A Bad Spring in Kazakhstan

There is a distinct argument to be made that the past two months have presented the most trying, most debilitating, 60-day stretch the regime of President Nursultan Nazarbayev has ever seen. Indeed, these past two months have served as something of a microcosm for Kazakhstan’s post-2014 trajectory, which has proven the most challenging period of Nazarbayev’s quarter-century in power. Culminating in a two-month period that has seen unparalleled protests, the country’s deadliest domestic attack, and an inflation rate greater than anything Kazakhstan has seen since the depths of 2008, there’s every reason to believe Kazakhstan’s domestic stability may be soon challenged in an unprecedented manner.

To be sure, it’s not as if this uncertainty is necessarily surprising, at least to outside observers. Ever since Moscow began carving into Ukraine and oil began caving in 2014, the ingredients for instability have combined to present a remarkable challenge to Nazarbayev’s grip on power. Much like Russia, Kazakhstan failed to diversify its hydrocarbon-export economy in the heady 2000s, and balked on combating elite predation and rank corruption. If anything, the regime’s kleptocratic tendencies have only entrenched; if Nazarbayev was, as a former Clinton official attested, the most corrupt leader within the “free world,” his family members have taken clear advantage of the country’s opaque finances. Political liberalization, likewise, existed in rhetoric alone, at least on the nationwide level. (It’s difficult to hold a straight face when a president claims 98 percent electoral returns.) A quarter-century after taking power, Nazarbayev, who will turn 76 on July 6, shows no signs of letting go.

The parallels between Kazakhstan and Russia are myriad--entrenched dictatorship, media dominated by state spin, the annihilation of political opposition. But where Moscow has managed to rely on great-power nationalism to placate President Vladimir Putin’s political base--see Ukraine, for instance--Astana has been forced to rely on lip service to economic and political liberalization, calls for national unity, and pleas to avoid the Ukrainian example. And as the past two months have shown, those calls, just like the country’s socio-economic model, are showing distinct signs of exhaustion.

The May protests, at least initially, nominally pivoted around proposed land reforms, which would have extended the amount of time foreigners could lease fallow land in Kazakhstan to 25 years. Quickly, though, Kazakhstanis began a vocal pushback. Indeed, those who gathered to protest the reforms--congealing across the country--appeared almost exclusively Kazakh, with rhetoric claiming the land was owned by Kazakhs, and sacred to Kazakhs. Much of the rhetoric, likewise, was directed squarely at Beijing, with concerns that Chinese investors would either fail to respect the quarter-century time-limit, or would ransack the land.

But even though the reforms sparked these protests – which, through their geographic spread, were unprecedented – a distinct reality soon emerged that the protests were about much more than leasing limits. If anything, the land reforms were something approaching the straw that broke the dictator’s back; they were an excuse, an avenue, to vent the frustrations piling up throughout the past two years, from savings halved to job prospects vanished.

The authorities, to their limited credit, at least appeared to recognize this reality. As such, when mass protests were planned on  May 21, Astana moved swiftly. Rather than reprise the live-ammunition protest crackdown in 2011--which saw over a dozen protesters killed in the western town of Zhanaozen--authorities began rounding up organizers, journalists, and demonstrators alike. All told, activists estimated that 1,000 Kazakhstanis were arrested, including a few hundred in both Astana and Almaty. While most were soon released, numerous organizers are facing draconian penalties for having helped organize the non-violent protests. Most disconcertingly for Astana, questions about the breadth of protesters’ complaints were answered when certain demonstrators began demanding Nazarbayev’s removal.

The weeks since these mass arrests were relatively quiet, at least as it pertained to large-scale protests. Soon, though, Astana was forced to deal with another round of unprecedented challenges to the authorities’ rule. In the northwestern city of Aktobe--the site of Kazakhstan’s first suicide bombing, in 2011--a few dozen individuals ransacked a local hunting store, and attempted to storm a national guard base. All told, at least 20 individuals were killed, with dozens more injured, representing the worst domestic incident in Kazakhstan’s independent history.

The details of the attack, weeks on, are remarkably scant, with rumor and innuendo continuing to outweigh any confirmation of either the attackers’ identities or motivations. Astana has attempted to paint the assault as simultaneously a plot through which Western and/or Salafist forces could destabilize the country, and has accused a former beer magnate, already under arrest, of fomenting both the protests and the attack in Aktobe. Officials, including Nazarbayev, have given the appearance of tossing anything and everything at the attackers’ motivations, hoping something sticks, melding conspiracies in a manner exceeding anything they’ve ever attempted. Indeed, one of the few things we can take away from Astana’s response is that the government remains insistent that the causes for the attack are exogenous to Kazakhstan--they couldn’t have come from any domestic factors, and therefore must have arisen from outside the country, whether from Washington or Syria.

In his responses, Nazarbayev has appeared as lethargic as he’s appeared conspiratorial, inspiring little confidence in his grasp of the issues at hand. Given the length of his rule, and the ossification of his autocracy, it’s increasingly clear that his leadership has lost a significant amount of the nimbleness it once knew. All of this, of course, comes with the backdrop that Kazakhstan is likely facing its first recession in nearly two decades--with Astana demonstrating little ability to soften the blow.

Between the protests and the Aktobe attack--and the government’s heavy-handed responses--there’s a distinct sense that the other foot is slowly beginning to drop in Kazakhstan. After a quarter-century in power, Nazarbayev’s regime shows little sign of grasping the magnitude of public frustrations, let alone an understanding of how to handle the rising tensions. Nazarbayev looks unsure of how to deal with what will likely be a long, hot summer.