In the summer and autumn of 1993, fewer than a dozen officials worked feverishly in complete secrecy to save Kazakhstan from raging post-Soviet inflation and introduce its first-ever national currency.
In Almaty, the country’s economic capital, Kazakh central bankers last month reminisced with foreign colleagues about those heady days at a conference marking the 10th anniversary of the November 15 1993 introduction of the tenge, which means “money” in Kazakh.
Grigori Marchenko, governor of the National Bank, recalls that things were so bad that “we had crisis committees, and their job was not to get the economy to grow, but to slow the decline”.
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