Astana as Imperial Project?: Kazakhstan and Its Wandering Capital City in the Twentieth Century

Abstract

The article looks at the phenomenon of Kazakhstan's "wondering capital city" in the twentieth century, when, over the course of less than seventy-five years, four different cities had served as the republic's administrative center. The author suggests that decisions to relocate the capital to a new city before 1991 reflected structural shifts in the political and economic relations between Kazakhstan and the central government. Thus, the succession of relocations can be read as a narrative of the changing colonial condition of Kazakhstan in the twentieth century. This narrative helps us understand how the infrastructural and discursive legacies of imperial policies were inherited and reappropriated by post-Soviet Kazakhstan. From the vantage point of the metropole, the transfer of Kazakhstan's seat of government from Orenburg to Kzyl-Orda (formerly Perovsk and AkMechet), then to Alma-Ata, and the development of Tselinograd (the future Astana) by the late 1950s were seen as elements of sociopolitical engineering serving economic progress. Each time, the new human and financial resources drawn to a new capital city boosted they city's development. These structural socioeconomic transformations also had a profound impact on the demographic situation, either marginalizing the Kazakh population or promoting its amalgamation with the newcomers, a process that produced a new local ethnocultural identity.