While our attention continues to be focused on Russia’s military threat on Ukraine’s eastern borders, and its attempts to blackmail the West into concessions, the explosion of protests in Kazakhstan should not pass unnoticed.
Those of us who have been following events in this huge Central Asian oil-rich republic have been amazed how quickly protests against the rise in gas prices for domestic consumers have turned into a nationwide rising against Kazakhstan’s government and the scarcely concealed despotic nature of its regime.
Some of us like myself, who followed what was then called Soviet affairs back in the ‘70s and ‘80s, are amazed to see statues of the self-proclaimed founder of modern Kazakhstan, Nursultan Nazarbayev, being pulled down, just as statues of Lenin were in Ukraine.
We are witnessing an explosion of pent-up frustration against, and anger with, the rule of a self-enriching oligarchy that has held sway over the country and its resources for so long.
What are we to make of these dramatic developments? We still don’t know what the outcome will be. Will the use of brute force and repression stifle the protests (as temporarily in Belarus and Russia), or will the Kazakh revolution, read Maidan, result in a profound change in the political, economic, and social setup in the country?
If it does bring change, it will have significant implications for the entire post-Soviet region still under the influence of Moscow. This new geopolitical political earthquake will send tremors that will certainly be felt in Moscow, Minsk, and perhaps even Beijing.
We don’t know what the political views of the protesters are, pro- Moscow, western, or Chinese, but clearly, Moscow will now have to factor in this unexpected setback and might be detracted from its current anti-Western offensive focused on determining the status of Ukraine.
The situation is fraught with more longer-term risks and possible dangers. Putin’s Russia can hardly afford to see its Kazakhstani ally destabilized or for it, in the worst-case scenario, to undergo regime change.
And then there is the threat of other external forces, not simply Western ones, capitalizing on the situation – Muslim fundamentalists from Afghanistan, Iran, Saudi Arabia, or China wanting to make the most of it.
On the other hand, let us recall that imperialistically-minded Russians have always viewed Kazakhstan, like Ukraine, as an artificial state, parts of which they have claims to.
After all, it was no other than that great Russian writer and chronicler of Soviet crimes, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, at heart a Russian chauvinist, who in the early 1990s in his thoughts on how Russia should be “rebuilt” urged that eastern Ukraine and northern Kazakhstan be “reclaimed” by it.
Kazakhs and Ukrainians, as victims of Russian colonialization, have experienced similar tragedies and crimes. In particular, in the early 1930s during the forced collectivization of “Soviet” agriculture when Ukraine last millions of people in the Holodomor, Kazakhstan simultaneously lost millions during the destruction of nomadic life and imposition of the collective farm system.
Kazakhstan, like Ukraine, was colonized by Russian settlers and other nationalities, including many of those who had been made into political exiles by Moscow.
It is worth recalling that the first major revolt in the late Soviet period that shook Moscow occurred in Alma-Ata in December 1986 when Moscow, with Mikhail Gorbachev newly at the helm and proclaiming “glasnost,” attempted to impose a Russian as its viceroy in Kazakhstan after the ethnic Kazakh party leader Dinmukhamed Kunaev was removed.
35 years ago the protests in Soviet-ruled Kazakhstan shook the Soviet empire and served as a warning that the old times were coming to an end.
Today, the popular uprising in independent Kazakhstan has sent a clear message to Putin, Lukashenko, and other similar tyrants in the post-Soviet space that their oriental despotism, modernized and adapted to the Soviet and post-Soviet eras, will also have its day, sooner than they and many expect.
