ABSTRACT
Alma ata, Kazakhstan—this is Central Asia’s “Wild East,” where businessmen from Houston to Seoul are doing everything but riding Mongol ponies and sending their foot couriers running out ahead to bet on Kazakhstan’s milk and goat meat—read, “oil and gold.” It is the one place in Central Asia where one can stay in a first-rate hotel. There is a reason for this. The Dostyk was the former hotel of the Communist Party Central Committee, and it has now fallen to the likes of us. One cannot expound upon the communists’ behavior in the wood-paneled bedrooms, but one certainly appreciates the luxury after the stinking hotels everywhere else. In the elegant conference room of the presidency, the man unquestionably the star of the Kazakh show, President Nursultan Nazarbayev, is holding court with the visiting French foreign minister’s delegation. An Asiatic empiricist, Mr. Nazarbayev has studied the economic “models” of South Korea, China, and Singapore.
