Republic or Death! (21 page)

‘Imagine if someone came and tried to break up London,' Mukhtar says, hitting a table in disgust. ‘It's just like that. My father composed the song to stop them doing this. “Don't do it. This is our land”' (Mukhtar insists his father basically wrote the words too, telling Jumeken Najimedenov what to write). The song became popular, even with the Soviet authorities, but unfortunately not popular enough to stop Khrushchev; the cold, dry north of Kazakhstan was soon dedicated to growing crops it was completely unsuited for.

I ask Mukhtar why he thinks the song's appeal lasted so long that almost sixty years later Nazarbayev picked it, and he says it's all down to his father's melody. ‘He used to know three hundred songs – every Kazakh song, every Russian song. And he'd always say, “You have to know all songs if you're to find your own style. It's like rain and you're trying to run through the water. If you know everyone else's, you get through. If you don't, you get wet.” That's why the anthem's so good – it's unique music.' However, it doesn't take more than a cursory listen to ‘My Kazakhstan' – sprightly, but like many other marches – to realise Mukhtar's judgement's been clouded by family ties. The real reason the song stayed so popular is, I'm sure, down to how it was used after it was written, long before becoming the anthem. And in particular, what happened on three days in December 1986.

On the 16th of that month, Mikhail Gorbachev appointed an unknown Russian as Kazakhstan's new leader, overlooking the local candidates (Nazarbayev was next in line). The next day, thousands of people, mainly students, gathered in Almaty's main square to protest, finally so fed up of Russia's contempt for their identity they were willing to take the risk of confronting its police. The police reports of that day say most of the protestors were drunk and rowdy, throwing rocks at anyone who tried to reason with them. But what most people actually spent the day doing, according to Mukhtar and many others I spoke to, was singing, and singing ‘My Kazakhstan' in particular. The authorities clearly thought even that minor show of dissent was going too far, as by the end of the day they had ordered the army to clear the square with batons and dogs. At least two people died and apparently thousands were arrested, many of those then beaten in custody.

Showing immense courage, most people then came back for two more days of singing – this time with a lot of genuine rioting thrown in. ‘My father was out of Almaty at the time,' Mukhtar says, ‘but my brother and I stood on our balcony and watched what was happening. I saw it myself. People came and crushed everything. I was shocked. I didn't understand what was happening, especially when they started singing. I understood: This is my father's song. The whole street's singing it. They're coming together. But that's it. Looking back now, it was like watching history. The French Revolution! With music! But then I had no idea what was going on.'

Mukhtar couldn't really have joined in if he'd wanted to as it'd have just meant going to prison. ‘I was a student and we got a telephone call from the deacon: “Please stay at home. Don't go out to study.” We had to stay in for three days. Every two hours someone called asking, “Are you still there?”'

Shamshi himself seemed to realise just how important his song had become. He was in hospital in 1992 when Nazarbayev announced the competition for a new anthem (the one Zhadyra eventually won). ‘Some of his composer friends came to see him and they were all talking about it,' Mukhtar says. ‘“Maybe we'll compose a new anthem, what do you think?” But my father said nothing. When they left, my mother asked him why, and he said, “What could I say? They'll never compose the anthem.” It was like he knew that he'd already written it, that one day his would be chosen.' Shamshi died a few weeks later; Nazarbayev rewrote his song fourteen years after that.

I ask if any of the family are annoyed by Nazarbayev changing the words when he did make it the anthem, but it gets the response you'd expect from someone who lives in an autocracy and whose father is now known as the composer of his country's most important song: ‘What a stupid question!' I barely ask Mukhtar anything else about the president after that, but the question clearly sticks in his mind. On our final day together, driving through the countryside, he suddenly asks me to ‘be nice' when writing about the president. ‘Write about him like he's your grandfather,' he says, ‘because to us, he's like ours. He's made Kazakhstan safe. We're not Georgia or Uzbekistan or Tajikistan, with civil wars and things.' He looks at me, and clearly unconvinced I'm going to do as he asks, tries another tack: ‘You know we have a saying here: “Write nice things about president and nice things will happen to you.”'

*

If most people I met in Kazakhstan were nervous talking about Nazarbayev, there was one topic no one held back on:
Borat
, the film about a Kazakh journalist who goes to America and shows up the small-mindedness of the people he encounters by acting as preposterously as possible. As soon as I told people I was writing about the anthem, most assumed it was because of that film, since it features a very funny fake one (‘Kazakhstan, greatest country in the world, / All other countries are run by little girls,' go two typical lines). If you search for Kazakhstan's anthem online, it's that
Borat
one that comes up first, which probably explains why in 2012 a Kazakh athlete, Maria Dmitrienko, was accidentally played it after winning gold at a shooting competition in Kuwait. She didn't appear to notice the error, even when the words ‘Kazakhstan's prostitutes cleanest in the region, / Except of course for Turkmenistan's' echoed around the stadium. At another sports ceremony the same year, officials accidentally played Ricky Martin's ‘Livin' la Vida Loca' instead, an incident that's far harder to explain especially as it occurred in Kazakhstan. Nazarbayev's government reacted to both mix-ups by passing a law saying that anyone who disrespects state symbols faces a year in prison. Another law quickly followed forcing athletes to know the anthem by heart or lose funding.

Now, all of that sounds very interesting to ask people about. And it would be, if Kazakhs didn't appear to believe that
Borat
had committed more historical damage to their country than any of the empires that have traipsed across their land. On my very first day in the country, I got chatting with a student, Dauren Joldybenov. Intelligent, interesting and funny, he told me a lot about Nazarbayev, about how Kazakhstan was changing and even about the state of Islam in the country (it's growing among the young, who see it as linked to their heritage). He was great company, in other words, until he suddenly asked if I'd seen
Borat
. ‘Is it true it was financed by oil companies angry that Nazarbayev renegotiated the terms of their contracts?' he asked. ‘You do realise none of it's true? It wasn't even filmed here!'

After a week in Kazakhstan, it wasn't just conversations about
Borat
making me uncomfortable; I was starting to feel somewhat overwhelmed by all the love for Nazarbayev – especially the repeated meetings I'd have with people who'd talk about him dewy-eyed while sitting yards from a billboard of him smiling down on us. The reason it made me uncomfortable was that I knew all the, shall we say, less-than-favourable things about him and his government: the accusations he siphoned money from oil deals in the 1990s and asked energy firms to buy him private jets and tennis courts in contract negotiations (none of them proven, admittedly); the fact newspapers are closed for little reason; the difficulties of politically opposing him (several prominent activists have gone to jail); his government's response to the Zhanaozen massacre, when fourteen striking oil workers were killed by police, which seemed to focus more on putting protestors on trial than finding out the truth of what had happened (there was no independent investigation); and the fact that in presidential elections, the leaders of the opposing parties that are allowed to run always seem to be pro-government (in April 2015, he won his fifth five-year term with 97.7 per cent of the vote). Most human rights organisations you can name put out annual reports about the country, all of which make claims such as that torture occurs in the country's prisons and that some of the country's laws contain clauses so vague they can be used to crack down on any activity the leadership dislikes.

There was once even a scandal around Nazarbayev involving the anthem. Back in 2000, a few days after he started saying Zhadyra's anthem needed replacing, politicians proposed adopting a song called ‘My People'. Nazarbayev had written the words to it and it does indeed sound like a great anthem for a country bursting into life. ‘The dawns have become clear, / the mountains are soaring high / … the day of our dreams has come true,' it starts. But there was a problem: Nazarbayev's lyrics appeared to be remarkably similar to those of a poem by a man called Tumanbay Moldagaliev, one that had been published two years before the president had put pen to paper. The two only differed in their titles, according to reports in opposition newspapers.

Serikbolsyn Abdildin, the Communist Party's leader at the time and a long-term thorn in Nazarbayev's side, wrote a long article highlighting this ‘sheer plagiarism' just before parliament was due to vote on whether to adopt it. A few days later, Nazarbayev wrote to the parliament thanking the politicians for their kind thoughts about his song, but asking them to drop their plan. He'd not written ‘My People' to be an anthem, he said, merely to inspire the youth.

Abdildin devotes a few pages to the incident in his memoirs. ‘I do not find any pleasure in discussing this situation, when a leader abuses his position to add his name to the creative heritage,' he writes. I asked Jonathan Aitken, a former British politician who once went to prison for perjury and who is Nazarbayev's English biographer, about this incident. He hadn't heard of it, and insisted Nazarbayev was a good enough songwriter to not need to copy others, but he did joke that ‘plagiarism isn't the same in Kazakhstan as it is here, especially if you're the president'. (Nazarbayev's office unsurprisingly denied the accusation, sending me a letter headed ‘Dear Mr Marshall!' – the explanation mark, I assume, highlighting my impertinence – stressing that the president is the ‘only author of the poem' and ‘all the information … regarding accusations of plagiarism is unfounded and incorrect'.)

With all this in mind, I started actively searching for people who might be opposed to Nazarbayev, to try to get their take on him and his song. The problem was, their views turned out to be pretty much the same as anyone else's. One afternoon, I went and saw Saule Suleimenova, an artist who made her name in the late eighties holding anti-Communist exhibitions, although her recent output is far less confrontational, consisting of still lifes made from plastic bags, a comment on the number you find dropped in the countryside. Her flat was filled with a few of these beautiful canvases as well as numerous piles of fag ends and stacks of paint. I told her my predicament and said several people had recommended I speak with her. ‘Of course,' she laughed. ‘I'm an artist. I'm free.'

But that freedom only seemed to stretch to criticising corrupt mid-level bureaucrats; she wouldn't touch Nazarbayev himself. ‘Why would I?' she said without a hint of sarcasm. ‘I like him, especially his foreign policy.' And as for the anthem: ‘To be honest, I didn't know it was his text until now,' she said. ‘He's done a pretty good job. It's much better than the last one.'

Another day, I got talking with an ethnic German, Alex (not his real name, which he asked me not to use). I'd stopped him in Almaty to ask for directions to Panfilov Park, a place where couples have wedding photos taken against brutalist war memorials and old men gather to play chess. He offered to walk me there and after a lot of small talk about what I was doing said conspiratorially, ‘Remember to tell the truth about Kazakhstan. Tell it like it is.' He seemed a bit melodramatic, but I suggested we went for a drink and, over a beer, he told me numerous unprintable allegations about Nazarbayev, his senior officials and his family, repeatedly saying things like, ‘Everybody says we're successful, that we have all this oil and gas, but look around – most people are poor. Where's the money going?'

But then he spent just as much time praising Nazarbayev, especially for keeping peace in this multi-ethnic country, telling me that no other politician would have managed it. And he also couldn't stop telling me about Nazarbayev's forays into music outside the anthem. ‘Have you heard “Ush Konyr”? It's this song by MuzArt, our most famous boy band,' he said at one point. I had heard it and it's pretty fantastic for a Kazakh boy band. ‘Nazarbayev wrote the words to that too. He did it in a few minutes at a party one night, writing on the wrapping from a chocolate box. He's really talented.

‘Don't forget to tell the truth,' he reminded me as we finished up. I wanted to reply that I wasn't sure what the truth was any more.

*

At the end of my time in Kazakhstan, I spent three days in Astana, trying to find a politician who would talk to me about the anthem. I thought perhaps they might be able to give me insights into Nazarbayev that no one had so far, assuming they would have had more dealings with him than members of the public. But none of them would talk. One initially said yes (‘Sounds fun!'), only to phone back the next morning to say he'd had a think and decided it really wasn't his place. I was starting to worry it was a futile chase until I tracked down Bekbolat Tleuhan. Bekbolat turned out not to be a politician any more – Nazarbayev had made him step down from politics for being a Kazakh nationalist (‘I'm not. That's an awful word. I'm a patriot!') and annoying many of the country's Russians – but he is a famous traditional musician and, even better, wrote music to accompany one of Nazarbayev's poems, the very one that got caught up in the plagiarism scandal.