnitel’naya Zapiska.

8 The capital was officially moved to Astana in 1998.4

from 319,300 in 1999 to 852,882 by the end of 2014; in the same period, the number of inhabitants in Almaty

increased from 1,129,4000 to 1,642,334.9 On the one hand, mass migration to Astana and Almaty has been a result

of the structural adjustment, de-industrialisation and impoverishment of the countryside that followed the collapse of

the Soviet Union. On the other hand, the dream of development together with the expectation of material

improvement inculcated by the Soviet system has by no means been crushed. In fact, many scholars have noted a

renewed orientation towards development on the part of the Kazakhstani regime since the beginning of the 2000s

(Adams & Rustemova 2009; Koch 2010; Laszczkowski 2012). People who migrate to Almaty and Astana are still

moved by what Tania Li (2007) calls a ‘will to improve’ – collective aspiration for social mobility and modern

urban life.

Urbanisation and Kazakhification

Despite the wide-spread urban stereotype of rural migrants invading the cities, Kazakhstani sociologists note that,

statistically, a great number of the newcomers to cities like Astana and Almaty also come from many towns that

have seen various degrees of urbanisation (Tatibekov 2005, Zabirova 2002b, 2006). According to the Agency of

Statistics of Kazakhstan, between the years of 2000 and 2013 net domestic (out)-migration from rural areas has

constituted little more than 20 % of the total internal migration in Kazakhstan, with the rest consisting of city-to-city

(or, to be more precise, small-town-to-big-city and regional-centre-to-capital) migration.10 In a sense, we could say

that the continued urbanisation of Almaty and Astana – as well as of a few other regional centres like Shymkent and

oil-rich Atyrau and Aktau – has been occurring at the expense of de-urbanisation and de-industrialisation in so many

places that had once followed the logic of Soviet industrial expansion. The effects of post-Soviet de-industrialisation

and restructuring have been particularly devastating in smaller urban centres, especially in towns that sprang up

around factories, plants, and mines (like mining towns Abai and Shahtinsk near Karaganda) or were a part of the

Soviet military complex (like Stepnogorsk near Astana), which fell into depression at this time.

So, while the movement of people into the big cities in Kazakhstan is often described as rural-urban mobility, it

should more accurately be referred to as mobility from settlements of ‘low and medium urbanisation’ to settlements

of ‘high urbanisation.’11 Interestingly, if we look at the actual proportion of urban versus rural population, we find

9 The data is taken from 'Chislennost’ naseleniya Respubliki Kazahstan po oblastyam, gorodam, raionam na nachalo

2015 goda,' available at: http://stat.gov.kz/getImg?id=ESTAT100236 , accessed 1 November 2015

10 The calculations are based on the yearly data from the stat.gov.kz

11 In the Soviet territorial planning there was a gradation of settlements by the degree of urbanisation: non-urban,

beginning, medium, and high. For instance, by the end of the 1980s, there were 270 ‘urban’ settlements in the 5

that it has not changed significantly over the 20 years of Kazakhstan’s independence. 12 In fact, the overall urban

population had decreased in the 1990s but then bounced back in the 2000s and 2010s: in 1991, the share of urban

population was 57.3 %; by the end of 2014, it was 56.65 %.13 The real change occurred with regards to the

concentration of urban population residing in large cities. In 1989, Kazakhstan had 21 cities with populations

exceeding 100,000 and only two of them – Almaty and Karaganda – had populations in excess of 500,000

(Zimovina 2009).14 So, if in 1989 only 17 % of city inhabitants lived in cities larger than 500,000, today (in 2015) 40

% of the city population dwell in such large cities (in descending order Almaty, Shymkent, Astana, and recently also

Karaganda).15 At the same time, former industrial strongholds such as Zhezkazgan, Temirtau, Ekibastuz, Balkhash,

and even regional centres with quite large populations such as Ust-Kamenogorsk and Taraz, continue to dwindle

from lack of opportunities and subsequent outmigration to bigger boom cities.16

An important dimension of all this is that, between 1991 and 2010, about 3.5 million people emigrated (most of

them to Russia and Germany), while only about 1.4 million immigrated. Most of these immigrants were oralmany –

ethnic Kazakh ‘returnees’ –which added a clear ethnic dimension to post-Soviet mobility in Kazakhstan.17 As a result of

Kazakh SSR but only a dozen of them were considered highly-urbanised, 110 of them were at the ‘beginning stage’

of urbanization –with the population just above 10,000 people and a low provision of urban services and facilities.

Most of these urban settlements at the ‘beginning stage’ of urbanisation were so-called raionnye tsentry, with a large

proportion of administrative and technocratic jobs.

12 In her article on the processes of urbanization in Post-Soviet Kazakhstan published in the Demoskop magazine,

Kazakhstani sociologist and demographer Elena Zimovina (2009) calculates that the proportion of urban population

has decreased more dramatically.

13 'Chislennost’ naseleniya Respubliki Kazahstan po oblastyam, gorodam, raionam na nachalo 2015 goda,' available

at: http://stat.gov.kz/getImg?id=ESTAT100236 , accessed 1 November 2015

14 Throughout the 1990s Karaganda had a negative saldo of migration, however, after the relocation of the capital to

Astana Karaganda has started to regain its prominence as a large city. It reached the 500,000 threshold again in

2015.

15 This data is from the ‘Demograficheskii Ezhegodnik Kazahstana 2014, available at:

http://www.stat.gov.kz/getImg?id=ESTAT098168 , accessed 1 November 2015

16 This situation recently prompted the government to adopt a new program for the development of small towns.

17 ‘Kazakhstan Za Gody Nezavisimosti 1991-2010,’ available at: http://www.stat.gov.kz/getImg?

id=WC16200014840 , accessed 1 November 20156

these internal and external migration flows, both Astana and Almaty, as well as other formerly Russian-dominated cities

like Karaganda, have been largely ‘Kazakhified.’

There are different views on the effects of the Kazakhification of Kazakhstani cities. According to some nationalist

accounts, these cities have received a healthy injection of Kazakh traditionalism, and the imbalance of Soviet times,

where the Slavic and other European populations lived in the cities while the Kazakh populace lived in the countryside

has been rectified (Gali 2004; Sarym 2009). In other accounts, such as those recorded by Joma Nazpari (2002),

Sebastien Peyrouse (2007, 2008) and Mateusz Laszczkowki (2012), Kazakh traditionalism is often held responsible for

all the problems ailing Kazakh society, the Kazakh state, and Kazakhstani cities – from corruption, scandals at the

highest levels of power to quotidian urban disorders. In the interviews documented by Joma Nazpari (2002), Sebastien

Peyrouse (2007, 2008) and Mateusz Laszczkowki (2012), Kazakhification is clearly equated with ruralisation and even

orientalisation of the country and Kazakh traditions are disparaged as archaic elements taking the country backwards

rather than projecting it forwards on the path of modernization. In his article about the perceptions and interpretative

framework of the Russians in Kazakhstan in the 1990s, Sebastien Peyrouse (2008) writes that in the perception of the

Russian diasporic organization, Kazakhification means ‘closing the door to European culture’ (Peyrouse 2008, p. 112).

Nazpari (2002, pp. 160-69) writes about gangs of newly urbanized Kazakh youth imposing their own vision of justice

and order, which includes the necessity to communicate in Kazakh on the urban scape of Almaty while the rest of the

population has to submit and recognize their supremacy. Laszczkowki (2012 pp.182-185), in his dissertation, describes

the discontent of the native Tselinogradtsy of Slavic descent18 with the influx of people from the South and from the

‘villages’ into Astana. Although Nazpari and Laszczkowski, having conducted ethnographic fieldwork in Almaty and

Astana respectively, emphasize that rural-urban divisions tend to transcend ethnic boundaries, they also recognize that

behaviors and dispositions that are considered by their urbanite informants as ‘rural’ and ‘underclass’ are often

associated with the Kazakh language and, thus, in everyday urban interactions, class lines are often drawn along the

perceptions of the ‘right’ Russian accent and Russian language fluency (Nazpari 2002; Laszczkowski 2012).

So, one definite consequence of Kazakhification that transpires from these accounts by scholars, journalists, and

commentators is that Kazakhification of the cities has created some very strong cultural divisions, which are seen to

correspond to the class divisions within the cityscape. In her book, The Politics and Poetics of the Nation: Urban

Narratives of Kazakh Identity (2010a), Saulesh Yessenova describes the situation of rural Kazakhs in Almaty as that

of the ‘subaltern urban’ or ‘urban underclass.’ Her book captures and analyses negative attitudes prevailing among

more established city residents, both Russians and Kazakhs, towards the recent migrants from rural areas – mostly

18 Laszczkowki’s research is based mainly on interviews with ‘native’ Tselinogradtsy of Slavic descent. I, on the

other hand, have also interviewed several Tselinogradsty of Kazakh descent. 7

ethnic Kazakhs. Saulesh Yessenova (2010a) traces ethnographically and historically how long-time city dwellers

develop vernacular and even intellectual discourses about the marginality and backwardness of the rural migrants.

Based on her empirical work in the Almaty bazaars, which, during the 1990s, due to the absence of other jobs, were

saturated with rural migrants, Saulesh Yessenova (2010a) challenges the prevalent discourses about the perceived

incapability of migrants to integrate and to acculturate to city space. With several ethnographic examples, she proves

how rural migrants, on the contrary, quickly adapt to urban ways of life and over quite a short period of time

develop the dispositions of city dwellers. Many of her informants, after a brief stint at working as petty traders or

even in racket gangs, managed to move to formal sector work in the city and to stabilise their positions in terms of

acquiring permanent jobs and permanent residences. According to Saulesh Yessenova (2005, 2010a), therefore, the

so-called ineptness of rural migrants for urban life exists mostly in the perception of long term city dwellers and

certain intellectuals, including a number of prominent Kazakhs, like the late Nurbolat Massanov, who saw recent

migrants ‘out of place’ in the city pulling it back out of its bright and progressive modernist path. Ironically, the

enormous contribution that migrants make to both the formal and informal economy of the city and its growth as the

country’s commercial and business capital becomes submerged beneath prominent intellectuals’ public discussions

about ‘uncultured-ness’ and a degradation of post-Soviet Almaty due to uncontrolled migration (Yessenova 2010b).

This division within the Kazakh nation between the newly urbanised Kazakhs and the long-time city Kazakhs,

who, it should be noted, are often only second or third generation city dwellers, themselves, has been the topic of

countless articles and intense discussion in the Kazakhstani media and internet forums.19 Needless to say, the

problem of ‘peasants in the city’ is not unique to Kazakhstan. It has been the topic of many works starting from the

classical Polish Peasant in Europe and America (1918-1920) to the more recent and more local problem of the

‘ruralization’ of post-Soviet cities (Humphrey 2002; Nazpari 2002; Darieva 2011; Humphrey 2013). In Kazakhstan,

however, this division between the newly and the longer urbanized coincides (but never completely overlaps) with

the cultural division between the Kazakh-speaking Kazakhs and Russified Kazakhs. Although both Kazakh-

speaking and Russian-speaking Kazakhs are usually effectively bilingual, being effective to function in both

environments, the problem usually relates to the fluency with which one speaks Kazakh and/or Russian (e.g. one

would be identified as a recent villager if one speaks accented Russian) and different cultural dispositions and

preferences (e.g. to speak Kazakh or Russian in a certain setting). Both sides of the divide have a range of

derogatory terms to choose from in order to identify ‘the other’ – recent rural migrants are often called mambety and

kolkhozniki, Russified Kazakhs are called shala-kazakhi, asfal’tovye kazakhi, and mankurty.

19 the google search of the word mambet returns more than 10,000 results8

The cleavage between shala Kazakh (half-Kazakh) and dala Kazakh (steppe Kazakh) has historical roots

reaching back perhaps to even pre-colonial times when nomadic Kazakhs and Uzbeks would move to Central Asian

city settlements and assume, to a greater extent, the lifestyle of sedentary people – sarts. The use of the name shala-

kazakh has been found as early as the middle of the 19 th century – sometimes describing Kazakhs who settled in the

cities of Orenburg, Omsk, and Semipalatinsk, but also designating ethnic others who came to live with and like

Kazakhs. In 1919-1920, the famous Kazakh poet Sultanmahmut Torayghyrov penned a poem ‘Qala men Dala

Aitysy’ – a poetic competition between two poets representing the city and the village, in which they argue as to

which one is more moral and more suitable for Kazakhs. During the late Soviet era, Chingiz Aitmatov’s ‘A Day

Lasts Longer than a Century’ (1980) painted the character of a modern Kazakh mankurt – a son of the village

strongman who had gone to live in the city to avoid burdening himself with the traditions of his forefathers and the

duties to his extended family; his father’s wish to be buried in a family burial being an inconvenient nuisance for

him. In the post-Soviet era, discussion of this duality within the Kazakh nation intensified as both the general public

and the literary society reflected on the fate of the Kazakh nation torn between two poles. A number of writers noted

that the alleged opposition between shala and nagyz Kazakhs is a reflection of the increasing competition for limited

resources, including public resources and public service jobs (Isakhanov 2010; Usmanov 2010). Journalist

Isakhanov (2010) writes that rural or Kazakh-speaking so-called naghyz Kazakhs cannot compete with their more

urbanized and more Russified brethren on a professional basis, so in order to overcome the otherwise

insurmountable competition they resort to symbolic violence establishing ‘moral superiority’ based on their

knowledge of the Kazakh language and traditions. Usmanov (2010), another well-known journalist, calls in his

writings on shala-kazakhi to form their own party and actively participate in political life, otherwise the current

takeover of naghyz-kazahi over the state apparatus would spell the ‘return to the middle ages’ for the whole country.

Kazakh Russian-language writer, a member of the International Pen-Club and Kazakhstani Writers Union, Kanat

Kabdrakhmanov (2012) argues that shala Kazakhs are no less patriotic than their counter-parts, only their patriotism

is oriented towards civilization-building rather than nation-building and is not language-based. Zhumabay

Zhakupov, in his book Shala Kazakh (2009) similarly gives a sympathetic view of the shala-kazakh, as a guilt-

suffering person quite out of touch with his historical origins but who is nevertheless trying to discover his roots and

reclaim his identity, and then also suggest a political program for shala-kazakhs' as a progressive social group.

Unfortunately, the other side of the divide – consisting of newly urbanized Kazakh-speaking Kazakhs, still

remains in the ‘subaltern’ stage of not speaking for itself. The experience of being a mambet is not reflected,

analyzed and psychologized in the same way as an experience of being a Russified shala Kazakh. Some remnants of

the Kazakh language intelligentsia (ziyaly qawym) try to speak for and on behalf of naghyz Kazakhs but their efforts

9

remain swatted and discredited in the popular media, including by the writers cited above, as political demagogy --

not a heart-felt and suffered for position. These subaltern Kazakhs, then, are supposed to be represented by the

nationalizing state whose policies are designed to reward Kazakh speakers and those who maintain their Kazakh

identity (Nazpari 2002; Dave 2007).

The debate on the division of the Kazakh nation between the naghyz and shala is further convoluted by the

increasingly felt presence of other Kazakhs – oralmans from China, Mongolia, and Uzbekistan. On the one hand,

these oralmans, particularly those coming from China and Uzbekistan, often endowed with skills and technological

knowledge, cannot be reduced to ‘unworthy rurals’, but on the other hand, speaking good Kazakh, they are often

seen as government tools of further Kazakhification. At the same time, the oralmans are not a competing

constituency for shala-kazakhs as they are preoccupied with adaptive survival rather than politically charged

moralizing discourses of which naghyz-kazakhs are often accused.

‘European’ Fortress and ‘Asian’ Frontier: a Symbiosis?

Quite expectedly, Astana and Almaty are at the crucible of this cultural class conflict between shala Kazakhs (long

urbanized) and naghyz Kazakhs (newly urbanized)20. For structural, historical, and cultural reasons, Astana seems to

have been better positioned to integrate both rural and urban components of Kazakhstani society producing more

amenable discourse and dynamics of migration21.

Akmolinsk (now Astana) was founded in 1832 as a very small wooden fortress –a seat for the regional Kazakh

aga-sultan Konyrkuldzha Khudaimendin and a center of Akmolinskii okrug (Bekmakhanov 1992 [1948], p. 125).

Based on his work in the Omsk archives, local historian and author of many works on the history of Tselinograd,

Andrei Dubitskii writes that on the day of the Akmolinsk okrug’s (in Kazakh duan) inauguration a yurt with a two-

sided flag – a Russian double-headed eagle on the one side and a Kazakh warrior on a horse on the other, was

positioned near the military barracks and Konyrkuldzha with many other Kazakh noblemen – volost’ heads and local

judges (biis in Kazakh) – took an oath of allegiance, while the military saluted by firing volleys (Dubitskii 1986, p.

27). The Russian regiment responsible for the establishment of prikaz (local administration) in the new okrug

reported that, when they arrived, there had been about 20 Kazakh (Kirgiz in the language of the time) households

settled in the area near the yet-to-be-established fortress along the river Ishim. It was also reported that some of them

had already been engaged in khlebopashetsvo (husbandry) without any help from the authorities (bez posobiya ot

20 This is the translation by connotation. Shala literally means ‘not fully’ and naghyz means ‘real.’

21 In his recent article published in Nationalities Papers Bernard Koeppen (2013) also notes the ‘cultural inclusivity’

of Astana. 10

kazny, sobstvennym izhdiveniem) for 50 years22. The head of the regiment listed the names of the Kazakhs eligible

for financial help or help with agricultural instruments. Kirgiz around the Akmolinsk fortress were in no way

exceptional in attracting Omsk governorship attention. As Virginia Martian writes in her Law and Custom in the

Steppe (2001), in the first part of the 19th century the collaboration of prominent Kazakhs and the general Kazakh

population was essential and sought after, particularly through the establishment of aga-sultan offices and the

inclusion of Kazakhs in the newly established okrug centers. So, in 1832, reports listing ‘progressive’ Kirgiz

engaged in khlebopashetsvo and other prominent Kirgiz who were nominated for help from the colonial budget for

their support of the new administration were sent to Omsk from Karkaralinsk, Kokchetav, Ust’-Kamenogorsk,

Bayanaul, and other new and more established older settlements in Northern Kazakhstan.

After the initial establishment of Akmolinsik, its fortress status, however, could not be supported for long: there

were not enough construction materials to fortify it and not enough regular government forces to defend it. During

the Kenesary uprising, it was partly burnt down and Konyrkuldzha Khudaimendin lost most of his herds. In 1845,

Akmolinsk’s status was changed from a fortress (krepost) into a Cossack village (stanitsa). 23 In 1852, two seasonal

trade fairs were established which eventually made the settlement grow into a known trading town where many

Kazakhs also settled (Kabul’dinov 2007). According to the first Russian census of 1897, 4612 Russians, 3020

Kazakhs, and 1035 Tatars lived there24. Kazakhs comprised more than 30% of the town’s population making it the

third largest Kazakh-concentrated city after Semipalatinsk and Kazalinsk. Many of these Kazakh citizens were

involved in trade and several were prominent in Akmolinsk’s public and social life. For example, the

Koshchegulovs, a well-known family that owned a combined confectionery and cookie factory (konfektno-

pryanichnaya fabrika), were the sponsors of the Kazakh Theater, of the Muslim school, and of the central mosque

22 See ‘Raport nachal’nika Akmolinskogo voennogo otryada polkovnika F. K. Shubina omskomu oblastnomu

nachal’niku B.I. de Sent-Loranu ot 25 avgusta 1832g’, in Istoriya Kazakhstana v Russkikh istochnikakh XVI-XX

vekov, VIII tom, chast’ 1. (2006) (Almaty, Daik-Press)

23 On the porousness of the Cossack settlements, Kazakhs’ inclusion in these settlements and the formation of a

“frontier society of interests” in Northern Kazakhstan see Malikov, Yuriy (2010) Tsars, Cossacks, and Nomads. The

Formation of a Borderland Culture in Northern Kazakhstan in the 18th and 19th Centuries.

24 See ‘Raspredelenie naseleniya po rodnomu yazyku i uezdam Rossijskoi Imperii krome gubernii Evropeiskoi

Rossii. Akmolinskii Uezd, Gorod Akmolinsk’, in Pervaya Vseobshchaya perepis’ naseleniya Rossiiskoi Imperii

1897 g. Available at http://demoscope.ru/weekly/ssp/emp_lan_97_uezd.php?reg=78811

that was built in 1887. Shaimerden Koshchegulov, an offshoot of the same family and a local mullah, also served as

a deputy to the first and the second Russian Duma for Akmolinsk oblast’.25

Unlike Akmolinsk, Vernyi (now Almaty) was meticulously planned and built as a proper imperial fortress to be

the seat of the Russian military governor (voennyi gubernator) at a historical juncture when the Russian control of

Central Asia was unquestionable and local participation in the city construction was not much needed. It was a

proper European city in terms of its layout –straight lanes criss-crossing each other with wide parallel lanes as main

avenues –intended to set example to and to dominate the surrounding socio-cultural landscape (Tuyakbaeva 2008).

The chief architect of Vernyi from 1883 to 1903 was the naturalized French civil engineer Paul Gaourdiue

(Buketova et al 2012). From its very inception Vernyi was envisaged as a symbol of imperial power on the frontier –

the edge of the Empire’s political, cultural, and even natural border (as the mountains of Alatau serve as a natural

border with the Xinjiang autonomous region of China). Historical accounts also document the late Soviet

conceptualization of Almaty as a fortress against its natural environment of mountains and mountain rivers (Elie

2013). The purpose of such fortress cities as Vernyi, Russian Tashkent, and even Vladivostok in the Far East (all of

these cities were built approximately during the same time in the 1860-1880s) was to identify the border of the

Empire with its center and to symbolize European-ness in Asia26.

Despite all the regime changes, the city establishment of Almaty has, in many ways, managed to retain this fortress

mentality to defend itself against its social and natural enemies and regulate who is and who is not accepted within its

‘walls.’27 While at the founding of the city in the end of the 19 th century and in the beginning of the 20 th century, urban

leaders had to defend it from the encroachment of the ‘hordes’ of Kyrgyz-Kaisaks and other unfriendly local

populations, elites now feel the need to defend it from the ‘quiet encroachment’ of the ‘hordes’ of mambets and

kolhozniks from the surrounding villages and from the South. The perception of Almaty as a ‘Russian fortress,’ in which

25 See Musul'manskie Deputaty Gosudarstvennoi Dumy Rossii: Sbornik Dokumentov i Materialov. (1998) ed. L.A.

Yamaeva (Ufa, Kitap)

26 As a historian Jeff Sahadeo (2007) notes in his Russian Colonial Society in Tashkent, the tsarist colonial

administration envisioned Tashkent as a ‘Russian Saint Petersburg’ that would ‘symbolize tsarist power symbol and

European ‘civilization’ in the region’ (p. 26).

27 In her chapter entitled ‘Moscow: Fortress City’ in Domain Errors (2002), Irina Aristarkhova writes that the

‘fortress consciousness’ of Moscow eventually evolved into the Russian imperial ‘consciousness’ which manifested

itself in building up ‘identifiable borders of the Russian national identity using the language of French

enlightenment.’ (2002, p. 80)12

Kazakhs were permitted to live albeit on ‘Russian’ terms continued through Soviet times despite Almaty’s designation

as capital of the Kazakh Soviet Republic. The motif of suffering without a residence in the city and feeling like a ‘step-

son’ of the Kazakh capital is a common thread woven into many works by Kazakh writers and literary figures of the

Soviet period from Qasym Amanzholov (1911-1955) to Muqaghali Maqataiev (1931-1976) to Safuan Shaimerdenov

(1922-2006). One of Qasym Amanzholov’s famous poems entitled ‘Shelter’ recounts his futile efforts to acquire an

apartment to house himself and his family over the course of ten years despite his being a war veteran and an already

widely published and recognized Kazakh poet. The poem starts:

Ten years I made my way in the capital

Though another town had called me, I would not go

The dream I chased a lying mirage

For ten years, shelter was my sorrow

and ends:

Though you give or keep my shelter,

Yet I shall not leave my city

With the fire of my poem I will warm

Myself, my wife, my young child28

In the 1970s, another Kazakh poet, Muqaghali Maqatayev, authored a famous joke implying that Almaty is a

Kazakh capital only in name –not in substance: ‘Almaty – Kazakhtyn astanasy, osrytyn baspanasy, uighurdyn

askhanasy.’29 It translates: ‘Almaty is a capital for Kazakhs, shelter for Russians, and a café of the Uighurs.’ In his

memoirs, Safuan Shaimerdenov recalls byzantine process of waiting, appealing, and negotiating which even the

most famous representatives of the Kazakh ‘creative’ (tvorcheskaya) intelligentsia had to go through in order to

obtain housing in Almaty.30

One of the reasons behind the relocation of the capital to Astana was a desire to break with this imperial history

and begin a new chapter in a city that would be conceived, planned, and built by the new Kazakh administration and

which would entrench the Kazakh language and middle classes in the urban space. If, as Bülent Batuman (2009)

argues, one of the goals of the transfer of the capital of Turkey to Ankara was a creation of a national bourgeoisie

28 See Amanzholov, K. (2006) Darigha Sol Qyz. Olengder men Poemalar (Almaty, Raritet). Translated from

Kazakh by Gabriel McGuire.

29 Niyazbekov, M. (eds). (1992) Degen Eken. (Almaty, Oner)

30 Shaimerdenov, S. (2011) Tandamaly Shygharmalar Zhiinaghy. T.3 (Almaty, Taimas) 13

distinct from the cosmopolitan bourgeoisie of Istanbul, the goal of the transfer of the capital to Astana was similarly

a consolidation of a ‘national’ (as opposed to Soviet, and/or Russified) urban middle class.

Yet another reason for the transfer of the capital, as stated in the Master Plan for the development of the city of

Astana, was the ‘integration’ of the people of Kazakhstan and ‘ethnic balancing’.31 Behind this official formulation, one

can see the nationalist judgment of the previous ‘imbalance,’ for the intention was not only Kazakhification of the North

but also uniting Kazakhstan by building a city with which everyone in the Kazakhstani state would comfortably

identify, whether northerner or southerner, urban or rural.

Following state officials, the authors of the Master Plan also argued that Astana presented ‘almost unlimited

opportunities for growth’—this in opposition to Almaty, a city whose potential for growth has been limited by

geological factors and by its border location.32 Thus, almost half a century after the Virgin Lands campaign, Astana

again turned into an internal frontier of the state –this time of the new state of Kazakhstan. Whereas the launching of the

Virgin Lands project around the city of Akmolinsk in the 1950s had created a channel for social mobility for peasants

from the European parts of the Soviet Union and for internal deportees residing in Kazakhstan (Pohl 1999; 2007), the

relocation of the capital to Astana fifty years later opened prospects for the urbanization and re-urbanization of a

(mainly) Kazakh-speaking population that was stifled in Almaty due to the entrenched-ness of the Russian-speaking

urban middle class and elites.

Ed Schatz in his article ‘What Capital Cities Say about State and Nation Building’, suggests that Nazarbayev moved

the capital to break with the Soviet-era ‘colonial’ apparatus, to facilitate the emergence of new elites from the regions,

and to ‘inspire at-least-minimal popular allegiance of the broad citizenry’ for the new national project (2004 pp. 120-

21). I would concur with all of the above but also add that Nursultan Nazarbayev was particularly trying to escape the

grasp of the entrenched Almaty elites with their hierarchies, vested interests, and rigid views of what should be the right

course for the development of the country. It is worth noting that Nazarbayev himself, as a native of a village in the

Almaty oblast’, was looked down on by the Almaty cultural and party elites as somebody who lacked proper (urban)

cultural capital but was instead a social climber from a village near Almaty. In this context, his birth village of

Chemolgan (just 30 km from Almaty) always appears to have a negative connotation that other places (especially if they

were towns and/or cities) would not have. While throughout his life, Nazarbayev has lived in several cities such as

Temirtau and Dnepropetrovsk, in the discourse of his opponents and critics, the village of Chemolgan is presented as

31 In Russian it was formulated as ‘uskorenie protsessa smesheniya etnicheskih grupp i… dostizhenie

sbalansirovannosti i garmonozatsii’ (p. 2-2). See General’nyi Plan Razvitiya Goroda Astany. (2001) Japan

International Cooperation Agency. Tom II. Ob’’yasnitel’naya Zapiska.

32 Ibid14

the most defining moment in his formation. Nazarbayev’s humble origins from Chemolgan (his policies are sometimes

criticized as being of chemolganskogo razliva – ‘brewed in Chemolgan’)33 as well as the Almaty oblast’ (as opposed to

the city of Almaty) origins of many high-ranking officials in power are often cited as a main reason for their ineptitude,

corruption, and other moral failures. The snobbery implicit in such comments about ‘mambets in power’ (mambety vo

vlasti) by the Almaty urban elites reflect their attitude towards their co-ethnics in the countryside and is reminiscent of

the Russian colonial attitude towards backwards ‘Asiatic’ people.

Despite its location on the Asian frontier, far away from the Russian border, several experts and cultural critics have

argued that Almaty is the most Russified city in Kazakhstan. At a round-table devoted to the much debated issue of

shala Kazakhs at the Club of Political Decisions in Almaty in May 2010, a well-known spokesman for the nationalist

movement and son of the famous diplomat Bolatkhan Taizhan, Mukhtar Taizhan, noted that ‘only Almaty people would

call themselves shala-kazaks.’ He continued, ‘in other Kazakhstani cities even in the so-called Russified North nobody

would call themselves with such a label.’

Another social activist and well-known cultural figure from Almaty, the editor of the Kieli Zhetisu project

(kieli7su.kz), devoted to learning Kazakh language (also through memorizing Kazakh epics), Zemfira Yerzhan, told me

in an interview34 that Almaty has a strong anti-Kazakh bias manifested even in the attitude of the city administration.

She noted that the city of Almaty demonstrates the most erroneous usage of Kazakh in the names of the streets, shops,

and advertisements. This oversight by the city administration is also matched by the persistent use of Soviet names in

the vernacular. As Zemfira Yerzhan points out, if one wants to emphasize that he or she is an old resident or a native of

Almaty, one would consistently use the old names of the streets and places even though they have not been in effect for

more than 20 years. Indeed, the discussion on the legality and correctness of spelling of the city name itself – whether

one should write Almaty or Alma-Ata in Russian– has spread from media to internet forums to scholarship. Reams of

virtual and printed media were devoted to this issue in the 1990s and 2000s. According to Zemfira Erzhan, the

resistance of Russian-speaking Almaty residents to their city being renamed ‘Almaty’ has to do with the nostalgia for

Soviet times, invested-ness in the kinds of cultural capital that comes from growing up in what is remembered as a

‘cosmopolitan’ Russian-language environment, and resistance to post-Soviet migration of a (predominantly) Kazakh-

speaking population to Almaty. In her Facebook post devoted to this issue, Zemfira Erzhan also writes that this

resentment of a seemingly slight change in the name is partly to do with how one hears the pronunciation of Alma-Ata

33 See for example Kosanov, A. ‘Krizis Vlasti v Kazahstane: Mif ili Real’nost’’, 18 April 2002, available at:

http://www.ww.kub.info/article.php?sid=1023, accessed 30 June 2014.

34 Interview with Zemfira Yerzhan in Almaty, 10 December 2013

15

versus Almaty in Russian.35 The new name, Almaty, which has the letter ‘Ы’ 36 in the end sounds very unpleasant to a

‘cultured person’ socialized in the literary Russian language. So, the difference is, according to Zemfira Erzhan,

aesthetic as well as a matter of principle for native Almaty residents over the age of 30, for whom the new name

‘Almaty’ symbolizes all the negative associations related to their city during the period of independence. Almaty is

divided between the people who stand for Almaty (Kazakh name of the city also adopted as its official name in Russian

after independence) and people who stand for Alma-Ata, Zemfira Yerzhan concludes.

It is worth noting that Zemfira Yerzhan is one of the very few prominent cultural figures among ‘original’ Almaty

citizens (another prominent figure would be Zira Nauryzbayeva) – who stand for the promotion of the Kazakh language

and culture in the urban space of Almaty, while numerous representatives of the so-called ‘creative class’ from the

‘natives’ of Almaty (korennye Almatintsy), despite being Kazakh themselves, take a very anti-migrant and often anti-

Kazakh position. For instance, at yet another round table devoted to the development of Almaty in September of 2010, a

prominent cultural and media figure, director of the Institute for the War and Peace Reporting in Kazakhstan, Rozani

Ismailova, compared post-Soviet migrants to ‘barbarians devouring the city,’ noting that in Soviet times only the youth

who had come to study at the higher education institutions were allowed to stay in Almaty and only ‘successful

representatives of society (tol’ko uspeshnye predstaviteli obshchestva) were given jobs and access to the privileges of

the capital city of the Kazak SSR,’ whereas nowadays ‘even those who did not get into universities also want to live in

the city’ (Radionov 2010). This is quite a typical view of representatives of the cultural elite in Almaty, who thinks that

Almaty urban space should not be available ‘just to anybody’ (komu popalo) -- it should be restricted to educated

people with a particular of cultural disposition.

Almaty cultural elites are not unique in trying to defend their privileges while feeling ‘under siege’ with the arrival

of so-called ‘marginal people’ (marginaly). In his recent work on Bishkek’s ‘creative class’ Georgii Mamedov (2014)

writes of similar ways native Bishkek citizens, whose primary cultural capital is rooted in education and Russian-

language proficiency, attempt to deny access to urban infrastructure to so-called ‘myrki’ – newcomers to Bishkek. In

this case too, class segregation and exclusion are predictably justified by an alleged lack of culture among the

newcomers.

35 Yerzhan. Z. (2014, April 21). ‘V byvshei stolitse Kazahstana est’ dve kategorii ljudei…’[Facebooks status update]

Retrieved from https://www.facebook.com/zemfira.erzhan/posts/819245184769615

36 Russian Duma member Zhirinovskii also recently suggested the exclusion of the letter ‘Ы’ from the Russian

alphabet because it has come to the Russian language from Mongols and remains a mark of shameful aziatchina.

See ‘Zhirinovskii predlozhil ubrat’ iz alfavita bukvu ‘Y’’, 12 March 2006, available at:

http://lenta.ru/news/2014/03/12/letter/, accessed June 30, 201416

Lamentation about the cultural cosmopolitan Almaty that is now lost is similar to lamentations about ‘our wonderful

Frunze’ or ‘European Ferghana’ recorded by Flynn, Kosmarskaya, & Sabirova (2014) in Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan

and is also manifested in the production of memoirs about Alma-Ata, the way it used to be, in online and print media, as

well as in Russian-language Kazakh literature. In the book, Neformal’naya Alma-Ata first published in 2005 and since

republished twice, Arsen Bayanov, son of the one-time professor at the Republican Higher Communist Party School

(Respublikanskaya Vysshaya Partiinaya Shkola), bemoans the passing of the Almaty of his youth, Almaty of the 70s

and 80s:

The city that was Alma-Ata, not the Almaty of today, is no more. Whether we, who grew up at that

time, like it or not – it is so. Our city is now called the ‘southern capital’ ( yuzhnaya stolitsa), which is

adding yet another layer of make-up to the face of an old lady, Alma-Ata. The city lost her status of

grand-dame, and from all the make-up she is wearing, resembles a worn out old whore. Streets are

being renamed, districts remade, new buildings are being built, and the trees of the Vernyi period are

being axed; the main thing, however, is that the people have been changed. (Bayanov p. 5)

According to Arsen Bayanov, a representative of ‘the last Soviet generation’ of Almaty, who came of age in the 80s,

Almaty was an international (as opposed to national) and cosmopolitan city but the markers of cosmopolitanism that he

emphasises in his book are telling.

In Bayanov’s memoirs, one of the main charms of the old Almaty is that the city through its international hotels and

touristic places had a window into what Yurchak would call an ‘imaginary West’ and what Bayanov calls ‘foreign

paradise’ (zagranichnyi rai) (Bayanov p. 31). This window was quite exclusive because, as Bayanov writes, many

locals (tuzemtsy) and ‘mere mortals’ (prostye smertnye) were not allowed into these places (mainly bars and restaurants)

set according to Western standards. Another charm was an inclusion of Almaty into a global (by which Bayanov really

means European-American) music scene in the late Soviet period. As Bayanov documents, in 1975 Almaty hosted

American jazz musicians from New York, several musical bands from Almaty – most famously Dos Mukasan –went on

tours abroad, and the city had a Beatles fan club that also attracted some of the communist leaders’ offspring attending

specialised English-language schools and therefore speaking good English.

When one reads Bayanov, it is quite obvious that the ‘informal culture’ of the old Alma-Ata he is nostalgic about

was European-oriented and the problem of the new Almaty is that it doesn’t aspire to the ideals of European-ness. For

Bayanov this means complete degeneration of urban culture. Comparing the current music scene in Almaty with his

times, he writes:

…time has rent an invisible hole in the organism of contemporary music. Alma-Ata, having mutated to

Almaty, stuffed itself with dead fanera (miming to a pre-recorded sound at concert performances) and

17

snacked on musical gasterbeiters from Tashkent, Bishkek, and Dushanbe who had never seen a

saxophone in their lives, did not know how a keyboard sounds, and sang only ethnic music. Their

oriental shrieks became a post-mortem dirge to Almaty pop and jazz at which funeral strippers from

Samarkand would perform the belly dance. (Bayanov, p. 225)

In Bayanov’s account one witnesses an idealisation of quite an exclusive cosmopolitan milieu and cultural

production which, however informal, rebellious, and creative, was still a provincialized echo of some ‘imagined West’

from the centre of the hinterland Soviet Central Asian republic safely ensconced far behind the Iron Curtain. It is also

important to note that this idealization of past cosmopolitanism comes from the former Soviet republican elites who

were centrally positioned to benefit from all the socio-cultural policies of the former Soviet Union (this fact is

downplayed) and who saw themselves as entitled to even more. Bruce Grant (2009) in his article on ‘Cosmopolitan

Baku’ and Magnus Marsden (2013) in his chapter on Dushanbe Post-Cosmopolitan Cities write about a similar

nostalgic illusion of past cosmopolitanism that, according to them, was quite different from cosmopolitanism as it

actually existed. As Bruce Grant puts it, Soviet cosmopolitanism was, like communism itself, a deferred project and

what is remembered today is often the selective memory that omits the hierarchies and exclusive practices common to

that cosmopolitan environment. Notably, in the Almaty retro-festival ‘Almaty – moya pervaya ljubov’’ (‘Almaty – my

first love’) –the post-independence cultural project, itself a product of the nostalgia aimed at revitalization of the past

cosmopolitan music scene – has been known for its gathering the elites of the past and present (thus reconciling the old

and the new) as well inviting stars from the West (some half-forgotten or demoted to second class) that could not be

invited during the time that is being yearned for.

Urbanity and Rurality in Astana

Compared to Almaty, the exemplar of proper European urbanity in Central Asia, Tselinograd, like several other cities in

northern Kazakhstan such as Kokshetau, Petropavlovsk, and Kustanai, shared quite harmonious relations with the

surrounding countryside and porous border between the rural and urban. As a centre of Khrushchev’s ‘Virgin Lands’

campaign initiated in 1954, Tselinograd was intended to lead towards the development of the agricultural sector through

the provision of services and other forms of cooperation with kolkhozy (collective farms) and sovkhozy (soviet farms).

Tselinograd’s major urban industrial sites, such as Kazakhselmash and Tselinselmash, produced agricultural machinery,

while leading centres of expertise (the second largest Agricultural Institute in Kazakhstan and other research institutes)

were charged with educating cadres for agricultural management and cultivating knowledge that could be useful in

agricultural development. Unlike Almaty, Tselinograd never had a restricted registration (propiska) system. The

regional elites and intelligentsia in Tselinograd were connected to the countryside not just by their roots and extended

18

family relations, but often by the very nature of their professional activities. Even though Tselinograd of the late Soviet

period by no means measured up to Almaty’s ideals of high cosmopolitanism, it nevertheless stood as a ‘middle ground’

of its own where newly-arrived Tselinniki (mainly peasants from European parts of the former Soviet Union), former

internees (Germans, Chechens, Ingushes) and natives (ethnic Kazakhs, as well as Russians who lived here through

several generations) were trying to ride the wave of Soviet modernization (Pohl 1999, 2007).

The Virgin Lands campaign instilled a respect for the countryside as frontier and a production site upon which the

city dwellers in Tselinograd (as well as in many other cities in Northern Kazakhstan) depended. For example, as a

former vice provostof Tselinograd Medical Institute remembers, 37 each of the four higher education institutions in

Tselinograd had an agricultural district (raion) in the region and an agricultural farm on the outskirts of the city to

which it was closely connected, where students and faculty would go to help with the harvest.

‘Our Institute was attached to sovkhoz Zarechnyi (now a part of the city of Astana on the South-West side), the

Engineering Institute was attached to Koshshy (now a suburb of Astana towards the South-West), the Agricultural

Institute was attached to Uchkhoz (now a part of Astana on the South-East side),’ says the former vice provost of

TSGMI (Tselinograd State Medical Institute), ‘Because every summer and every fall we would take our students to

these farms, we would establish long-term friendship and colleagueship with the workers of these sovkhozy.’ ‘I have

been friends with a former agronom of the sovkhoz Zarechnyi for almost 30 years,’ she continued, ‘It would never

occur to anybody in Tselinograd’s academic circles to look down on Zarechnyi or any other sovkhoz near

Tselinograd. We were like this” (she cross-holds her hands).

In addition to the above mentioned ties to the rural environment, Tselinograd had a large and vibrant section of

private housing not just on the outskirts but also at the very heart of the city centre – in the bazaar area where the

only Kazakh language school in Tselinograd was located and in the Slobodka district near the Ishim river that had

grown out of the original Cossack settlement of the 19th century. The bazaar had always played a unique role being a

constitutive part of the city. Just a few blocks from the main square (in fact, Tselinograd’s main square and the

communist party headquarters building occupied the site of the original Akmolinsk bazaar) and the urban centre, it

was associated with the backwardness of traditional extended Kazakh families and the petty criminality (after all the

bazaar, itself, was a black market outside the socialist distribution system) of local bazaar traders and suppliers

(usually from the South of Kazakhstan and other Central Asian Republics). However, it was also one of the few

places where the Kazakh language was dominant and the reason why the only Kazakh school remained in the area

after all other Kazakh schools were closed down in the 1960s due to lack of demand. Bazaar residents might have

been considered backwards and lacking cultural capital according to the Soviet value system but they were also

37 Interview with the former vice provost of the Medical Institute in Astana, 6 September 201319

quite wealthy and remained invested in their semi-rural ways of life (using their private houses as small production

sites to store materials, to sort fruit and vegetables, to keep livestock and to slaughter animals whose meat was to be

sold at the bazaar) and in their traditional Kazakh-ness (knowing Kazakh and being Kazakh helped them to

communicate and build trading networks with Kazakhs and other Turkic-speaking suppliers of fruits and vegetables

from the South). One of the first things that was accomplished after the relocation of the capital was the

gentrification of the bazaar – it was roofed and beautified. The family that controlled the bazaar during the late

Soviet era and the beginning of the 1990s was embraced into the Astana establishment, with one of the offspring of

the family even briefly serving as city mayor. The private housing sector of the bazaar, like other private housing

sectors in the city, was eventually demolished with the parts that remained losing their economic attractiveness and

becoming a marker of underdevelopment reminding Astana’s newcomers that it was really a ‘village.’

Because of its semi-rural past and rural connections, Astana is often accused of not being a ‘real’ capital: ostensibly

lacking culture and urban sophistication, its transformation from a ‘dusty provincial town’ (pylnyi provintsial’nyi

gorodok) to a glamorous city is consistently considered suspect and incomplete. But the qualities of rurality and

frontier-ness (and thus instability), which seem to make Astana questionable, at the same time make it suitable for being

a Kazakh capital – one that tries to combine Kazakh modernity with the rural, pastoral, and nomadic Kazakh traditions,

even if not always successfully. The major problem for Astana, which is simultaneously its boon, is that there are no

longer any clear guidelines on how to ‘become urban,’ nor are there officially-sanctioned scripts of ‘proper’ urban-ness.

As Mateusz Laszczkowski (2011a) points out in his recent article, the meaning of urbanity in Astana is constantly

contested and negotiated (96).

In Almaty, on the other hand, the ideal of urbanity (at least to those who claim to continue Almaty’s urban tradition)

is clear: it is in the past, in how things used to be in Soviet Almaty, when it was clean and orderly,38 when migration was

controlled through restrictive propiska system, when there were only a few cars on the streets, and when there were no

taxi drivers from Shymkent easily identified by their plate numbers beginning with X and, as many native almatintsy

would say, by the fact that they don’t know how to drive and don’t know the city.

The concern about ‘properly urban’ order in the cityscape is overwhelming in both Almaty and Astana. The elites in

the two cities constantly attempt to project an image of cultural capital and inculcate ‘culture’ through urban pedagogy

38 In her insightful piece about the notions of waste and out of place matter in post-Soviet Almaty, Catherine

Alexander (2009) writes how her informants complain profusely about newly arrived migrants who wander the

streets of the city and destroy the urban order of things and about newly built buildings which ‘block’ the winds and

obstruct airways.

20

and organization of ‘cultural’ events. The increased spatial and social mobility that these two cities have experienced

make the elite anxious and nervous about the lack of propriety and ‘Culture’ in the urban space. In the next section, I

analyze how projects to bring ‘culture’ to the (migrant) masses are approached in the two cities and what it says about

their character.

The Yurt and the Skyscraper

[Figure 1 to be placed here]

The municipality of Astana, as well as other state bodies that see themselves responsible for ‘culture,’ devote a huge

amount of time and money to urban pedagogy. During my fieldwork at the office of AstanaGenPlan in 2008, I observed

that extensive thinking goes into planning and aestheticizing public space, e.g. designing hooligan-proof benches,

making sure that there are enough trash cans (positioned near the benches), and ensuring that the whole atmosphere of

the public space encourages citizens to behave in a ‘cultured fashion’ (vesti sebia kul’turno). Municipal authorities’

efforts to host cultural celebrations also factor centrally into their efforts to make Astana the national ‘centre of culture’

– kul’turnyi tsentr (Adams and Rustemova 2009). One such event, the tenth anniversary of Astana in 2008,39 celebrated

from July 1 to July 6, was marked by spectacular festivities that included, among other forms of entertainment, Italian

opera, Cuban ballet, a Turkic music festival, vast number of concerts featuring the participation of Russian and

Kazakhstani celebrities, and free open-air concerts of regional dancing and singing groups in the central park, and city

squares (the tradition of celebrating the Day of Astana continues until today). The sheer variety of cultural events

organized on the eve of the 2008 Day of Astana was such that everybody could find something to attend according to

his taste – pop concerts for the youth, Cuban ballet and Italian opera for the intelligentsia, and the general public could

enjoy free concerts of regional and various ethnic singing and dancing collectives in the parks and squares. Such

celebrations of Astana as a city that aspires to contain in itself the whole of Eurasia (and the world) while remaining a

national capital hospitable to different regions and different ethnic groups of Kazakhstan and as an exemplary city,

whose promise of urban prosperity and order constitute a precursor to the prosperity of the nation as a whole, are

usually met with scepticism from the opposition and opposition-oriented intellectuals, many of whom come from

Almaty. The criticism is usually that Astana is an image-driven project and that the city’s projected image is an

inaccurate representation of the country as a whole. For instance, as part of the 2008 celebration, a tent city of several

yurts (traditional nomadic tents) was set up across the river from the city’s iconic skyscrapers (this happens during other

celebrations as well, not only anniversaries of Astana). Every region (oblast’) set up its own yurt and some regions (e.g.

39 In their article ‘Mass Spectacles and Styles of Governmentality in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan,’ Laura Adams and

Assel Rustemova also have a description of Astana’s 10th anniversary celebration (2009, p. 1260)21

Mangyshlak) set up more than one. They were filled with national crafts and national Kazakh food and drink (kumys).

One local intellectual said that this image of nomadic tents side by side with skyscrapers was incongruous,

anachronistic, and, most importantly, was not representative of the way of life of the majority of the population. He

asked rhetorically, ‘Who lives in yurts today; hardly even one per cent of the population!’ ‘Yurt on asphalt is an utter

nonsense!’ He then continued, dismissing the yurt as a phenomenon out of place in the urban environment, and deriding

both skyscrapers and tents as exercises in ostentation. His comments were echoed by many foreign and local experts

and journalists who argued that the city ‘does not represent Kazakhstan’ and ‘has no Kazakh spirit’ (Yuritsyn 2008).

The organizers of the celebrations at the municipality of Astana, however, contended that their goal was exactly to

‘represent Kazakhstan’ and to bring the ‘Kazakh spirit’ to the very centre of the city by setting the yurts up there. The

head of the Department of Internal Affairs underscored Astana’s connections to the regions: ‘We invite all these one-

time American superstars [she meant the late Witney Houston who had been invited to sing at the Presidential

Reception, and whose inadequate performance was criticized even in the ‘inner’ circles], but we should not forget that

Astana is the Kazakh national capital; and that is why akimat spent so much funds and efforts to bring these regional

collectives to Astana.’ She continued: ‘People who come from the regions as migrants or as guests should feel that this

is their city too.’40

As we can see from the response of the municipal official above, in the eyes of the officials responsible for the

management of the public space and public culture in Astana, Astana is not supposed to be just an imitation of ‘global

modernity,’ it is also supposed to represent the ‘national,’ or even better to achieve the symbiosis of the global and

national. However, in what proportions and how this symbiosis should be achieved in a proper urban way is opened to

debate and hierarchies of taste.

‘Almaty – Kreativnyi Gorod’ (‘Almaty is a Creative City’)

When the capital was relocated from Almaty to Astana, Almaty was left under a much more liberal municipal regime --

it was ‘freed’ from the responsibility of representing the national culture. The urban space of Almaty today is visibly

less ‘nationalized.’ It is worth noting that most of the current regime’s opposition leaders come from Almaty and belong

to the cohort of so-called tsentrovye almatinskie – those who grew up in the city centre in the Brezhnev era, and many

of whom are children of the Soviet nomenklatura and intelligentsia. Many of these oppositionists, despite professing

liberal democratic views, glorify the Soviet past and derive their legitimacy from their urban roots in the Soviet times.

Notably, this nostalgia for the Soviet Almaty often cuts through political divisions and includes people who are now far

from being in the opposition and sometimes, in fact, are very close to power, like the daughters of President Nazarbaev,

40 Interview with the Head of the Department of Internal Affairs of the city akimat in Astana, 18 August 200822

who were once highly active in organizing the nostalgic retro-festivals called ‘Almaty – my first love,’ which sought to

re-enact the atmosphere of Soviet Almaty.

This nostalgia for Soviet Almaty is present even in the new, quite liberal projects, such as the civil society and

municipality-supported initiative ‘Almaty – creative city’ launched in 2011. 41 When I first approached the people

behind the initiative (most of them, incidentally, korennye almatintsy, i.e. people who were born and raised in Almaty),

I was told that they wanted to reinvigorate the city based on the ideas of Richard Florida (2002) articulated in The Rise

of the Creative Class. The initial plan of the organizers was to support the creative art cluster and cultural events but, as

one of them explained in the interview: ‘So many people have come to Almaty in recent years; many of whom don’t

appreciate the culture of this place, the meaning of this place, so we want to re-create the spirit of Almaty.’42

During the panel organized to discuss this initiative with the participation from the Department of Culture on April

25 2012, constant themes included Almaty’s dirtiness and the general lack of culture of recent migrants. One of the

participants said: ‘The government cannot manage the cultural sector; after the independence we lost a whole

generation…Before, the status of the Almaty citizen was associated with the status of the cultured person.’ He

continued, ‘We [long time Almaty residents] are in the habit of attending galleries and theatres; we inherited this habit

from our parents.’ Other panel participants also brought the theme of the cultural divide between the newly and the

longer urbanized. ‘We are talking about inculcating culture in the city, but we have different cultures. Southerners can

spit on the asphalt – it is their culture. Some Kazakhs slaughter and dismember sheep in their common [urban] yards;

this is also our people’s culture and tradition… But for other people also sharing this common yard, it is wildness or

alternative culture at best.’

Eventually, the foundation behind the ‘Almaty – creative city’ initiative also enmeshed itself in the business of

urban pedagogy through organizing art-ploshchadkas (art-squares) in unusual places, i.e. not near theatres or the city

centre, but in residential areas on the outskirts of the city where most of the migrants live. In the words of one of the

organizers, they began acting upon the old Soviet slogan of – “kul’turu v massy” (“bringing culture to the masses”).

However, the project of “Almaty – creative city” and the celebrations that were organized through the public-private

initiative that I witnessed throughout the summer of 2012 have distinctive features and are completely unlike the

celebrations in Astana.

If, in Astana, many of the celebrations had involved bringing collectives from the regions and using the public space

to showcase regional culture and traditions (like, for instance, the central city park tent city described in the previous

section), the ‘Almaty –creative city’ project never had a single yurt on their ploshchadkas and very rarely used folklore

41 After going under this slogan for more than a year, the word ‘kreativnyi’ was changed into ‘tvorcheskii.’ This is most likely because of the dubious connotation in Russian of the word ‘kreativnyi’.

42 Interview with one of the initiators of the project in Almaty, 6 March 2012.23

groups; instead they presented string and clarinet quartets, jazz and rock bands, photo and art work exhibitions and live

theatre performances. In other words, they would strive to bring what they considered to be an urban cosmopolitan (as

opposed to traditional and/or national) culture which the migrants supposedly lacked. At the end of the day’s program,

a movie or a documentary would be shown. One of the documentaries shown at several art-plashchadkas in July of

2012 was Arsen Bayanov’s (the author of the Neformal’naya Alma-Ata book discussed above) Almatinskie Khroniki

Muzykal’nyi Tranzit about the history of the official and underground music scene in the Soviet Alma-Ata.

On July 27 2012, in one of the art-ploshchadki, organized on the outskirts of the city in a migrant-dominated area

near the shopping centre Maxima located on Raiymbek major thoroughfare in the ‘lower’43 part of the city, I witnessed

the following scene: after a 30 minute concert by a string quartet and a 20 minute circus act, a pop-quiz contest

(viktorina) about the history and the sights of Almaty was presented. The leaders of the pop-quiz, wanted to get some

adult Almatintsy to answer questions like ‘what is the longest street in Almaty,’ ‘what is the longest name of the

street,’44 ‘how many steps are there on the skating ring Medeo,’ etc. but the adults in the audience were reticent about

volunteering to play; only small boys would raise their hands and come up to the stage. At some point, when a string of

boys lined up by the stage, one of the presenters figured out that they would be unable to answer any of the questions

and so said, ‘I guess all of you came here by foot from Kaskeleng.’ 45 Kaskeleng was one of the outskirts of Almaty,

about 20 km further down along Rayimbek highway from where ‘villagers’ used to come, and the condescending

remark by the leader of the contest implied that people from Kaskeleng would not know anything about the history and

culture of ‘proper’ Almaty. The remark points to the centre-periphery relations that characterized Almaty and its

suburbs in Soviet times and which persist even till today, even though Kaskeleng has undergone extensive gentrification

and has become a city in its own right with a population of 50,000, developed infrastructure, and a newly-built campus

of the prestigious Suleiman Demirel University – ‘villagers’ from Kaskeleng and other outskirts are seen by the Almaty

urbanites as lacking in urbane qualities and as being completely different in their cultural attitudes. These centre-

periphery relations between Almaty and its surrounding villages are in stark contrast to the urban centre-frontier relation

between Astana and its surrounding villages both in the present where the areas around Astana are seen as space for

further development and growth and in the past where the villages were considered the productive frontier of the city.

[Figure 2 to be placed here]

43 In Almaty vocabulary, ‘lower’ and ‘upper’ is not in relation to the North and South but in relation to the

mountains. Closer to the mountains – up, lower – down

44 The longest name street turned out to be ‘Kirpichno-Zavodskaya’ – the old Soviet name that has been changed

after independence.

45 In Russian: ‘Vy navernoe vse peshkom iz Kaskelena prishli?’24

In July 2012, in addition to the project of art-ploshchadki, Almaty municipality’s department of culture ran another

social advertisement project dedicated to the education of city residents regarding rules of the road. Forty billboards

(see Figure 2) were placed all over the city, in particular on the glass panels of bus stops, featuring a ram leaping across

the road at a visible distance from a pedestrian pass where someone (presumably a well-cultured urbanite) was crossing

properly. The message on the billboard said ‘People cross the road in the right place [across the pedestrian passes] –

sheep cross the roads wherever they like.’ The creators of the billboard at the Openeyes DDB advertising agency

explained their rationale in using the sheep metaphor for undisciplined pedestrians as follows:

This [social advertising] campaign is based on the simple and harsh insight that should be clear to every urbanite

who has ever ventured out of the city and has seen how leisurely and slowly herds of sheep crossed the road.

Sheep cross the road wherever they want, people cross the road at the pedestrian pass. Tell me how you cross the

road and I will tell you who you are.46

The billboards offended a significant number of the public. Commentators noted that first of all the campaign

was selectively targeting only pedestrians and not drivers, who are no less implicated in breaking the rules of the

road, and, secondly, it was playing along with the long-held urban prejudices in which many rural migrants are

belittled as ‘sheep’. Rural Kazakhs are often accused of polluting the cityscape with their sheep, bringing sheep to

the bazaars, using sheep as petty bribes, and, as was mentioned above, of slaughtering them in all the unsuitable

places in the city. The billboards further ignited the divisions between Kazakh-speakers and Russian-speakers

because of the different connotation of the word ‘sheep’ in these languages. In Russian and its corresponding urban

vernacular, sheep (baran) is a symbol of rurality and backwardness and is often used as offensive jargon; in the

Kazakh language, however, sheep has more of a positive connotation as a main staple of Kazakh cuisine and the

pillar of Kazakh pastoral economy. Moreover, in Kazakh folklore, sheep are actually praised for following the rules

and being ‘quiet’ animals – not law-breakers. Hence, the message that the commissioners wanted to get across did

not really translate into Kazakh (and, presumably, a large proportion of the targeted audience of the campaign would

be Kazakh-speakers). Hence, in the Kazakh translation of the message, instead of using the word sheep, the word

mal (generic Kazakh term for cattle which can have some negative connotation indicating the cultureless who don’t

behave properly) had to be used. The municipality of Almaty that commissioned the billboards, and the

advertisement company who produced them declared that they had no intention of offending anybody; their goal had

merely been to convey the message on the importance of the rules of the roads. Nevertheless, the billboards turned

46 See the company’s portfolio at http://www.ddb.kz/index.php?id=11&galItem=401&galAlbum=1&galTag=,

accessed 17 June 2014.25

out to be insensitive on many levels and the Municipality quickly withdrew them from all the bus stops and street

intersections where they had been initially placed.

Conclusion: Social Mobility and Cultural Distinction in Astana and Almaty

Kazakhstan is usually known as a very centralized state with a strong ‘vertical power structure’ (vertikal’ vlasti).

However, even in such a centralized state we see how municipal governments of the two major cities have different

notions of ‘Culture’ and pursue different types of cultural politics while trying to achieve an elusive urban order. This is

not to say that any particular ‘Culture’ is superior to the other but to note which culture is excluded and which one is

included into the mainstream public culture that the two cities are trying to substantiate and project to the outside world.

The question of ‘proper culture’ becomes particularly important when evaluating prospects for socio-spatial mobility

from the point of view of a new arrival trying to ‘make it’ in the city. In Almaty, it is difficult to ‘move up’ because the

centre of the city is like a social fortress or, in the words of Zemfira Yerzhan, a ‘mental enclave’ that only opens up to

carriers of the certain kind of cultural capital and insider information that includes the old street names and the corpus of

stories on the ‘informal life’ of Alma-Ata in the 1970s and 1980s. Flynn, Kosmarskaya, and Sabirova recently (2014)

showed how long-time residents in Bishkek and Ferghana form nostalgia-based communities or ‘mini-worlds.’

However, if in Bishkek and Ferghana’s cases these communities have not much power to shape the culture of the city

going forward, in Almaty we are dealing with nostalgia-based cultural production and image-making driven by the city

elites themselves. The nostalgia about Alma-Ata is being ‘institutionalised’ in the partnership between the municipality

and civil society groups, and mobilised in order to shape the city to a certain form and to regulate what kind of culture is

‘acceptable’ and otherwise. The Almaty professional class and intelligentsia manifest the desire to ‘preserve’ culture as

long as they are the carriers of this culture and it promotes their status of true ‘Alma-Atintsy’. Culture matters because,

in the words of the panellists in the ‘Almaty – creative city’ project, only certain kinds of people frequent theatres and

galleries. History also matters because only certain kinds of people can claim ‘historical’ connection to the urban space.

Almaty classes don’t mix and mingle at the new super-modern places like in Astana supermalls (Lazczskowski 2011a);

they are segregated not just by income differentiation and the concomitant ‘spatialisation of class’ in the lower and

upper districts, but also by living in different cultural milieus (Zhang 2012). Sporadically, the city establishment sends

cultural emissaries ‘down there’ to acculturate people on the outskirts on the virtues of cosmopolitan urbanism. As a

well-known public figure wrote in response to Zemfira Yerzhan’s Facebook post on the cultural distinction between

Alma-Ata and Almaty, ‘there has to be a wide scale program to inculcate internal migrants with cultural, literary, and

ethnographic values so that they would cease being barbarians and become carriers of their forefather’s spiritual

tradition.’

26

The Astana municipality’s way of organizing cultural events, particularly the day of Astana, sends a

completely different message. It says that this is a city where one can self-fashion without buying into any kind of

dominant culture. Very much like in the architectural style, in its cultural politics, too, the Astana establishment

invites eclecticism and a creative play between the ‘yurt and the skyscraper.’ The fact that somebody from the

Zhambul region can come with his tent and occupy, if only briefly, the central park or Independence square means a

lot from the point of view of claiming the city – even if it can be interpreted by some intellectuals or ‘natives’ as

‘mambety having good time’ (Lazsczkowski p. 181). It is super-important that one can have a regional and even a

rural identity, emphasize his/her origin (from Karaganda or from Chymkent) and to simultaneously claim to be an

Astana citizen (Lazsczkowski 2012). Astana professional yuppie (ofisnyi plankton)47 folklore is saturated with jokes

about 50 attributes of representatives of different regions and cities in Astana – these jokes are usually called: ‘50

attributes of a person from Shymkent in Astana,’ ‘50 attributes of a person from Almaty in Astana,’ ‘50 attributes of

a person from Tselinograd in Astana,’ ‘50 attributes of a person from Karaganda in Astana’ and so on. In some

ways, these jokes indicate the patterns of internal migration in Kazakhstan and the culture and disposition of

migrants from different regions.48 For example, one joke about Karaganda says that migrants from Karaganda have

occupied all the middle management government positions in Astana. People from Almaty miss mountains, try to

figure out where ‘up’ and ‘down’ is in Astana, and complain about service in local restaurants. Jokes about people

from Shymkent hint at their perceived backwardness and proneness to corruption; one joke, for instance, says that

only a Shymkent person knows that road patrols in Astana take bribes (implying some personal knowledge of a

Shymkent person in an action of bribery). For the young people who come to ‘make it’ in Astana these jokes are like

stories of origin and becoming. But, in a way, this folklore supports an official narrative of Astana as being both a

47 Office plankton (in Russian, offisnyi plankton) is a derogatory term for white-collar office workers who are

engaged in non-productive ‘pen-pushing’ activities or ‘imitations of activity.’ The term carries a negative

connotation of passive uselessness. It describes the middle echelon of the new post-industrial economy: people

working in management, sales, and advertising, including, chiefly, technocrats and public servants. The phrase is

used to mock this new middle class’ ‘average’ way of thinking, materialistic goals, and a meaningless (unproductive

and even parasitic) existence. Astana is also often mocked as the ‘city of public servants’ or the ‘city of offisnyi

plankton.’

48 These ‘migration’ jokes are not restricted to Astana. There are jokes similarly about migrants to Almaty (usually

much more negative) and to Western Kazakhstan’s oil-booming cities of Atyrau and Aktau.

27

‘melting pot’ of the nation and as a city of opportunity for all Kazakhstanis. Unlike Almaty, Astana is a city where it

doesn’t take long to become a native.

28

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