Landing was bumpy. Outside it was snow-globe frenzied. Mid-afternoon but that didn’t seem relevant. As we left the jet bridge into the terminal gate a woman in a pastel-blue suit smiled and pointed a Sony mini DV camcorder at our faces.

Welcome to Kazakhstan.

At immigration control I chose a line with a young and tired-looking officer who barely glanced at my passport. I got a standard fifteen-day tourist visa on the spot, waited for the official stamp, admired a mural of horses running across the steppe.

The warmth of the arrivals hall thawed the atmosphere as far as the taxis, then the cold bit. Exhaust fumes billowed thick as factory smoke in the freezing air. I chose an alcohol-bloated driver in a dirty Nissan who grinned at me, as if amused to find me in the back of his car. I gave an address a block away from my chosen hotel. The driver grunted as he set off and then the road vanished beneath snow.

‘Where from?’ he asked, speaking English.

‘America.’

‘New York?’

‘Close by.’

‘First time?’

‘In Astana, yes.’

He laughed.

‘Business.’

‘Hope so.’ We approached flashing lights that I thought were emergency vehicles but turned out to be a convoy of snow ploughs. ‘Quite some weather,’ I said, switching to Russian but keeping it unpolished.

‘This is nothing,’ he replied in Russian. ‘Last week, the snow was … ’ He gestured up to the roof lining, which was tobacco-stained. ‘Now it will get colder. Less snow, much colder.’

Like most new cities, Astana’s roads were broad and straight. We passed large geometric sculptures, positioned around the place in the way you’d try to make an oversized flat look inhabited, then huge new residential developments. The buildings themselves were spread out. I couldn’t see many lights on. Very occasionally a human could be seen moving between them, head down against the wind.

One face was repeatedly visible: the Kazakh President. He gazed enigmatically from billboards: Nazarbayev; wise, inscrutable, charismatic, seventy-eight years old and, given that he’d been running the place as a Moscow-loyal communist when it was still part of the Soviet Union, he’d ruled the country for longer than it had existed. He’d steered a careful path without relinquishing power, keeping Russia, China and the West sweet. Most of all keeping his own people sweet, who voted 90 per cent in his favour in relatively clean elections but still couldn’t start a magazine without governmental permission.

A few more of these citizens appeared after we’d been driving for ten minutes. My first impression of them was that they were suicidal. They wove through the cars, which were themselves skidding, appearing from between the grey mounds of slush at the side of the road. I had no idea if somewhere underneath the black ice there were lane markings, but no one would have been able to keep to them anyway.