It was a hot July morning in 2000 when a helicopter carrying Kazakhstan’s President Nursultan Nazarbayev landed on a drilling barge on the Caspian Sea. An anxious-looking Nazarbayev emerged from the aircraft flanked by his customary coterie of flunkeys and security detail. The occasion would mark what seemed at the time like the finest birthday present he would ever receive. Nazarbayev was to turn 60 two days later, on July 6. Oilmen exploring the northern section of this land-bound sea had made the largest discovery of its type in three decades – a field containing upward of a billion barrels of recoverable crude. When Nazarbayev was handed a flask of crude oil, he cheerfully anointed the cheeks of subordinates responsible for the project, known as Kashagan, and even a local seven-year-old boy . The scene is described in Black Blood of Kazakhstan, a 2017 book by Oleg Chervinsky, chief […]