Republic or Death! (19 page)

 

EVERYTHING ABOUT KAZAKHSTAN'S
capital, Astana, feels wrong. It's a city literally in the middle of nowhere – surrounded by steppe, nothing but yellowing grass to its east or west, giving central Asia's winds a thousand-mile run-up before they clatter into it. (The winds are so strong, in fact, the government had to grow a ring of trees around the city to help deflect them.)

It also feels less a city than two that have been badly stuck together. On the northern side of the Ishim river is the old town. It was once known as Akmola, ‘the white graveyard', a name that tells you exactly how its Russian founders felt about it (it comes from the colour of the soil), and it still looks and feels very much a Soviet city, with rows of colourless apartment blocks and endless bus queues. But on the southern side, there's … well … how can I put this? There's a 77-metre-tall pyramid with stained-glass doves flying to its peak; there's the world's largest tent, which throbs pink, green and yellow through the night like an alien giving birth; there's a gross replica of the White House; a building that looks like an egg hatching; another that looks like a bike helmet; a Romanesque theatre; and a Dutch windmill. There's even one of the world's largest mosques, its sparkling turquoise prayer hall empty because there are so few devout Muslims to fill it. The place is absurd. You bus around it desperately guessing at what you'll see next, struggling to take everything in. It's like someone told a group of architects to build a capital from scratch, adding, ‘Don't worry about money, or taste, or practicality. Just blow people away.'

That is, in a way, exactly what has happened here. Astana is the creation of one man: Nursultan Nazarbayev, who has ruled Kazakhstan since 1989, shepherding the country through the collapse of Communism to become the oil giant it is now. He's the father of the nation and its eternal hero, and no one can say otherwise. Well, not here, at least: insulting him or his honour is punishable by up to five years in prison.

Astana is Nazarbayev's pride and joy. In 1994 he announced that it was to replace the wind-free southern city of Almaty as Kazakhstan's capital, and just three years later forced all his politicians and bureaucrats to make the 600-mile move. He allegedly designed all its major buildings himself, sketching ideas and even picking colour schemes before handing them over to architects for realisation. Almost all these buildings have plaques screwed to them saying, ‘Built at the initiative of the leader of the nation, Nursultan Nazarbayev.' Even the ice hockey stadium has one, making you wonder if the city's team used to smack pucks around an icy car park until the president turned up and said, ‘What you guys need is a stadium.'

But the reason I'm here isn't to gawp at the almost overwhelming number of architectural wonders; it's to see one in particular. It's called Bayterek and it is Astana's centrepiece: a 110-metre-tall tower that's meant to look like a golden egg sitting in a poplar tree, as if the legendary ‘bird of happiness' has laid its young in the equally legendary ‘tree of life'. Inside, you can take a lift to the egg and stare out at the steppe while being bathed in golden light, or you can ignore the view and join a queue of excited Kazakhs waiting to do something else: to have their photo taken while putting their right hand in a cast of Nazarbayev's. A golden cast, naturally, which sits on top of an ornate plinth in the middle of the room.

On my first day in Astana, I headed straight for Bayterek and spent a good half-hour watching Kazakhs laying hands on that cast, some closing their eyes to make a wish as they did so. There were glamorous women in thigh-slit dresses, podgy men in cardigans and dozens of others, all stern and unsmiling, this clearly being ‘a serious moment'. I even saw two parents lift up their newborn to do it. I stayed watching for a long time, partly out of fascination and partly in the hope that some dignitary or other would appear – the President of Eritrea, perhaps – because I'd heard what happens when someone important places their palm on that cast. Drums roll, cymbals crash and massed choirs, hundreds strong, starts singing, ‘
Meniñ elim, meniñ elim
, /
Güliñ bolıp, egilemin
' – ‘My country, my country, / As your flower I will be planted.' The noise is apparently so loud that people jump back, and the attendants have to stifle laughs. The song? Yes, of course it's the country's national anthem, ‘My Kazakhstan', a tune that sounds every bit the post-Soviet march you'd expect. But why have I travelled all this way to hear it? Because its words were written by one Nursultan Nazarbayev, the only serving world leader to have written his own anthem.

No one important arrived, unfortunately, so in the end I had a go myself. I put my hand into Nazarbayev's surprisingly large palm. The music didn't start. It clearly knows a dignitary when it feels one.

*

If you were to guess who writes the world's anthems, chances are you would soon name some of history's more infamous leaders: the vain and egotistical men – it's always men – who, once they've achieved power, seem to force their way into every aspect of a country's life. Such men wouldn't blink at requiring schoolchildren to sing their praises each morning, would they? And surely they'd never let simple musicians take credit for having written something as important as their anthem, even if the idea that they could have written it themselves is scarcely believable. So it is surprising just how few dictators, demagogues and autocrats have felt able to toy with anthems, or force their names into them. It's as if these songs are untouchable; as if altering them would be a step too far, like changing a country's name or replacing its very soil.

There's no mention of Kim Il-sung – the Great Wise President-for-Life Dearly Beloved and Sagacious Leader – in North Korea's ‘Aegukka', for example, and there's no mention of his pop-culture-loving son, Kim Jong-il, either. Instead you get a soaring tune in which North Korea is transformed into a country ‘Limitlessly rich and strong'. That might be because even the Kims knew there were limits to their personality cults, but experts on North Korean music think it's more likely because they had so many other songs written about them, they didn't need the anthem as well. The most famous song in North Korea is not the anthem, but the ‘Song of General Kim Il-sung', written by a farmer, Kim Wôn'gyun. ‘Tell, blizzards that rage in the wild Manchurian plains / … Who is the partisan whose deeds are unsurpassed?' it goes. ‘Who is the patriot whose fame shall ever last?' The chorus gives the inevitable answer. That song's lyrics are pasted alongside mountain pathways to inspire walkers who pass, as if the views alone are insufficient. Wôn'gyun wrote it in 1945 and Kim Il-sung asked him to write the anthem a year later, almost as if it were a prize.

China did for a while have an anthem praising Chairman Mao – from the start of the Cultural Revolution in 1966 until Mao's death ten years later – but that seems more forced on the country by accident than as a result of Mao's egotism. From the start of Communist rule, China's anthem was the ‘March of the Volunteers', that chirpy melody you'll have heard at so many Olympic medal ceremonies. It was originally written to entertain cinemagoers in the 1930s, the musical centrepiece of a film about the resistance to Japan's invasion of Manchuria, which may explain why the lyrics are so dramatic: ‘Arise, all you who refuse to be slaves, / With our flesh and blood let's build a new Great Wall!' it starts.

In Mao's early rule, that song's lyricist, Tian Han, was lionised as one of China's greatest writers. His plays and operas, which took characters from Chinese history and used them to push Communist ideas, were almost compulsory viewing. But then Mao launched his Cultural Revolution, which included getting rid of the old intelligentsia who he saw as endangering Communism, and overnight Han's plays were reinterpreted as ‘great poisonous weeds' undermining the nation. He was thrown in prison, and in 1967 was tortured to death. The Communist Party really had no choice but to ban the ‘March of the Volunteers' after that, its role as the anthem soon taken by ‘The East is Red'. As one historian has pointed out, this is an anthem that almost deifies Mao. It's ‘a creation myth, a historical vision, a belief system and a moral landscape' all in one. ‘The east is red, the sun is rising,' it goes:

China has brought forth a Mao Zedong.

He works for the people's happiness,

Hu erg hai ya.

Those last four words are nonsense, taken from the original folk song it was based on, but that nonsense became the Chinese people's alarm clock and their kiss goodnight for a decade. China's first satellite was even called East is Red. It played the song to prove it was working.

*

But if you look hard enough it is possible to find dictators who have actually turned anthem writers. There's Pol Pot, for a start, who many believe was involved in writing the anthem used in Cambodia during the Khmer Rouge years. It's called ‘The Glorious Seventeenth of April', a reference to the date his regime took control, and has so many references to blood in its first verse it reads like a horrific premonition of the Killing Fields. ‘The bright red blood flooded over the towns and plains of our motherland,' it begins,

The blood of our good workers and farmers,

The blood of our revolutionary fighters, men and women.

Pol Pot's signature isn't on the song's score, but writing it is the sort of thing he would have done, and there are apparently hints in the song's grammar. Ieng Sary, the Khmer Rouge's third in command, also once remarked that Pol Pot thought of himself as an ‘incomparable songwriting genius' as much as a political one.

There's also Turkmenbashi, the broad-shouldered, thick-necked former leader of Turkmenistan, who ruled there for sixteen years until he died of a heart attack in 2006. He was as much of a lunatic as Pol Pot. While in charge, he closed all hospitals outside the capital Ashgabat and renamed April after his mother (it became Gurbansoltan); he banned lip-syncing and wrote an autobiography called the
Ruhnama
, which was meant to be almost as much of a spiritual guide to the people as the Qur'an. It opens with his anthem, the uninspiringly named ‘National Anthem of Independent Neutral Turkmenistan'. Musically, he did a great job, picking a tune by the composer Weli Muhadow which sounds like a symphonic orchestra riding across endless deserts. Unfortunately Turkmenbashi's words didn't quite match up to the promise of the melody. ‘The great creation of Turkmenbashi / … Long live and prosper, Turkmenistan,' goes the chorus. Learning the anthem was compulsory; you could be asked about it during your driving test (as you could anything in the
Ruhnama
). The anthem's reference to Turkmenbashi was not removed until two years after his death.

So, you have Turkmenbashi and you have Pol Pot. And then you have Nursultan Nazarbayev. I doubt he appreciates the company.

*

In the middle of Astana's old city is the Museum of the First President – three storeys dedicated to Nazarbayev's life. It's the only museum I've ever been to where they make you wear fluorescent blue shoe-covers to avoid staining the carpets. Inside you can see every one of Nazarbayev's citizenship cards, watching him change from a bouffant-haired teen in the 1950s, not unlike a Communist James Dean, to the perma-tanned, ever-smiling ruler of today. You can also see hundreds of the gifts he's been given by other world leaders and wonder why on earth Queen Elizabeth II gave him such a cheap-looking carriage clock, and then why on earth Nazarbayev would want it on display.

But the first exhibit you come to isn't about Nazarbayev's life at all, it's about Kazakhstan's symbols: its eye-popping blue and yellow flag, its golden emblem filled with winged horses, and, of course, its anthem, adopted in 2006. On a screen, there's a copy of the words to the original ‘My Kazakhstan', a march written back in the 1950s, the music by a composer called Shamshi Kaldayakov and the words by songwriter Jumeken Najimedenov. But Najimedenov's words are covered with pen marks: some blue, some black, annotations and crossings out everywhere. It turns out to be Nazarbayev's handwriting and it shows him rewriting practically the whole song, turning it from a historic relic into a ballad for his reimagined country. ‘From antiquity / Our heroic glory emerged,' he scribbles over the first verse,

They [the Kazakhs] did not give up their pride.

My people are strong.

He ends the second verse with the simple, if rather presumptive, ‘Our country is happy, / Such is our country.' It is signed ‘P', for President.

It's easy to jump to conclusions about why Nazarbayev decided he should write this anthem. After you've spent a few days here, bumping into photos of him on street corners and in subway stations – ‘Oh look, there's a ten-foot-tall Nazarbayev stroking some flowers' – you get the feeling it's probably because he feels he has to leave his mark on everything in the country, so that when his time ends, his legacy won't. No one would have the guts to tell him it was a bad idea either: this is a country, after all, where politicians once proposed renaming the capital Nurstana in tribute to him.