“The electricity was only on for two hours a day. It was hard for people to pay rent. The entire infrastructure was destroyed.” This is how Pernebay Duisenbin, a writer living in the town of Zhanatas, southern Kazakhstan, remembers the 1990s.
“We used to have the largest construction factory in Kazakhstan,” Duisenbin continues. Today, Zhanatas is home to some 24,000 residents, less than half of the 57,000 who used to live here in the 1980s.
“Now there is almost nothing left,” Duisenbin says. “There was also a factory that made about 2,000 different products: spare parts for machines, tractors, mining equipment and wonderful lathes.”
