Palladium, By Luka Jukic, January 19, 2019
In Nazarbayev’s words, Kazakhstan is a country “in the epicenter of the world,” and Astana is the “heart of Eurasia.”
A million people in a city may not seem particularly impressive, especially by Asian standards, but Astana was founded just 20 years ago. Since then, it has drawn hundreds of thousands of people from all over the country, despite the miserable conditions and—as I have been told by nearly every Kazakh I’ve met—its soulless character. What draws people to Astana, though, is very real economic success. It’s a success that has gone largely unnoticed to the outside world. In the years following the collapse of the Soviet Union, Kazakhstan experienced much of the same poverty and economic decline as the rest of the former Soviet Union. But since 2000, unlike most of its counterparts, it has experienced tremendous economic growth and development.
"the Eurasian Economic Union (EEU) in 2014, the most integrated organization of post-Soviet states since the USSR’s collapse—an idea Russian President Vladimir Putin himself attributed to Nazarbayev, and the result of his decades-long attempts at integrating post-Soviet states into a new economic and political bloc. "