Republic or Death! (20 page)

However, he would say that explanation could not be further from the truth, that he wrote the anthem simply because he loves his people and wanted to give them a song that would ‘have a strong emotional charge, raise their morale and bring them together to achieve a higher purpose'. Those are his exact words, in fact, taken from an email his office sent me after I'd harassed them for the best part of a year. The email goes on to say he started writing poems as a boy, carried off by a ‘romantic perception of the world', and has never let that passion go. ‘Reflections on the past, worries for the future of our people, the feeling of love for my native land, all inspire me to write,' he says. The anthem is just another example of that inspiration hitting. He picked ‘My Kazakhstan' to rewrite because it was a song that had ‘already achieved wide acceptance and love, played in every home, on every holiday, prompting high patriotic feeling'. It just needed ‘some refinement', a touch-up here and there, since the words were written so long ago.

When Nazarbayev's office sent me that email, I think they assumed it would end my desire to learn anything else about the song and certainly be enough to stop me visiting (‘You're here?' were the first words I heard when I called his office from the capital). But Nazarbayev's comments, interesting as they are, don't seem an entirely believable explanation of why he wrote the song, if I'm honest. And they also leave a lot of questions unanswered. What was wrong with the old anthem in the first place? Did Nazarbayev really do the rewrite? And, most importantly, does Nazarbayev's authorship affect people's feelings towards this anthem? Does it turn something that's meant to be apolitical into just another tool for his rule?

Nazarbayev was born in 1940 and grew up in a village called Chemolgan in the south of the country. His parents worked on the local collective farm (in spite of having a withered arm, in his father's case) and Nazarbayev had to help: moving cows, watering crops, or helping protect flocks in the mountains in summer (wolves apparently always a danger). The only entertainment was hearing his mother sing folk songs at night, his father occasionally accompanying her on the
dombra
, the Kazakh two-string guitar. He was apparently the best student at his school – everyone here tells you that, while museums have his glittering report cards on show. What is less discussed is that he was also the sort of boy who stood in front of the mirror at night practising speeches for the next day's class – something that says more about how he got to become president than a few good grades ever could. It was at school that his ‘serious passion for music began', he says. ‘My friends and I sang folk and pop songs, played music together. I started to play the accordion, mandolin and
dombra
. As the Kazakh proverb goes, the real Kazakh is not Kazakh, the real Kazakh is
dombra
.' Like most proverbs, it loses something in translation.

Aged eighteen, Nazarbayev had just graduated from school when he saw an advert for Young Communist League members to go and train to be metallurgists at a steel plant in Temirtau, 300 miles away in the north of the country. ‘A metallurgist has a noble and proud profession,' the advert said. ‘It's a job for real men who will earn the highest wages.' It didn't mention that the steel plant had yet to be built, that the town's nightlife consisted of watching people fight or that he'd have to live in a dormitory where there was no space even to dry clothes (‘We left our work clothes outside at night because it was easier to put them on when they were frozen than when they were wet,' he once said). Those omissions may explain why he so enthusiastically signed up. By the age of twenty, Nazarbayev was working eight-hour shifts at a blast furnace, working with molten metal at temperatures above 40°C, feeling the weight drop off him, and drinking half a bucket of water every day in a futile effort to keep it on. He barely stopped working when his shifts were over, either, spending his time organising events for friends and colleagues, everything from weddings to fishing trips. The Communist Party soon took notice of this drive and organisational ability and offered him a job as the second secretary of the committee in charge of the heavy industry department of the Temirtau City Communist Party Committee, his first step on to a very long ladder of even longer job titles.

By 1989, Nazarbayev had done so much climbing of that ladder, he'd become First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Republic of Kazakhstan, a surprisingly succinct name for the highest position in the country. He'd got there through skill, greasing the right palms (being a politician in the Soviet Union was as much about knowing who to bribe to fix production figures as anything else) and a fair dose of luck (he survived a KGB investigation). So, as Russian Communism wheezed its last, he suddenly found himself leader of the world's ninth-largest country, albeit one with more problems than almost any other former Soviet state. Kazakhstan had been Russia's dumping ground for over 100 years: the place where the tsars exiled their supposed opponents (including Dostoyevsky) and where Stalin tried to deport whole populations, such as the Chechens. Russia tested its nuclear weapons there too, and had left over 1,200 warheads sitting in silos in case Nazarbayev wanted some explosions to welcome in independence. The country was also ridden with anxiety: the then majority Russian population worried what Kazakh nationalists would do next; the Kazakhs worried the Russians would either leave or revolt. And on top of all that, the economy had collapsed.

*

Zhadyra Daribayeva, a beautiful sixty-six-year-old poet whose dimples get deeper with each smile, is sitting in a cafe explaining what life was like immediately after that independence. ‘It was very difficult,' she says with slight understatement. ‘I was travelling a lot then, and I saw people crying everywhere. When they spoke about the future they'd break down. Everyone's clothes were rags. No one had food. We had no water, no light in the cities. People had to do whatever they could to earn money …' She trails off. ‘I saw so many horrible things, but I had hope because our president was honest with us. He said, “Right now, everything is difficult, we just have to be strong.”' She waves her hand around the cafe, filled with chattering women eating dainty sandwiches and pouring out pots of herbal tea, as if to say, ‘Look, he was right.' ‘Don't misunderstand me,' she adds. ‘I was filled with happiness because we had independence. We felt free! It was just difficult.'

The reason I've arranged to meet Zhadyra is that she is one of the authors of Kazakhstan's first anthem, the one Nazarbayev replaced when he wrote ‘My Kazakhstan'. Actually, she's more important than that: she's one of only a handful of women to have ever written an anthem – a fact that seems to say as much about how wrapped up patriotism is with testosterone, as it does about historical inequality.

At independence, Kazakhstan actually had two anthems. The first was the Soviet Union's, which people could no longer sing without laughing or crying (‘Long live the creation of the will of the people, / The united, mighty Soviet Union', it went). The second was the anthem of the Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic, which people might have been tempted to carry on with if it hadn't been full of lines like ‘To the great Russian people we say: “Thank you!”' and ‘Victorious path of Lenin never be tarnished'. At one point it even talked of Kazakhstan being covered in fog, ‘But Lenin went forth as the morning, and it was morning!'

Unsurprisingly given those two choices, Nazarbayev soon launched a competition for a new anthem, asking for new words to the Kazakh SSR tune. Zhadyra decided to enter after having a dream in which she was a bird struggling to find a roost – as if someone was trying to tell her she wouldn't find peace until she'd had a go. So she left her husband and three boisterous children in Almaty and headed for a rural library where she could study other countries' anthems – France's, Turkey's – and conjure some suitable words. ‘Out of three hundred and sixty entries, I came last,' she laughs, ‘but they couldn't decide on a winner so the president said they'd have to try again. A lot of people then said to me, “Maybe your words are actually good, but you're not famous; you're a woman. Try joining up with others.”' Zhadyra, showing admirable restraint, somehow didn't tell any of these people to shove their chauvinism somewhere unpleasant. Instead she found some men willing to work with her – famous men at that – and the group spent the next three months sending letters back and forth, toiling to put all of Kazakhstan's history and its people's emotions into just three verses and a chorus. ‘We are a valiant people, sons of honour,' their final song opened,

And all we've sacrificed to gain our freedom,

Emerging from the malicious grip of fate, from hell of fire,

We've scored a victory.

It's a mouthful, but something in there obviously touched Nazarbayev since he chose it above 780 other entries. Maybe it was the references to the past. Kazakhstan was not long ago home to three nomadic tribes, who traced their heritage to such great horseback-riding warlords as Genghis Khan and Tamerlane, and who could point to monuments like the ruins of Sauran – a vast, walled city in the desert – as evidence of their power. That heritage was all disrupted when the Kazakhs were forced on to collective farms and had to sit back as the Soviet Union did its best to ruin them – the ‘hell of fire' referred to in Zhadyra's song. ‘People always want to forget history, but they have to use it to build a new future,' Zhadyra says.

Over the next few years, Zhadyra heard her new anthem (blandly called ‘National Anthem') wherever she went – schoolchildren had to sing it daily; public events opened with it. But in 2000 Nazarbayev started saying it needed changing, Zhadyra's words especially. Zhadyra, somehow, wasn't surprised, or even the remotest bit disappointed. ‘I used to see children try to sing it and it was really difficult for them, because it's words for adults really. You have to understand them; you have to feel them. And everything had changed by then. Life wasn't a struggle any more. Everything was new. I'm of another century really and so's my anthem.'

She starts wistfully telling me about Nazarbayev and the many meetings she's had with him. He'd of course have been the best person to write the new anthem, she says. ‘He knows everything that's happened in our country, and he's always thinking about what will be and how we can get there. And he's a poet too. Did you know that? He used to read me his poems and they were very good.' I clearly make a face of disbelief. ‘I'm not just saying that!'

*

It took me all of about thirty seconds to realise I wouldn't be asking Mukhtar Kaldayakov any difficult questions about Nazarbayev. I had gone to Mukhtar's home – a modest three-room flat in Almaty littered with children's toys – to learn about his father, Shamshi, the man who wrote the music for the original ‘My Kazakhstan', which Nazarbayev then took for his anthem. Mukhtar welcomed me inside, then introduced me to his children. ‘And this is my youngest, Nursultan,' he said, lifting up a wide-eyed boy barely past his first birthday. ‘Name just like president's! Sort of gift to him. He's done so much for my family.' He then showed me his gun collection. ‘This can kill from three and a half kilometres,' he said, passing me a rifle so heavy I could barely lift it.

Mukhtar is easily one of the most hospitable people you could hope to meet in Kazakhstan. Round-faced, with hair rapidly receding, he spent the best part of the next three days showing me anything he could think of connected with the anthem, as well as plenty of things that weren't. He's a conductor himself, having inherited his father's passion for music, and he took me to Almaty's opera house, where he got his alto and tenor colleagues to sing ‘My Kazakhstan' for me, their voices so powerful they shook my rib cage. Later, he took me out to the countryside to eat horse sausage, drink camel's milk and see the mountains that inspired Nazarbayev to write poetry, even if Mukhtar's father didn't feel quite so warmly towards them (‘He always said to me, “Why'd you go out there? For someone to kill you?”'). He even took me to see his mother, a decision he appeared immediately to regret when she started telling me that Shamshi used to get so wrapped up in music he forgot they needed money to eat, and that he once went through a phase of drinking so heavily it turned her hair white with worry (‘Musicians!' she said dismissively). Mukhtar only seemed to calm down when she pulled a ream of photos out of a bag. There was Shamshi, in dozens of pictures, from his teens to old age, always with a gentle smile on his lips and a faint moustache above them, so handsome I'm not surprised she forgave all his vices.

Shamshi was destined to be a composer, it seems. He was born Shamshi Donbaiev, but ran away from school and, wanted by the police, had to change his surname. He decided on Kaldayakov, meaning ‘he has a mole on his foot', because his own father did indeed have one. ‘He was the first person in the world to be called that,' Mukhtar cries out when telling this story. ‘That's how much of a born composer he was. He even composed his name!' Shamshi didn't start playing music, though, until he was about seventeen and joined the army, taking up the mandolin to entertain new friends. He went on to have a long career writing Kazakh pop songs – most in a waltz style – but ‘My Kazakhstan' was one of his first compositions and his only march. Shamshi wrote it in the early 1950s, when Nikita Khrushchev – then leader of the Soviet Union – had just launched his ‘virgin lands campaign' with the hope of turning northern Kazakhstan into Russia's corn belt. The fact he labelled it ‘virgin land' tells you exactly how much contempt he had for the Kazakhs living there, and to make matters worse he also proposed carving a new regional area out of their country to be put directly under Russia's control.