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As the weather got steadily colder in September and October, my friends and I would often go to the Khan Shatyr shopping mall to hang out at the weekends, drinking coffee and egging each other to buy things.  When I was a teenager growing up in suburban Surrey, I’d also spent my Saturday afternoons at…

Karaganda used to be a byword for remoteness when Kazakhstan was part of the USSR, a kind of Soviet Timbuctoo. There was a joke that went:  “Gdye?” (“where” in Russian) “Karagandye!” (“in Karaganda” – meaning, I don’t know where) Not far from Karaganda is Dolinka, the headquarters of the Kazakhstan gulag — named Karlag —…

The fatal shootings of 17 men in and around the oil town of Zhanaozen in December 2011 shook Kazakhstan to its core. The Zhanaozen tragedy, as it became known, followed a six-month strike by workers at the huge Uzen oilfield.  The struggle between workers demanding higher pay and better conditions on one side and the…

One of my favourite Soviet films is ‘Irony of Fate’, in which a Muscovite gets drunk and flies to Leningrad, where he goes to a building with the same number in a district with the same name, and lets himself into the apartment he believes to be his home — which instead turns out to…

What I liked about my new rented flat in Astana was that it was almost new and neutrally decorated — not easy to find in Kazakhstan — but it still needed a few touches to turn it into a home.  My removal from Almaty went smoothly. The movers boxed everything, wrapped it lavishly in reams…

There are a lot of cultural differences between England and Kazakhstan, and the way the two nations arrange to meet friends and business acquaintances is one of them. I’ve heard the phrase ‘let’s call each other’ — ‘Давайте созвонимся’ in Russian — many, many times since arriving in Kazakhstan and it invariably leads to hours…

Kazakhstan is a darker place after the Zhanaozen tragedy, and there had been other disturbing events since then.  The shooting of 17 men in and around the oil town of Zhanaozen in December had shaken the nation The Zhanaozen tragedy, as it became known, followed a six-month strike by workers at the huge Uzen oilfield. …

How to rent an apartment in Kazakhstan? One word: Krisha.  The Krisha.kz website is one of those Kazakh things that work extremely well.  I’d used it before in Almaty, and you get to look up houses and apartments using a wide range of search terms, then call the landlord or agent and go to view…

In August 2012 I moved to Astana, Kazakhstan’s 15-year-old capital city.  Well, that’s not entirely true. There’s been a settlement on the bank of the Ishim river since 1830, which two years later became the town of Akmolinsk. The town’s fortress was burned down during the liberation movement led by Kenesary Khan, but later rebuilt,…

While staying in Moldova I took a side trip to the unrecognised rebel republic of Transnistria. Just a couple of hours drive from Chisinau, driving in Tiraspol, the capital of the tiny republic, felt like going back to Central Asia — or indeed back to the Soviet era.  From the border checkpoint — where I…