Kazakhstan is the width between Russia and China

Dismiss Kazakhstan as empty ground between Russia and China and you see the area while missing the state. This country is the width that overland routes must cross when they avoid the sea. The steppe is not a blank margin. It is the space in which the state chose to place its capital.

The capital is called Astana. It does not sit at Almaty, at the foot of the southern mountains. It sits in the northern steppe, where the seat was moved after independence. The city was Akmola, then Astana, then Nur-Sultan, after the long-serving president Nursultan Nazarbayev, and then Astana again. The changes of name are not a curiosity. They show that this capital is a political placement: the state names its centre instead of simply inheriting it from an older city.

The width is the country

Kazakhstan covers 2,724,900 square kilometres and has 20,843,754 inhabitants. Few people live on that area, and distance belongs to ordinary state life: long journeys between cities, steppe in the north, dry country farther south, mountains only where the borders turn south and east. Russia lies to the north, China to the east, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan to the south, Turkmenistan to the southwest. To cross this country is not to cross an approach. It is to cross a state that is this width in its own right.

To the west Kazakhstan reaches the Caspian Sea. The sea gives the country harbours, but no natural outlet to the ocean. It therefore remains landlocked, and by area the largest such country. The status describes the missing world ocean, not a place off the routes. Railways, roads and pipelines to the north, west and east are the coast this state has. The Baikonur cosmodrome, which Russia uses on Kazakh soil, is another bargain over territory: use and sovereignty come apart, and the ground stays Kazakh.

Astana stands where the centre was placed

Almaty was the capital when Kazakhstan still belonged to a larger state, and the city faces the mountains on the southern border. The independent state moved the seat to Akmola, into the steppe, and called the city Astana, which means capital. That it later carried the president's name and then dropped it does not change the geography. It confirms it. The middle of the country was not a ready-made metropolis. It was declared one, and then built.

A city in the steppe does not stand by itself. It needs roads the state lays, water brought in, and offices that move. That is the point of the transfer. Astana sits closer to the middle of the territory than Almaty, and farther from being only the southern hem of a mountain range. Kazakhstan chose to be governed from the width, not from a city that crowds the southern borders and leaves the northern steppe behind.

The capital was placed in the steppe. It was not waiting there as a finished city.

— TerraTally · Countries desk

Kazakh and Russian in the same state

The constitution makes Kazakh the state language. Russian is officially used alongside Kazakh in state bodies and in local self-government. That is a practical order for a country whose north, along the Russian border, does not speak as a single national language would suggest. Kazakh says which state is meant after independence. Russian keeps offices, firms and many cities intelligible to one another. Both roles are legally intended, and they are not the same role.

The currency is the tenge, issued by the national bank. A currency of one's own belongs to the same decision as a capital of one's own: the corridor was not meant only to carry other people's routes, but to have a budget. Kazakhstan is not an annex of Russia, and it is not an outpost of China. It is the country between them, large enough to set conditions, and landlocked enough to remain dependent on its neighbours. The width is room for manoeuvre and dependence at once.

To see only emptiness is to underestimate how much politics sits in a steppe that someone has declared to be the centre. Kazakhstan governs itself from Astana, uses Kazakh and Russian in official life, and remains the largest landlocked country because the Caspian is not an ocean.