Customer Reviews

Apples Are from Kazakhstan: The Land that Disappeared

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Unless you are interested in Soviet history or Kazakhstan already, this book would probably not be that interesting. Since I am both a keen student of the former and relatively interested in the latter, I found this book fascinating.
I have been to Kazakhstan two years ago (on business), but as is usually the case with brief visits, I only saw what's obvious and superficial. This book was perfect as it dug deeper and explained a lot of what I saw.
The author does a good job keeping it lively and interesting, his style remind me of Bill Bryce's travelogues. My only note (and I read the British edition, it may have been changed in the US) is that the book is somewhat rambling. The author follows a personal narrative ("I did this, saw that") but it jumps around in a non-linear fashion, so you are not exactly sure when things are taking place and what season it is. And some poor editing as well, I think the story about the President's youth is repeated a couple times.

Lastly - the attitude towards the President seems overly diffident. I agree with the author that the country owes most of its recent progress to him, but I think a more neutral tone could be achieved. Given the history of Western writers being smitten by Soviet dictators (I am implying the analogy), I think one should tread carefully.

I have been interested in Kazakhstan since I spent a summer there almost ten years ago. Borat notwithstanding, most Westerners are unfamiliar with the region: this was the ONLY book about Central Asia among thousands of travel and guidebooks at my local mass-market bookstore.

Robbins' writing is a great introduction to Kazakhstan for westerners, as he reviews the country's history and relates amusing anecdotes from his travels. Most western literature on Kazakhstan is dryly academic or political in nature, and focuses on the country's problems and the need for international involvement; this is the first book I've read, that, while acknowledging the challenges, presents a positive view of Kazakhstan's present and future.

As E. Salimova points out in her review, the book is filled with western bias, and only an introduction - but it is a positive introduction, and one that I hope will whet western appetites for greater understanding of the region.

This is a strange mixture of a travelogue and an anecdotal history of Kazakhstan. Robbins characterizes Kazakhstan as an ancient country which has been long forgotten in the West, and he seeks to rediscover the diversity of its past and present.

He describes his travels from the wild steppes of the central country, to the old capital at Almaty, to the nightclubs of the brash new modern capital at Astana. As we travel, he provides interesting historical side stories on the Kazakhstan exiles of Trotsky, Dostoyevsky and Solzhenitsyn; on Sakharov's witnessing of the first Soviet H-bomb tests; and on the horrific forced labor camps of Stalin's Gulag. He also recounts many other fragments of its history, not least that indeed "apples are from Kazakhstan".

As part of his visit, Robbins had multiple interviews with President Nazarbayev and was allowed to travel with him during a tour of some of Kazakhstan's remoter areas. Nazarbayev's quoted reminiscences are interesting, especially around the fall of the Soviet Union and the birth of independent Kazakhstan (although like all politician's memoirs, his words should probably be read cautiously). Robbins has clearly benefited from Nazarbayev's help and in return he is notably delicate in addressing potentially awkward issues. There have been allegations of significant high level corruption in Kazakhstan and of the forcible discouraging of political opposition, but these are not topics that Robbins dwells on.

On the plus side, Robbins has clearly fallen in love with Kazakhstan and he paints a broadly sympathetic picture of a country that has a difficult past, a beautiful but often barren landscape, a climate of hot summers and extreme winters. He presents a country which is relatively tolerant and, with the benefit of oil wealth, is growing prosperous and (by the standards of the region) relatively open.

This is more of a travelogue than a deep history or social analysis, but I found it consistently interesting and educational, and often amusing.

A valuable introduction to an important area of the world that most of us have neither been to nor know much about.

This standard, albeit well-written, travel book, with lots of local color, is made much more important by the inclusion of serious words on the tortured political evolution of Kazakhstan: the days of the Gulag; deadly nuclear testing; the virgin lands/ecological disasters; and the end game of the USSR. Mr. Robbins, an English observer quite positive about Kazakhstan and its current president, ends with finding the present to be a relatively bright time for the varied peoples residing in these vast and hard steppes.

(I think the dust jacket design by Yoshiki Waterhouse is excellent, as are the rough drawings that are planted throughout the text.)

Having just returned from a trip to Kazakhstan, I thoroughly enjoyed reading Christopher Robbins' "Apples are From Kazakhstan: The Land the Disappeared. The book offers an excellent introduction to the country that is known to Westerners only as the home of Borat. Kazakhstan, one of the largest countries on earth, remains an enigma in many minds, and that is unfortunate. From the perspective of my personal visit to the country, the country has a lot of promise. Having visited several of their "Stan" neighbors, I can safely say Kazakhstan is leading the region in many respects. The book lays out many of the reasons why Kazakhstan is such a fascinating place, starting with the obvious: it is the home of the apple. The book describes the country's history as a home of exile, gulags, nuclear testing, rocketry, and much more, but paints a very promising and interesting picture of the nation, currently less than 20 years old, and its people. While much of the book is necessarily about the Soviet impact on the nation, it mainly focuses on Kazakhstan itself. If you are at all interested in the region or this particular "Stan", I highly recommend this book. It will give you much more than the Borat interpretation of the nation.

The author links current life in Kazakhstan's society with the rich and often bitter history of the country. The social trends and building of the new mentality are subjected to a deeper analysis based on the historical facts. Although, some of the conclusions may seem to be a little subjective, overall, it is a great reading for someone interested in the region.

Author Christopher Robbins got intrigued by the large Central Asian nation of Kazakhstan due to a chance encounter on an airplane. That's lucky for him and us as he takes us into a world unlike any other. Given the fact much of the Western world really only knows the actual word "Kazakhstan" from the Borat movie which portrayed the nation as some hick joke of a backwater full of inbreds.

Of course, that was a parody but it was a bad one once you learn exactly what Kazakhstan was and is. The author takes us on a journey through its Soviet past of gulags, the Cosmodrome--home of the Soviet space agency, the current Aral Sea environmental disaster and even up close and very personal with current President Nazarbayev.

I haven't even mentioned the nuclear testing, the culling of the wolf population (from helicopters!) or the fact both Trotsky and Solzhenitsyn "lived" in Kazakhstan for important parts of their turbulent lives.

As far as the title goes, apples did apparently originate in Kazakhstan but it's just a clever title to grab your attention (and the cover of the first edition I have is far superior with a apple that has a bite in it in the shape of the Kazakhstan unlike this Rorschach blob cover on this particular amazon listing).

If you're at all interested in Central Asia, the old Soviet Union and how newly independent nations do manage to forge new futures, pick this up. It's definitely a mindblowing read.

First off, "Borat" only earns two asides. Second, this is not as "hilarious" as one prominent blurb promises, but for a solid, rather self-effacing narrative in straightforward journalistic style, it fulfills the need for a serious introduction to this massive ex-Soviet republic. There's not a lot of excitement, but this dignified study, enhanced by Bob Gale's illustrations, reminds us of the golden era of British travelogues through Central Asia.

Robbins, while not a showy writer, conveys efficiently a lot of information from past visitors-- not all of whom traveled there willingly. He sums up Tolstoy's forced stay, Dostoevsky's harrowing brush with the firing squad, tsarist imprisonment and internal exile, Solzhenitsyn's Stalinist gulag and post-independence resentment at Kazakh national pride, and Frederick Burnaby's dogged Victorian treks at 70 below. Robbins at his best conveys the visceral thrill of each of these storied predecessors.

His own prose I found more serviceable; he rarely draws our attention to it. But it subtly works to steadily roam these forbidding steppes. Near Tolstoy's old flat, he finds his own: in true Soviet fashion it's "unfinished, but in an advanced state of decay." (52) I vaguely had heard of the WWII mass deportation/genocide of Chechens. Robbins cites a postwar report the "head of the Department of Special Deportees" reporting to Moscow on the survivors starving through two winters by eating grass: "The absence of clothes and footwear in winter could have a fatal effect on their ability to work." (qtd. 162)

Andrei Sakharov's own brush with fatality as he watched the nuclear testing that decimated much of Kazakhstan also finds the telling phrase: thousands of birds died at each explosion: "They take wing at the flash, but then fall to earth, burned and blinded." (qtd. 195) Poplars, however, flourished by the roadside of one labor camp. Political prisoners distinguished Karaganda's landscape, for each tree "had the corpses of five prisoners to feed it." (qtd. 216)

I would have liked less of Almaty the capital, formerly awash with the original apples from which it takes its name, but the gravitation of the author towards the cities and the steppes, for this is where he gets to go for his travels, is understandable. What suffered was the lack of attention to the mountains along the southern borders, but geopolitical sensitivity might be to blame. We get to see the Charyn Gorge, the answer to the Grand Canyon, but not enough for me of Mount Belukha in the Altaic range, near the fabled Shambhala. But I learned of King Arthur's possible origins with Lucius Artorius Castus, prefect of a legion quartered at York. commanding the Sarmatian cavalry, heirs to the mounted Scythian warriors who came via Pannonia, today's Hungary. Somehow, this connects Kazakhstan to Lancelot-- read pp. 91-5.

More can be found about the influx of oil money, the brave invention of Kazakh's own currency vs. the ruble after the breakup of the USSR, and the Kazakh Beatles. It concludes with a somewhat ginger (if understandably so) look at how the president, Nursultan Nazerbayev, gains over 90% of the popular vote. Robbins gets close to the ruler of this somehow 60% Slav but Sunni Muslim nation, whose multiethnic descendents of the Golden Horde, of exiles, of oilmen, of deportees manages to make petrodollars replace caviar in this vast, still little-known, region.

This book was very informative and historically accurate. I know for a fact that it is in the personal library of the Kazakh Ambassador to the UN. I used this book as one source in a graduate independent study paper, it was a great resource!

I wish Christopher Robbins talked more about what he saw in Almaty; I greatly enjoyed visiting the city, but somehow did not found its charm or the beauty of its surroundings come through in this book (or in my Bradt travel guide). Travel to Kazakhstan's countryside could have given more impressions to share; it seems that Robbins has only traveled to Almaty, Astana, Temirtau and Atyrau. His interest in history (vs. present day) exceeds mine, and many of the historical vignettes are not really about Kazakhstan - nonetheless, his narrative, including interviews with President Nazarbayev, is consistently interesting and illuminating, and, in my opinion, manages to capture the big picture - the "feel" of the country - as well as many interesting details of Kazakhstan's daily life.