DARK SHADOWS: INSIDE THE SECRET WORLD OF KAZAKHSTAN

Welcome to Dark Shadows KZ a blog dedicated to journalist Joanna Lillis's book DARK SHADOWS that takes a look inside the secret world of Kazakhstan. Published by London's I.B.Tauris, the book is available in the UK from 30 October 2018 - you can order your copy here or come along to the London launch at John Sandoe books on 22 November to meet the author and get a signed copy.

Dark Shadows is a compelling portrait of Kazakhstan, a country that is little known in the West, written by Joanna Lillis, a Kazakhstan-based journalist reporting on Central Asia. She has lived in Kazakhstan since 2005 and her work has featured in the Guardian, The Economist and the Independent newspapers, the Eurasianet website and Foreign Policy and POLITICO magazines. 

Journalist Joanna Lillis paints a vibrant picture of this emerging nation, strategically located in the heart of Central Asia, between Vladimir Putin's Russia, its former colonial ruler which sees Kazakhstan as its own backyard and Xi Jinping's China, the rising global superpower on its eastern borders. Kazakhstan is a vast oil-rich state carving out its place in the world as it contends with its own complex past and present.

Joanna Lillis’s vivid reportage is based on 13 years of on-the-ground coverage, and travels across the length and breadth of this enigmatic country that lies along the ancient Silk Road and at the geopolitical and cultural crossroads where East meets West.

Featuring tales of murder and abduction, intrigue and betrayal, extortion and corruption, this book explores how a vainglorious president, Nursultan Nazarbayev, transformed himself into a potentate and the economically struggling state he inherited at the fall of the USSR into a swaggering oil-rich twenty-first-century monocracy. A colourful cast of characters brings the politics to life: from strutting oligarch to psychotic presidential son-in-law, from principled politicians to striking oilmen, from crusading journalists to courageous campaigners.

Dark Shadows explores how Kazakhstan grapples with its Russian imperial and Soviet past, with survivor testimony recounting a dramatic history of revolution and war, famine and flight, terror and trauma that left the Kazakhs battling for their very survival as a people. One elderly lady recounts her forced march to China to escape famine as a child; another tells of her deportation to Central Asia as a newborn; a third recalls how Stalin's Terror despatched her grandfather to the firing squad and her grandmother to the Gulag. 

There are heartrending stories about life in post-Soviet environmental disaster zones: victims of nuclear testing around the site where the USSR exploded its first atomic bomb; fishermen left stranded in the desert as the Aral Sea shrinks; villagers in the snow-bound north afflicted by a mysterious sleeping sickness. There are quirky snapshots of life in far-flung corners of Kazakhstan, from the Russian Old Believers harbouring 500-year-old grievances to the maverick atheist who refuses to back down in a clash of principles with the state. There are inspirational tales of labours of love: from the nuclear-physicist-turned-ostrich-farmer tending his brood of gangling bipeds on the southern plains to the minister-turned-viticulturalist reinventing a dilapidated Soviet collective farm as a boutique winery.

Traversing dust-blown deserts and majestic mountains, taking in glitzy cities and dystopian landscapes, Dark Shadows conjures up Kazakhstan as a living, breathing place, full of extraordinary people living extraordinary lives.