Eternal Futurostan: Myths, Fantasies and the Making of Astana in Post-Soviet Kazakhstan

Abstract

If for Francis Fukuyama 1991 signalled History's imminent end, for the Republic of Kazakhstan history was only about to begin. In the most concrete sense, the collapse of the Soviet Union had given the Kazakhs-rather unexpectedly for many of them-an opportunity to act on their own, as autonomous historical subjects in a world growing, as some political interpreters averred, increasingly multi-polar. Seen at a slightly different angle, the newly acquired sovereignty brought about a transfer of property rights over the historical past, that nebulous mental terrain overseen hitherto by party functionaries and meticulously screened historians, into the hands of local agents. In other words, the Kazakh state and society broke into history with a claim upon the future and the past, graduating at once into protagonists of the drama of independence and creators of its prequel. What would have looked like a standard situation in a country resuming its autonomous existence after a hiatus (however long) of foreign