City of extravagance gleams in Kazakh steppe

By Maria Golovnina

ASTANA (Reuters) - If there is one thing Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev cherishes as part of his legacy, it is the gold-plated extravagance of his new capital, Astana.

Tucked away in the empty heartland of Eurasia, Astana was little more than a windswept provincial town a decade ago when Nazarbayev declared it the capital of his vast oil-rich state.

Now, with its grandiose, if somewhat surreal, skyline dominating a barren landscape, Astana stands as a monument to Nazarbayev's two-decade rule in the former Soviet state.

With gold-tinted tower blocks, oddly shaped skyscrapers and a giant pyramid with an opera house in the basement, Astana also offers a peek into what a country can do with billions of dollars of new-found oil wealth.

In power since 1989, Nazarbayev dreamt up Astana's creation -- Kazakhstan's answer to Dubai and Brasilia -- in 1994 as a symbol of Kazakhstan's independence and a way to give a sense of national identity to his people.

Like other nations born out of the break-up of the Soviet Union, Kazakhstan endured years of post-Soviet chaos in the 1990s but its economy is now booming thanks to billions of dollars of foreign investment.

Five times the size of France but populated by only 16 million people, it wants to copy the experience of Gulf Arab states that have grown rich on the back of oil since the 1970s.

It is also at the centre of global oil diplomacy as Europe courts it as an alternative to Russian energy supplies.