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Kazakhstan at a crossroads – photo essay

This article is more than 1 year old

Living in Kazakhstan for more than three years, photojournalist Frédéric Noy documented the culture and atmosphere of a turbulent country working to define itself in the shadow of the Soviet Union

by Frédéric Noy

Shaped in the crucible of central Asia, Kazakhstan, the largest landlocked country in the world, remains for most foreigners a huge void on the map, somewhere between Russia and China. With a surface area five times the size of France, it has long sailed along with history and the great empires.

  • A landowner, his son and his brother leave the vast plain surrounding Taraz, where kokpar – an ancient equestrian game – was organised. In a trailer attached to the landowner’s old Lada stand his two horses with their heads covered to protect them from the biting evening wind on their way back

From Alexander to Genghis Khan, from the Russian conquest in the 19th century to the integration into the Soviet Union, it has hardly known a period as a nation state, as Vladimir Putin liked to point out perfunctorily in August 2014, a few months after the annexation of Crimea: “The Kazakhs have never had a state,” suggesting that their only way out was to be integrated into the great Russian entity. A notable exception: the autonomy of Alash, from 1917 to 1920, a liberal-nationalist political breathing space between the Tsarist and Soviet authoritarian eras, on a territory roughly corresponding to that of the present republic.

  • Tourists in the seaside town of Balkhash on the lake of the same name

  • Cadets walk through Panfilov Park, Almaty, in front of the monument to the legendary 28 Panfilov guardsmen

In the fallow ideological space created by the break-up of the Soviet Union in 1991, of which ironically it was the last member for four days, Kazakhstan had to construct an alternative discourse of national cohesion, an attempt to define itself in the eyes of the world, but also to claim a distant glorious past, in order to remain definitively master of its destiny.

  • The Eucharist during Sunday service in the Russian Orthodox Ascension Cathedral, also named Zenkov after its architect, located in Panfilov Park, Almaty. Built between 1904 and 1907, constructed entirely of wood, it was confiscated by the state and transformed into a museum during the Soviet period, becoming a place of orthodox worship again in May 1995, a few years after independence

This is a complicated challenge, since its territory was an open-air laboratory for the industrial, atomic, agricultural, political and social experiments of the Soviet Union, traumatic experiments whose after-effects are still felt in the national psyche. This was an immense challenge for a country whose intellectual elite was strangled by the Stalinist purges and whose communal balance of power in the Soviet Union favoured Slavic groups and Russian speakers.

  • During a self-defence class at a gym in Almaty, Maria Makarevich, a Kazakh national boxing and kickboxing champion and former bodyguard of wealthy business people, teaches young women how to defend themselves in the event of an attack, including domestic violence, a serious problem in Kazakhstan

At independence, Kazakhs were in the minority in their own homeland. In order to change the demographic balance, a repatriation programme over 25 years (from 1991 to 2015) brought the return of more than 1 million people – about 5% of a population of more than 19 million inhabitants. Most of the exiles were descendants of those who fled the USSR in the 1920s and 1930s to escape repression, forced collectivisation and famine.

  • Members of Q-Pop band Ninety One warm up in a discreet studio in Almaty before their Saturday night show, during which they write a song in an hour. In the corseted Kazakh society, their appearance has revolutionised gender representation, revolted conservatives and boosted the use of Kazakh in contemporary song

  • Kazakh snowboarders sit in a cable car that takes them to the Shymbulak ski resort, 2,200 metres high on the outskirts of Almaty

For the 51% of the population born after independence on 16 December 1991, Ninety One is more likely to remind them of of the Q-pop group than the year of independence, although one is named after the other. Since then, contemporary Kazakhstan has been going its own way, incognito, far from the eyes of the west, despite the international fame of the film Borat. It reinvents itself. Connected to the world, trying to forge a modern and hi-tech identity, carrying from its Soviet past an industrial glory, and from its nomadic origins a rural nostalgia.

  • At the end of the very long and rich dastarkhan (low dining table) set up for the spring festival Nauryz, the women of a village family joke and discuss

  • The Oralman family of Zukhra Mukanova (wearing a blue scarf), in their living room in the village of Chubarsu, a few kilometres from Shymkent

Oralman are descendants of Kazakhs who fled the Soviet regime from 1920 onwards, Kazakhs in the ethnic sense of the word and mostly living in other central Asian states. Zukhra Mukanova and her daughters moved from Uzbekistan to Kazakhstan in 2010. Although she has a residence permit, she has started the process of obtaining citizenship so that her daughters will automatically become Kazakhstani. Aizhan Mukanova, pictured above wearing an orange scarf with her daughter resting on her legs, said: “Sometimes my child gets sick, and I couldn’t go to the doctor. When she was born, we went to Shymkent to do an MRT, all newborns have to do it once every two to three months, but we can’t do it in the public hospital because of a lack of papers. We have to use private doctors.”

  • For many years, the Aral Sea gave these men no cause for celebration. Fishing died out in the 1980s, after the Soviet government drained the sea to feed cotton fields far upstream. The once colossal Aral shrank to one-tenth of its original volume, becoming a tragic shadow of its former self. Its fish have died, its most successful fishers have left. Thanks to the construction of a dam financed by the World Bank, the northern part of the sea has filled up enough for fish to return

  • At dawn, off the coast of the village of Tastubek, fishers pull up nets they set the night before

The country built its new capital in the middle of the steppe to prevent the dreaded expansionism of the Russian big brother, and to give new life to the atrophied Aral Sea. A society whose soul is symbolised by kokpar, an ancestral equestrian sport, and whose cultural virtues include opera and ballet. A nation, the cradle of apples, whose subsoil contains 99 periodic elements. An immensity irrigated by the memory of itinerant times and whose umbilical cord remains the train, an artefact if ever there was one of sedentary life. A space whose cardinal points are unknown to each other, while in Almaty, the cultural capital, activists and young protesters electrify the gatherings and nights.

  • Dozens of young people, activists and members of civil society, sensitive to queer and feminist causes, meet in one of the only two LGBT-friendly nightclubs in Almaty, during a demonstration afterparty

  • In Almaty, Kazakhstan’s more political, youthful and anti-establishment city, the organisers of the International Women’s Day march greet 1,000 participants

  • People gather in Republic Square, Almaty, in memory of the victims of the January violence; a group in Almaty protest to mark International Women’s Day on 8 March

  • Workers clear away rubble and strip the Akimat, Almaty’s monumental city hall, down to its metal structure. As the centre of riots in Kazakhstan earlier this year, it was stormed by a mob and set on fire on 5 January. The burnt-out wreckage was the seat of power in the country’s largest city

Formerly the headquarters of the central committee of the Communist party, inaugurated in 1980, the huge Akimat dominates the city from its elevated position, overlooked by the Ile-Alatau mountains. Its rapid reconstruction is a priority to prove the return of control by the government and the return to normality.

  • Meat hangs from metal spikes along the aisles of the northern part of the Zelionyj or Green Bazaar in Almaty. As a traditionally nomadic nation, meat and dairy products take up a lot of space in the bazaar. Several aisles are dedicated to horse products. Originally, this place served as a stopover for merchant caravans travelling through central Asia

The name of the country in -stan, so pejorative to Elbasy (Father of the Nation) Nursultan Nazarbayev, that he suggested calling it Kazakh Yeli (Country of the Kazakhs) in 2014. Since 1991, more than 30 years passed largely under his rule. First secretary of the Kazakh Communist party in 1989, he retained the leadership of the country after the fall of the USSR, where no election was ever recognised as free and independent by international observers. He finally handed over the presidency in 2019 to a loyalist, Kassym-Jomart Tokayev, in a departure that was more formal than real, since he retained a major influence

  • For a few bucks, an iman leads the prayer for visitors to the huge Akmeshit cave (White Mosque in Kazakh). For security reasons, the visitors are wearing helmets. According to local belief, this is a sacred place that can perform miracles in the lives of visitors who pray or make a wish there. Many of them are women who are unable to have children or people who hope to be cured of an illness. According to legend, women and children took refuge in the underground cave, the entrance to which is invisible above ground, during the wars between the Kazakhs and Dzungars from 1643 to 1756

The subtle mixture of geopolitical invisibility, relative prosperity paid for at the price of a policed authoritarianism and immobile evolution in which Kazakhstan bathed was pulverised last January during disturbances that were as brief as they were bloody. The official death toll of at least 227, including 19 members of the security services, hardly bears witness to the trauma in Kazakh society.

  • In the waiting hall of a station, a large mosaic commemorates a glorious episode of the fishers of the Aral Sea: their contribution of 14 wagons of fish to famine-ravaged regions during the tumultuous early days of the USSR

  • A Kazakh couple on their way to Kyzylorda from Almaty (a 23-hour journey). The train remains the mode of transport for the classes less favoured by the economic boom in Kazakhstan. The distances between cities are very long and it takes hours to get from one to the other

The end of an era? In any case, that of the Nazarbayev dynasty. A new chapter? On 16 March 2022, President Tokayev promised extensive political reforms and constitutional changes to move from a “super-presidential” regime to a presidential republic with a “presidential” structure.

  • During a photoshoot for a Kazakh artist’s project, the actor Almira Tursyn holds a baby saiga, a rare species of Eurasian antelope that lives mainly on the steppes of Kazakhstan. A trained psychologist, she was chosen from 15,000 applicants to play Tomyris, the legendary queen of the steppe.

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