The Gucci Revolution Revisited
In response to this IHT editorial mentioned on this blog before, here some of my thoughts:
There some kind of feeling of grandeur in the city of Almaty.
Yes. A sense of grandeur or… a complex?
“Almaty” badly digested the impoverishment right after the Soviet crash and now that things take off again it tries to compensates that with a fixation on having the biggest, the flashiest, the most expensive etc. etc. I just spent 1.5 months in Kazakhstan and it really stroke me: “see we have this just like in Europe and that just like in the US…” It’s a bit like the attitude of a provincial who became rich but is frustrated because he is not taken seriously by the urban high society.
Life in this part of Kazakhstan provides the illusion of prosperity.”
Actually, you don’t have to go walk that far from the Gucci and Lancôme boutiques in Almaty to find that “other Almaty” – one that few expats and correspondents know. One that technically starts south of Gogol köshesi and the Zeliyonii Bazar and then spreads to the southern suburbs.
It is there that you’ll find the masses of impoverished rural migrants who try to eke out a living a petty traders, day labourers etc. A group whose life changed little compared to 1997 when I first came to Kazkahstan.
The real faultline in this country is no longer between Kazakhs and Russians but between those who benefited form the Nazarbayev reign (that group include a number of ethnic Russians) and those who have not (or did but see further amibitions blocked).
on January 16th, 2006 at 7:50 am
A small nitpick, but I think you mean north of Gogol and the green bazaar. From the center of the city, Medeo and Shymbulak are to the south; the airport and Astana lie to the north.
Most people (myself included) seem to have an innate desire to equate “north” with “up” and so imagine the mountains to be to the north and downhill to be to the south, but in Almaty this is not the case. Almaty’s suburban sprawl lies to the north (along Seifullina) and west (along Al-Farabi).
And so I’m not merely taking pot-shots at a minor error– your point is fundamentally correct. There’s a lot of “me-too”-ism in Almaty these days, and an awful lot of luxury goods being purchased by a relatively small slice of the populace.
on January 16th, 2006 at 6:38 pm
You remark is very correct: NORTH of Gogol. Indeed it had to do with ‘up’ and ‘down’, ‘n’ and ’s’.