Just to let everyone know, I’ve opened a POP friendly email account at kazakhblog [at] gmail.com. My old email, kzblog [at] yahoo.com, will no longer be monitored as frequently. Please send any emails to kazakhblog [at] gmail.com. And let me know if there are any links I forgot to change on this blog.

So in honor of Robert Burns, who celebrated his 250th birthday on Sunday, I thought it would be fun to translate Ode to a Haggis into Russian. It was then pointed out to me that Burns was very popular in the Soviet Union and that Samuel Marshak, a poet and writer in his own right, had done the definitive translations of Burns and Shakespeare in Soviet Times. So I duly found the poem in Russian and discovered that like all great translators, he had changed the words quite a bit. Some may feel this was necessary to catch the meaning or to make it comprehensible to Russians. Others may feel it was a bastardization.
So I thought it would be fun to present the original text, the official Russian translation, and then my English translation of the Russian translation.

Any commentators who feel brave enough to present their own translations of the original are more than welcome. (more…)

This story has been in my backlog, duly starred in Google Reader and bookmarked in the “To Post About” Folder on Firefox. But as I work through that file of stories I meant to post about, they become less and less timely. So I’m going to link to a nice article on it at Ekspeditsya, a Central Asia blog I just discovered with some pretty good content on it.

Claims have been made that 20 000 students were expelled for being unable to pay tuition or fees at Kazakhstan universities and colleges. The Minister of Education claims that the number of expelled students is only 7 000 and that of those 3 000 were expelled due to poor academic performance or other grant violations. The Ministry is also apparently taking measures to be more flexible in allowing students to pay for education.

It would be interesting to hear from some of the students themselves on this issue. Is this a real problem or not? There are serious problems with the educational system in Kazakhstan but I have never heard that school fees were excessively high although I have heard many accusations of corruption and of students or parents paying out-of-pocket for everything from repairs, to new teacher salaries, to sports equipment (There’s an interesting comment on Masimov’s blog about teachers not being paid and other financial problems at a school in South Kazakhstan).

So how hard is it to pay for higher education in Kazakhstan?

While we tend to think that large-scale, uber-modern building projects are the purview of Astana only, Almaty also has its fair share of construction plans. The financial crisis has halted construction all over the country because banks have stopped giving credit. But one project, Apple Town is apparently still on track. And it’s being praises as well-thought out by experts.

Overall the project will cost $4 billion dollars and will contain 2554 apartments as well as schools, stores, and commerical offices. In other words, it will be a mini-town in the mountains south of Almaty. The first stage of the project will be finished in 2011 and by 2014 it will be fully constructed.

The smallest apartment is currently going for $500 000. Apartments feature crystal chandeliers, a jacuzzi, heated floors, security video screens in the apartment, and remote controlled lights and heating. One may question whether the country needs more housing aimed at the super-rich, particularly in these economic times, but apparently some apartments have already been sold (For those unfamiliar with the Kazakhstan market, it is perfectly normal to buy an apartment in a building that has not yet been built).

The economic times may be a boon to Apple Town because they claim that there are many unemployed workers. With financing coming from Korea, the instability in Kazakhstan banks is not affecting the project. Korean firms are also providing a lot of the materials and equipment that are going into the building.

Some other fun facts: The total area of the project will be 275 448 square meters (2 964 897 square feet), of which 20 701 square meters (222 823 square feet) will be roads. It will contain 5 345 parking spaces or 1.33 spaces per apartment.

Caravan, the weekly newspaper, has an article on the agricultural business in Kazakhstan, which is in serious crisis [RU]. In a follow-up interview with Kazakhstan Today, Anatoly Popelyushko, head of the Union of Food Producers in Kazakhstan, says thatprices in Kazakhstan are higher than prices in Europe [RU] for food. The articles are both in Russian so I’ll outline a few of the key points here as to why the agricultural industry is in serious trouble.

• Domestic agriculture “is not developing. In fact, the opposite,” Popelyushko said to Kazakhstan Today. Government investments are either misguided or ineffective. For example, the Development Bank of Kazakhstan invested $ 130 million in ethanol plants which use grain that can be sold abroad at a higher profit than the bio-ethanol. He also notes that, “Eight sugar refineries were built; only three are producing, and at only half their capacity. The rest can be taken down for scrap metal: they are unprofitable.” Regarding government actions to regulate and stabilize the wheat industry, Popelyushko says it was a failure. The system put into place had no effect on the market and while there was a bumper-crop of wheat, the price did not go down. It is unclear where any profits went, especially regarding companies that were created by the government. Furthermore, Caravan states that government subsidies for farm products are eaten up by the high price of imported goods.

• Furthermore, Popelyushko claims that the government deliberately does not do enough to regulate prices and that many products cost two to three times more than in Europe. Many of our products in Kazakhstan, cost two to three times more than in “expensive” Europe. (more…)

OK, this post has nothing to do with Kazakhstan per se and the story is already 2 years old. But 2008 marked the 50th anniversary of Boris Pasternak winning the Nobel Prize in Literature for Dr. Zhivago. Because the Nobel Prize committee seals its records for 50 years, we look forward to the records being made public this month and getting a confirmation.

According to a book by Ivan Tolstoy, The Laundered Manuscript, the CIA helped win Pasternak the Nobel Prize. Pasternak, better known as a poet in Soviet Russia, finished his novel, Dr. Zhivago in 1955. Set during the Russian Revolution, the famous love story espouses anti-Soviet ideals such as individualism and fighting against the politics and culture of the times. Pasternak realized that the novel could cause him serious problems in the Soviet Union and his wife, afraid of the gulag, urged him not to publish it.

However Pasternak sent the manuscript to Novy Mir, the State literary magazine. The government, according to records released in 2001, saw the manuscript as a threat:

Boris Pasternak’s novel is a malicious libel of the USSR,” wrote Soviet Foreign Minister Dmitry Shepilov in an August 1956 memo to members of the Central Committee of the Communist Party. In a memo of its own, the KGB offered the opinion that “a typical feature of his work is estrangement from Soviet life and a celebration of individualism.”

Pasternak also shared the manuscript with Sergio D’ Angelo, a Moscow-based Italian radio broadcaster and acquaintance of Italian publisher, Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, who was also a member of the communist party. The author also gave typed copies to Isaiah Berlin, the British philosopher and to a French specialist in Slavic Studies Helene Peltier.

The communist party pressured Feltrinelli not to publish the book, even forcing Pasternak to write telegrams urging him not to go forward. However Pasternak did manage to send secret letters assuring the publisher that these telegrams were not sincere. In one such letter, he wrote

how happy he was that the Italian was not “fooled by those idiotic and brutal appeals accompanied by my signature (!), a signature all but false and counterfeit insofar as it was extorted from me by a blend of fraud and violence.” (more…)

Kazakhstan is in the process of introducing new passports with biometric data encoded in them. This is not newsworthy as many other countries are doing the same thing. To ensure that Kazakhstan citizens can freely travel around the world, the introduction of biometric passports is necessary.

What is interesting is that the new passports will include the holder’s ethnicity (or nationality, as it is called in the Russian-speaking world). For now that information will be simple text and not in biometric form i.e. there will not be a piece of DNA in there.

While Soviet-era ID documents always included the holder’s ethnicity, the current passports do not include any information about ethnicity (only citizenship), although national ID cards do. While Kazakhstan promotes itself as country of inter-ethnic tolerance where 120 ethnic groups live side-by-side in peace, to some Western observers the emphasis on ethnic identification seems to belie the image of tolerance. (more…)

A disabled rights group in Karaganda has requested government grants to pay prostitutes. Tarilik, which means “normal life” in Kazakh is an NGO based in Karaganda, Kazakhstan. The head of organization claims that:

Kazakhstan’s invalids have limited possibilities for intimacy and that “they complain that after saving money to pay for the services of a prostitute, [the prostitute] sees them in wheelchairs or without arms and leaves.”

Petrus said “there are men, 30-35 years of age, who have never been with a woman.”

It’s not just men, Petrus: disabled women also suffer from the same problem. And, in her opinion, legalizing prostitution would “provide significant profits for the state budget.”

Well it certainly would boost an industry that is 100% domestic, except for prophylactic devices which are primarily imported. And while this particular initiative is a bit wacky, in general Kazakhstan needs to do a lot of work to integrate the disabled into normal society. So hopefully this appeal will at least generate some PR and lead to more feasible programs in the future.

According to the Sunday Times, Two MI6 agents may have assisted Dariga Nazarbayeva in collecting information. Recall that Nazarbayeva, the daughter of the President of Kazakhstan, hired a variety of consultants to collect information about the Kazakhgate trial, a fact that came to light when Rakhat Aliyev, Nazarbayeva’s ex-husband, threatened to publish the reports. The reports allegedly contain personal information about key witnesses and secret information about the progress of the trial.

Now accusations have come forward that two agents serving in the British Secret Intelligence Service, MI6, leaked information to Global Options Management, a private consulting firm that was hired by the Nazarbayev family.

According to the Sunday Times:

One MI6 officer is said to have divulged that MI6 was “closely observing” the role of Hurricane Hydrocarbons, a Canadian oil company, and financial arrangements involving oilfields in Kazakhstan. A second MI6 officer is alleged to have revealed information that the service held on Akezhan Kazhegeldin, the former Kazakh prime minister. The report also contains information that it claims was given by Scotland Yard detectives.

A follow-up on Freestailo, the YouTube star from Kazakhstan. Many people in Kazakhstan have been trying to figure out where he got the idea from. Also, while there are some Kazakh words in there (”Analain” which means “dearest” and “Kyzdari” which means, “girls” or “women”) there is also a lot of nonsense, like “Waka Maka”.

Thanks to a friend for pointing out this song, Freestyler by the Bomfunk MCs:

Notice that the first lyrics are “Freestyler/Rock rock rock rock the microphone”. Which sounds, to a non-native speaker, like: “Freestylo/waka maka”!