Kazakhstan: The End of Autocratic Inertia?
Until January of this year, Kazakhstan had largely maintained its facade of stability. The government’s carefully balanced “multi-vector” foreign policy was the envy of other states in the region. As the most prosperous country in Central Asia, the world’s largest producer of uranium, and a country wealthy in natural oil and gas, “soft authoritarianism” was the price many Kazakhs were willing to pay in return for such economic and political stability.
Ex-president Nursultan Nazarbayev’s propaganda of prosperity had, however, been concealing a far less appealing truth for his 30 years of governance. Although the president had achieved some economic reforms during his three decade-long rule, severe wealth inequality, intensified by the deeply embedded cronyism in the Nazarbayev regime, had reared its head. In 2019 Nazarbayev unexpectedly stepped down from power in favour of a younger former diplomat Kassym-Jomart Tokayev, who many may recognise for his time as UN Director General at Geneva in 2011-2013. For many in the region, it was inconceivable that the leader who had overseen Kazakhstan’s development since the collapse of the USSR would leave his throne room in any other way than a coffin.
The surprise transition was unsettling for the Kazakh population and elites alike. From 2019, this new political uncertainty mixed with pre-existing economic pressures to foment social discontent, which erupted earlier this year as in set of protests which quickly escalated into a crisis that left hundreds dead.
The origins of the crisis
The unrest of January 2022 was sparked by a protest over rising fuel prices, but quickly escalated into large-scale unrest across the major cities of the country. This is certainly not the first instance of popular protest in Kazakhstan’s recent history; since Tokayev’s accession alone there have been several instances of unrest. The first, in February 2019, followed a housefire which killed five children. This event was seen as symbolic of the government’s neglect for modernisation projects, as the dilapidated state of the building allowed the fire to take hold with devastating consequences. Another protest took place at the Almaty Marathon, on 21 April 2019, where two activists were arrested for brandishing banners reading “You cannot flee the truth”, “#AdilSailayUshin” (“for free elections”) and “#Ihavethechoice”. In response, the civil rights organisation Oyan Qazaqstan (“Wake up Kazakhstan!”) was established.
However, these protests did not descend into the same chaos on the national level as those in January. Numerous factors have contributed to the escalating crisis, but both long-term and short-term motivations are broadly economic. Kazakhstan has seen an economic downturn since 2010, when the oil boom stopped. Economic difficulties have only been exacerbated by the collateral effects of Russian sanctions since the 2014 invasion of Crimea, as Russia is one of Kazakhstan’s primary trading partners. The coincidence of Tokayev’s rise to power with the Covid-19 crisis, and consequential rising inflation also did the Kazakh economy no favours.
The key issue with this economic decline, however, is the rampant wealth inequality linked to corruption. Whilst poverty has been increasing for average citizens, elites have been growing rich from the country’s coveted oil and uranium reserves. 60% of Kazakh children are born into poverty, whilst Nazarbayev’s daughter Dariga Nazarbayeva and grandson Nurali Aliyev own property in London worth at least £80m, alongside other Kazakh elites whose collective real estate holdings in the capital add up to around £530 million.. It would thus seem that the UK has its own responsibility to bear when it comes to legitimising the kleptocratic ways of foreign elites.
These same elites are perhaps largely responsible for the violence and rapid escalation of the protests this January. Many experts have commented on how what began as legitimate popular protests against fuel prices and the regime’s corruption were hijacked by militarised and criminal groups, allegedly associated with pro-Nazarbayev elites, who feel their interests are threatened by Tokayev’s presidency.
What comes next?
Now that protests have exposed and openly challenged the corruption of the regime, popular discontent is likely to continue unless Tokayev proposes large-scale reforms to uproot the cronyism deeply ingrained in the Kazakh system. Whilst taking no action would encourage popular discontent within Kazakh society, economic and political reforms would also be impossible without further elite in-fighting, causing broader conflicts in the country. The shaky constitutional “order” that has been restored after this wave of unrest is therefore likely to be again unsettled by any attempt to resolve its root causes.
In light of current events in Ukraine, one could also question Russian interference, after Russian troops intervened earlier this year to quell this conflict. Whilst in 2019, expert James Nixey assured Chatham House that a Russian invasion was out of the question, recent events have perhaps demonstrated that such interference is always a possibility. There have equally been fears of Chinese interference since 2016, when a change in property laws threatened to allow increased Chinese ownership of Kazakh land. Since then there have been reports of unofficial presence of Chinese troops in Kazakhstan. If the interference of foreign authoritarian regimes is the only factor retaining relative stability in the country, the order that would prevail would certainly be neither civil, constitutional, nor would it have a stable base of support in the population.
So, while the managed transition from Nazarbayev to President Tokayev, with the latter’s promises of reforms, and his less macho diplomat-turned-president image, seemed to offer Kazakh people hope that their concerns of the last few decades could finally be addressed, the reality has yet to meet these expectations. Kazakh authorities may have been hoping for a managed transition à la russe that would emulate Putin’s seamless accession to power in 1999, but the moment is perhaps actually more comparable to perestroika, a suite of democratising policies implemented by Gorbachev in the late-Soviet period that arguably accelerated the USSR’s collapse. Only reforms from Tokayev could ensure long-term stability for Kazakhstan. However, whether such attempts to combat autocratic inertia would have the same destabilising effect that perestroika had for the USSR remains to be seen.