| Headline: Kazakhstan's unfinished revolution Source: Euromoney Date: January 2001 Listening to Grigory Marchenko talk you could be forgiven for thinking he was central bank governor of a booming first world economy. The budget is balanced – in fact there is a surplus; financial infrastructure is robust and the banking system in good shape. Marchenko himself is urbane, highly qualified and very persuasive. He is however the chairman of the Kazakhstan National Bank and the country he describes is not one its inhabitants are entirely familiar with. In the bars of Almaty, where a returning visitor’s five tenge note is viewed as an old-fashioned curiosity – the one thousand is a lot more useful these days – those locals who can afford to drink foreign beer do so slowly and they have little time for Marchenko or his statistics. “It’s all bullshit,” is the opinion of a middle-aged surgeon. “Maybe the budget is balanced and maybe it isn’t. But if it is, why don’t the streetlights work? Why is half the city falling down? Why does a professor of medicine earn $50 a month? You try living on that.” He doesn’t add that in the former USSR too the medical profession was looked down upon – and still is in Russia – but it is true that almost anyone of middle age would have been better off under communism than they are now. |