Kazakhstan – divided into Millispheres

Millisphere: a discrete region inhabited by roughly one thousandth of the world population; around eight million but anywhere between four and sixteen million will do.

Back before Covid, when one could still contemplate traveling, my dream list of potential journeys included the Northern Silk Route through Central Asia.

In the 1980s Olive Newland had gone to Urumqi in the far west of China, traveling as an elderly Whanganui woman by herself. From Urumqi Olive took the southern route across the Tarim depression and over the Karakoram Pass and down the Indus to Pakistan. Olive survived only to die in a car crash in Westmere.

The Northern Silk Route follows where the life-giving waters of glacier fed rivers meet the desert lowlands, passing through the region that gave us the apple, peach, apricot, walnut and almond as well as cannabis and scented roses.

From Urumqi the northern route goes to Almaty in Kazakhstan and a decade ago my friend Blackie the cowboy carpenter arrived in Almaty on a flight from Amsterdam. Slightly drunk, wearing jandals and without a visa, Blackie had planned for his brother Mike, who was teaching in Kazakhstan, to help him get in – but Mike wasn’t there. Kazak customs were suspicious of all the different stamps in Blackie’s passport. “International traveler eh!,” sneered the uniformed customs officer in an oversized, braided Russian cap and Blackie caught a glimpse of his brother arriving as he was frogmarched onto the next flight to Schiphol.

Blackie never made it to Almaty but my friend Chris, the international English literature teacher, had spent a year working there as well as doing another stint in Uralsk, in Kazakhstan’s far west, where the temperature goes from minus fifty celsius in the winter to plus fifty in the summer.

Kazakhstan (2020 population 18 million) by my rules is too large to qualify as a millisphere and we ended up dividing Kazakhstan by watersheds into the millispheres of Aral, Balkhash and Kazak (see map).

Before examining Kazakhstan through my human geography model of the millisphere we should pause to look at Halford MacKinder’s influential 1905 “Heartland” geopolitical model. Mackinder saw the world through the lens of the British Empire. British control of its empire was only possible through being the world’s preeminent navy, he reasoned, and its ultimate threat was from the centre of Eurasia – far from Britain’s navy. Britain’s bogeyman at the time was Russia whom they feared would invade India – overland.

MacKinder’s mythical “Heartland” coincides with present day Kazakhstan. MacKinder’s homily that “whoever controls Eastern Europe controls the Heartland and whoever controls Heartland controls the ”World Island” – being all of Europe and Asia – resonated with the postwar United States, inspiring a Cold War with the Soviet Union. If anyone controls the “Heartland” today it is China but MacKinder didn’t see China coming.

In 1991 the USSR shattered into the independent states we see today. The Baltic “republics” lead the way as the peripheral states broke away and when Russia finally declared independence Kazakhstan was left as the last member of the USSR.

Geopolitics credits geography with determining the rise and fall of empires – twentieth century thinking. The millisphere model credits human geography with revealing the relationship that we humans have with our environment – twenty first century thinking.

Central Asian physical geography starts with plate tectonics. Mountain ranges like the Himalayas, Pamir, Tien Shan and Hindu Kush thrust up as land masses collide and, like an old fashioned hub cap crumpling, depressions like the Tamin and the Caspian plunge to below sea level.

Of the three millispheres of Kazakhstan two (Aral and Balkhash) drain into inland seas and lakes – the Aral Sea and Lake Balkhash respectively. One millisphere (Kazak) drains north into the Ob river in Russia which discharges into the Arctic. A common theme is the environmental degradation of these landlocked seas as rivers were harnessed for irrigation.

Balkhash

Dividing Kazakhstan by watershed produced the millispheres of Kazakh, Aral and Balkhash – named after Lake Balkhash. There are 3.3 million people living in the Balkhash basin – in Kazakhstan – not enough for a millisphere. We need to add the watershed in China to qualify. There are another 2 million Kazakhs and Chinese living in the Illi valley on the Chinese side of the border.

Eighty percent of Lake Balkhash’s inflow comes from the Illi River which rises in the Tien Shan mountains in Xinjiang in China. As one would expect there is a growing demand for water in China which has increased its irrigated crop area in the Illi valley by 30% in the last two decades. The Illi river also suffers from industrial pollution in China.

The Lake Balkhash water level has dropped by two metres since the 1970s and it looks like a repeat of the Aral disaster. Like the Caspian and Aral seas Balkhash is an endorheic basin (no exit to the ocean) and Balkhash was once an interconnected system of sixteen lakes (some fresh water and some saline). Now there are five lakes and there has been a major loss of surrounding ecosystems. The Illi river flow into Balkhash has been reduced by about a third.

China refuses to ratify the UN law of trans-border water use claiming an absolute right to the water regardless of the consequences; and that “the water is needed to provide power and food to the burgeoning populations of the region”.

Almaty, the largest city in Kazakhstan, was also the political capital before the government moved to Nursultan in the millisphere of Kazakh to the north. An important staging post on the historic Northern Silk Route under the Soviets Almaty became a place where exiles were sent. Trotsky was sent to Almaty when he fell out of favour with Stalin and New Zealanders sometimes go there to teach the children of the kleptocracy.

Sitting on China’s “One belt, One road,” Almaty is a multicultural city. Uyghurs run restaurants selling fatty mutton dishes and there is still a sizable Russian population. Mike, a teacher from Northland, liked the Russians. “Because they are no longer the top dogs they are not as arrogant as the Kazakhs; and they were always trying to get me drunk”. Mike’s wife liked skiing in the mountains nearby.

My friend Chris also enjoyed his time teaching in the “Big Apple” – Almaty is thought to be where the apple originated. Like me Chris has a geography degree. “Chinese money is building new railway lines and roads all over Kazakhstan, I don’t know how they are ever going to pay for it,” Chris said. China is thought to control 40% of Kazakhstan’s oil production.

In 2020, 4000 Chinese freight trains passed through Kazakhstan on their way to Europe. At Khorgos, on the Chinese border, in the Illi valley, they change all the bogies under the trains because Kazakhstan railways run on the Russian gauge which is different to that in China.

When Kazakhstan became a republic under the rule of the kleptocrat Nursultan Nazarbayev there was a feeding frenzy for the previously state owned property and businesses characterised by nepotism, political cronyism, corruption, violence and intimidation.

Almaty had large squatter communities and when developers attempted to demolish some in Shanyrak in 2006 large scale riots broke out. A year later 600 police came and arrested the ring leaders. Poet Aron Atabek was sentenced to 18 years in prison and in 2012 he smuggled out of prison and published “Heart of Eurasia”, which called for the squatters to be given their “miserable 0.06 hectare plots.” For this he was put in solitary confinement and the squatters of the Shanyrak Asar (cooperative) are still negotiating for titles to their homes.

Also from Almaty is cyber pirate Alexandra Elbakyan. What New Zealand’s Kim Dotcom did to Hollywood’s intellectual property with his Mega Upload website; thirty-two year old Elbakyan is doing to the intellectual property of accademia with her Sci-Hub website. Reed Elsevier, the London based publisher of (government funded) university research, is not happy.