This is a guest post from Registan.net

One of the strangest things about studying Central Asia is grappling with the severe inequalities. The big cities in a country like Kazakhstan are bastions of wealth sometimes difficult to comprehend.

For example, this is a photograph I took of the waterfront along the Ishim River in Astana, the capital of Kazakhstan, in July of 2003. Five years ago, apartments in those pastel towers were renting for $700 a month—in a country whose GDP per capita at the time was around $2,000.

That year, when I was in a cab in Almaty—the country’s enormous, beautiful city nestled up against the Tien Shan Mountain in the southeast—the Turk driving the car explained to me that there were such wonderful opportunities there that he and several of his friends had left Turkey for Kazakhstan because the pay was better. Things have only gotten worse since then, as oil (and, moreso now, uranium) money has flooded into the country, making its politics rather more Russian in character, if you get my drift.

But Kazakhstan is also home to truly shocking poverty. Venture a half-hour outside the limits of any noticeable city (”big” doesn’t apply to most of them) and you can find people still eking by on almost nothing—whether scraps from a failed collective farm, the toxic remains of a slowly draining overpolluted lake (the Aral Sea, sadly, is not alone), or even encroaching desertification in what was once Khrushchev’s vaunted “Virgin Lands.”

All of this is an introduction for a fascinating RFE/RL video of what life is still like in rural Kazakhstan. The reporter said the 21st century hadn’t reached this isolated village… but it sounds more like the 20th hadn’t either:

Hard-Scrabble Life In A Kazakh Village