Russia rents Baikonur from Kazakhstan for $115 million a year. The mayor is jointly appointed by the Russian and Kazakh presidents.
"We live under two governments, but unfortunately get only one salary," Kuzmin noted wryly as he walked the freshly renovated corridors of City Hall.
As Russia's economy has recovered and oil prices swelled, Moscow has begun spending on Baikonur again. The city also benefits from Russia's booming trade in commercial satellite launches and space tourism. In April, Charles Simonyi, the U.S. billionaire who helped design Microsoft Word and Excel, became the fifth such tourist, spending $25 million to visit the space station.
Despite its Soviet character -- or perhaps partly because of it -- Baikonur remains a magnet for Russians and Kazakhs looking for a decent job.
Vadim Smirnov, an emergency services official, came in 2000 with his wife, Yelena, from the southern Russian town of Kapustin Yar.
Pushing his 2-year-old twins in a stroller near a Soyuz booster rocket installed as a monument, Smirnov remarked, "There still is socialism."
In Baikonur there are free healthcare, state jobs, and apartments still owned by the administration and reserved for those working for the city or the launch complex. After 20 years, workers get free apartments and land lots in Russia.
Monuments and busts of figures such as Gagarin and Sergei Korolyov, the father of the Soviet space program, dot the streets and parks.
Baikonur lies by the Syrdarya River, dangerously near the Aral Sea. Once the world's fourth-largest inland body of water, the sea has turned into a dust bowl of toxic salts because of massive Soviet irrigation projects. Winds carry caustic clouds of the stuff through Baikonur, poisoning the air.
Minerals in the groundwater won't support anything bigger than a desert shrub, so trees must be planted in massive concrete tubs of soil sunk into the ground.
Yet, Baikonur residents believe they are sheltered from the ills of the big cities.
"Here, people speak the same language and are united by a common goal," said Lyubov Bryantseva, a spokeswoman for the city administration.
"There is no other place like Baikonur," said Alexei Tarasov, 68, a colonel and trade union leader who works for the Federal Space Center, one of the Russian agencies that operate the cosmodrome. He arrived in Baikonur in 1962 as a young army lieutenant. The place "felt like an oven," he recalled, but its residents enjoyed all the privileges the communist system could provide.
