Money Changes Everything; Lots of oil cities are doing well, none as weirdly as Astana.(City overview)(Cover story)

Byline: Owen Matthews (With Anna Nemtsova in Astana)

Oil cities are now lit up by windfall profits around the world, but only Kazakhstan has one where none existed before. It's the brainchild of President Nursultan Nazarbayev, who declared in 1997 that the capital would move from Almaty, near the Chinese border, to a place closer to the geographic center of the country. Ministries, embassies and the offices of the state oil company were moved by administrative fiat. Private businesses and people followed, complaining all the way. But there's no saying no to Nazarbayev. The city of Astana now has a population of about 600,000, out of a planned future total of 1.5 million.

There's nothing quite like the spectacle of skyscrapers rising in the wind-blasted steppes of central Kazakhstan. Astana's original designs were drawn up by the Saudi contractor Sheik Bakr bin Laden, elder half brother to Osama, and control of the project has since passed to a wider consortium of developers. (The bin Ladens still own more than 100 hectares of land in the city center.) While other oil capitals like Baku are using their newfound money to recover a late-19th-century charm, Astana has arguably less class, but way more chutzpah.

The eccentric cityscape boasts a 97-meter-high tower topped by a golden sculpture featuring an impression of President Nazarbayev's right hand. Visitors can put their hand in his and make a wish. There's a giant, domed presidential palace that Ming the Merciless might find appealing. One foreign oil exec wryly calls the oddly Orientalist style "ethno-postmodern." Holding pride of place is a giant pyramid symbolizing the "four sides of the universe" designed by the fashionable British architect Lord Norman Foster. Elevators travel up the sides to a halo-shaped room at the apex ...