Historically, Kazakhstan’s capital, Astana, founded by decree of President Nursultan Nazarbayev in 1997, was never a place people chose to visit. Located between the bleak steppes and forbidding bogs of southern Siberia, it was built in the 1830s as a fort and manned by Cossacks defending a crossing place for traders in the shallows of the River Ishim.

Stalin drafted in German prisoners-of-war and Chechen deportees to toil in local factories and farms. After them came droves of Soviets under the banner of Khrushchev’s Virgin Lands policy to turn the steppes into a vast field of grain.