September 24, Astana

After saying goodbye to Zolka at the airport in Samarkand, we spent the rest of the night in transit and finally landed at the Astana airport at 5:00am.

Leaving Samarkand: Paperwork bureaucracy is still alive and well! We had to physically print out our boarding passes at the airport in Samarkand just so an official could manually ink-stamp them. They weren't even scanned, just stamped, leaving us with the impression that literally anyone holding a piece of paper could have boarded that plane.

Once we hit passport control in Astana, it was a total nightmare. There was a massive, creeping line, and it took an hour and a half to get through because the border control officers spent an agonizing amount of time on every single person, completely devoid of automated equipment or expedited lanes. Stepping outside, you see a sleek, hyper-modern airport building proudly emblazoned multiple times with the name of Kazakhstan's first president, Nursultan Nazarbayev. Whatever staggering funds went into turning this capital into a futuristic monument, none of it was funneled into optimizing basic airport operations.

Astana Background

Formerly a quiet steppe outpost named Akmola (and later Tselinograd), the city was abruptly declared the nation's new capital in 1997 by President Nursultan Nazarbayev, replacing Almaty. Fueled by massive oil revenues and designed by world-renowned architects like Kisho Kurokawa and Norman Foster, it was built from scratch into a glittering, sci-fi showcase of Eurasian ambition. It was even officially renamed Nur-Sultan from 2019 to 2022 in honor of the former president before reverting back to Astana. 

President Nazarbayev's decision to shift the capital 600 miles north from Almaty to the windswept steppe of Astana was driven by a calculating mix of geopolitics, geography, national branding, and maybe just a hint of vanity. The government primarily feared northern separatism: the northern regions shared a border with Russia and were home to a majority ethnic Russian population, so moving the seat of power there permanently shifted local demographics and secured the borderland. In addition, geographically, Almaty was trapped, hemmed in by mountains in the South with little room for expansion, exposed to major earthquake hazards, and tucked away in a far corner of the country. 

While foreign critics widely dismissed the move as a megalomaniacal vanity project to build a futuristic monument to one man's ego in the desert, it functioned as a state-building exercise that allowed the newly independent nation to anchor its borders and project a bold, oil-funded showcase of modernity to the world.

That said, our hotel, the Weil, proved to be another exercise in cutting-edge design purely for the sake of it. We were running on almost zero sleep, and there we were, pacing up and down a heavily textured decorative corridor trying to figure out which wall panel was actually the concealed door to our room. Once inside, we faced an additional cognitive load of cryptic push-buttons just trying to figure out where the closet and hairdryer were hiding, how to turn on the lights, and how to operate the shower. Fine design, for sure, but it demanded way too much brainpower.

After cleaning up and enjoying a nice breakfast, we went out to explore. The city is colossal, massive 8-lane boulevards reminiscent of grand Soviet urban planning, but bizarrely lacking basic pedestrian underpasses or street crossings. It is emphatically not built for human feet. Despite the population soaring past 1.68 million, there is still no subway system. Magnificent, towering skyscrapers line the streets, but occasionally you'll notice a distinct lack of central air conditioning, leaving retrofitted A/C units slapped across the exterior facades. Bukhara solved this challenge more organically by disguising their late-addition A/C units behind ornate, carved covers.

The crowning architectural creation of the city is the Baiterek Tower, a massive white lattice tower topped with a giant golden glass sphere, symbolizing the mythical "Tree of Life" and the sacred bird Samruk's egg. We took the elevator to the top, and from the observation deck, the view is truly magnificent: lanes of traffic humming below, sculpted flower beds, the grand Presidential Palace, and a surreal lineup of futuristic high-rises stretching out across the flat steppe.

To top off this grand monument, right in the center of the golden sphere sits a pedestal holding a bronze mold of former President Nazarbayev’s handprint. A cheerful attendant offered us to get in line for the chance to place our hands inside the imprint for good luck, an opportunity like that one simply doesn't pass up! Maybe one day back home we'll build our own Arch of Triumph with a corresponding handprint of the Father of the Nation for visitors to touch.

We made our way to the Botanical Garden, which feels much more like a young, sprawling park with newly planted trees. There were very few people out walking, which makes total sense given the city's car-centric scale. But we were thrilled to see plenty of Stolovayas (classic self-service canteens)! It was too early for lunch, but we poked our heads inside several to confirm it had all the best comfort staples. Most of these places open at 8:00am and serve everything from breakfast to dinner.

For actual lunch, we headed to Gruzin Kuzin right next to our hotel, which turned out to be the absolute worst Georgian food imaginable. The flounder we were served had undoubtedly died a natural death long ago, and we certainly weren't going to disturb its eternal rest, leaving almost all of it untouched on the plate.

We retreated to the hotel for a much-needed afternoon nap to finally catch up on sleep. Refreshed, we took a cab back toward the Botanical Garden to Keks, where we had marvelously delicious syrniki (adding to the lovely ones we had for breakfast) along with a few other great treats while catching up on the blog.

Walking home in the cool evening air, we got into a long discussion about the varying fates of the 15 former Soviet republics after 1991. Looking around Astana, people genuinely seem happy, kids smiling, teenagers glued to their phones, older folks relaxing together in the park. Everyone seems to be doing just fine here.

Post-Soviet Democratic Outcomes

Of the 15 former Soviet republics, only three transitioned into durable, consolidated democracies:

• The Baltic States (Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania): were it. Their existing historical pre-WWII democratic identities, immediate integration into the European Union and NATO, complete institutional break from Moscow and complete removal of traditional Soviet apparatchiks from the government enabled them to build stable rule-of-law societies.

• The Hybrid / Transition Zone (Moldova, Georgia, Armenia, Ukraine): These 4 states developed competitive, electoral systems with active civil societies and genuine power rotations. However, their democratic progress has been constantly checked by deep internal political polarization, systemic corruption, and direct military intervention or territorial occupation by Russia.

• The Authoritarian / Autocratic Zone (Russia, Belarus, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan): The remaining 8 republics reverted to or maintained authoritarian governance. In Central Asia and Azerbaijan, former Soviet leadership elites smoothly converted existing party and state apparatuses into presidential and, in some cases, dynastic systems, often supported by oil, gas, and mineral wealth. Several factors reinforced this trajectory: there were few nearby democratic models to emulate, little historical experience with competitive democratic institutions, and strong Soviet-era state structures that could be repurposed rather than dismantled. Abundant natural resources also gave governments an independent source of revenue, reducing their immediate dependence on broad-based taxation, private enterprise, or regional economic cooperation and making it easier to pursue centralized development. Geography reinforced this pattern: the Central Asian states were relatively isolated, landlocked, and surrounded largely by other authoritarian or unstable states, leaving fewer obvious regional examples of an alternative political model. The result was a preference for state stability, centralized authority, and rapid modernization over the uncertain process of Western-style democratic reform.

Perhaps the most important lesson from the post-Soviet times is that democracy cannot simply be installed and then expected to perpetuate itself. Democracy is a skill. It has to be learned, practiced, and passed from one generation to the next.

The Greek democracy experiment worked within a small community of citizens who could participate directly. Modern democracies are vastly more complicated: hundreds of millions of people, enormous bureaucracies, complicated economies, global information flows, and now algorithms shaping what we see and believe. We have dramatically expanded who gets to participate without necessarily making a comparable investment in teaching people how to participate.

That may be one of the great unfinished projects of democracy: teaching people not only how government works, but how to be citizens, how to disagree, evaluate information, recognize manipulation, accept political loss, and protect the rights of people with whom they profoundly disagree.

Technology may give us tools to make government, history, and political ideas more accessible than ever before. Whether those tools strengthen democracy or undermine it will depend, as it always has, on what people do with them. I'm of opinion that a true democracy is both right and responsibility, has to be deserved - ongoing. 

We ended our night with a final drink at the hotel bar, bringing a close to our last evening in Astana.