Following Lenin’s death Soviet leaders grew quite keen on naming things after themselves, but this could get complicated very quickly in a country where Stalin was in charge and high-ranking officials were regularly purged. But once Stalin died, a similar fate befell the towns and cities bearing his name: Stalinabad became Dushanbe, Stalingrad became Volgograd and Stalino became Donetsk. He at least was dead and so did not have to witness his own downfall, but the same cannot be said of many of his henchmen like Vyacheslav Molotov and Lazar Kaganovich who were still alive when they saw their names stripped from things. 

Nazarbayev is, by comparison, still quite fortunate. Molotov not only saw his name vanish from cities, but he was dispatched to Mongolia to serve as ambassador before being expelled from the party in 1961. Although he was eventually allowed back in, he endured a long, forced retirement that ended with his death in 1986 at the ripe old age of 96. Kaganovich, who had at one time been Khruschev’s main patron, was demoted to minor administrative positions and also expelled from the party. He also lived a long and bitter life, and died at the age of 97 in July 1991, a mere five months before the USSR evaporated. Nazarbayev is already in his 80s, so it is unlikely he will have to suffer that long of a humiliation. 

Meanwhile, Astana (which simply means “capital”) has had many names, even by the standards of the region. Before that it was Tselinograd and before that it was Akmolinsk and before that it was Akmola. At the turn of the millennium, I was teaching English in Almaty when one of my students told me that Akmola meant “white tomb”. He suggested that Nazarbayev might want to rethink locating his new capital in a place with such a name; it did not bode well. Indeed.