Steppes in Time

...In due course, the plane took off...

...The population is half Kazakh and half Slavic, the Slavs having been exiled to "virgin lands" by Stalin and Khrushchev...

...President Nazarbayev himself, a pleasant, moon-faced autocrat, received me in an office festooned with rococo furniture and golden draperies...

...Dressed in a crypto-mili-tary uniform—and bearing more than a passing resemblance to Frau Farbis-sina in the Austin Powers films—she literally reared back in her chair, widened her eyes, and declined to dignify my impertinence with a response...

...At the polls, more than a few people approached me, thinking I was a visiting Russian, to seek "guidance" in choosing the right candidate...

...The overhead compartment, contrary to custom, was open, and over the first several rows it was stuffed with straw...

...Surely the metaphor for my journey emerged when I flew on Kazakh Air from Almaty to points north...

...Moreover, from a commercial standpoint, Cohen has struck pay dirt: Borat seems to have annoyed Kazakhstan's authoritarian government, which has darkly hinted that the Borat character might be "serving someone's political order...

...A neighboring passenger, a Munich businessman, asked me if I knew why there was straw on board, and I remember making a joke (in fractured German) about the aircraft's engines, horsepower, and nourishment...

...Of course, Borat is a comic creation—boorish, lascivious, anti-Semit-ic—and his credulity and fractured English are wildly overdrawn...

...It's a spinoff from his popular British television series, Da Ali G Show, and features Borat, a fictional TV reporter from Kazakhstan, played by Cohen...

...As we sat down to gorge—me, the girls, election officials, and an exiled Ukrainian farmer who was chairman of the local "wheat brigade"—I realized the meal was not pasta at all, but steamed fat, in various forms, and from inside what creatures I dared not inquire...

...The movie's ostensible title is Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan...

...I was in Kazakhstan ostensibly to report on its first parliamentary elec-tions—the president's Fatherland party did remarkably well—but public acquaintance with the franchise was, shall we say, limited...

...I should confess that I am not one of Cohen's greatest admirers—I find his "Ali G" character tedious—but Borat is another matter...

...I did manage to collect several English-language brochures from the government information agency, ostensibly for NGOs and election observers...

...and as it banked to the left and rose in the sky, bundles of straw shifted overhead, releasing a shower into the aisle and all over me and my German companion...

...I have one before me now entitled What a Candidate for Election to the Majlis of the Parliament of the Republic of Kazakhstan, Presenting Them Persons and the Members of Organizing Bodies Should Know About Elections...

...At one polling place in the capital city of Astana, I asked an election worker if she might have a sample ballot to spare...

...As far as I could tell, the Kazakhs live on an unremitting diet of horsemeat, which, as a sometime rider, I was disinclined to consume...

...And what about Kazakh cuisine, you might ask...

...With his Turkish-style moustache, 1970s wardrobe, surreal vocabulary, and generally clueless demeanor, Borat is a broad (but not too broad) impersonation of a TV personality in the Common wealth of Independent States...

...Philip Terzian...

...If only Borat and his camera crew had been on board...

...Indeed, the Kazakh Foreign Ministry was obliged to shoot down rumors that President Nursultan Nazarbayev intends to raise the subject when he meets with President Bush this month...

...In the village of Kovondoi, high on the steppes, my presence was celebrated by the arrival of several charming peasant girls in national costume, bearing a huge tureen filled with pasta for an afternoon feast...

...He didn't laugh...

...I take some interest in all this because, unlike Sacha Baron Cohen, I have actually been to Kazakhstan, interviewed President Nazarbayev, and exchanged pleasantries with Kazakh TV reporters...

...Just as there really are some beefy southern sheriffs and wisecracking Brooklynites, some of the people I met in Kazakhstan seemed straight out of Central Casting...

...Its gigantic scale confirmed a theory of mine: that the size of a statesman's residence is in inverse relation to his country's significance...

...But as with most such inventions, there is a kernel of truth in Cohen's bag of tricks...

...Strictly speaking, Kazakhstan is about as remote a destination as any journalist could want: flat, windswept, bleak, hidden behind the Alta mountains from western China and ringed by rusting factory towns, asbestos-bound pipelines, and nuclear lakes...