The Bloodshed In Kazakhstan, The Power-Struggle Within, What Putin Is Up To And What It Means For The World

The Soviet Bloc looks to be reforming under Putin with Kazakhstan as the next victim, so the argument goes. The multiple shifting pieces at play in that country currently as the streets fill with bodies and armored vehicles make it hard to predict outcomes. But let’s at least try to understand what’s happening, what’s at stake for the citizens and the rest of us. Petrol prices were cut loose from subsidy and doubled. Demonstrations followed in Almaty the former capital and largest city and in some provinces. Police cracked down. The internet was shut down. Protests intensified. According to reports, criminal gangs began raiding shops and houses and assaulting people. The government fell and President Tokayev blaming ‘terrorists’ called in troops from outside the country, namely the Russian-led regional security organization (CSTO). Outcries erupted on Western social media to the effect that Moscow was taking back another post-Soviet republic by force.

Kazakhstan has been run by an entrenched elite within a constitutional framework set up to ensure the survival of that elite centered around former longtime President Nursultan Nazarbayev and his cronies. Here is an absolutely terrific short analysis of the power play among the top figures by Joanna Lillis, an unimpeachable expert on the country, telling who’s in who’s out. Essentially Nazarbayev, as a leading Soviet apparatchik, inherited the republic upon independence and did quite well for many years. Above all, he kept intact a territory the size of Europe and kept the Russians out, while developing the massive oil reserves speedily enough to keep the population quiescent. What he didn’t do is introduce genuine democracy and rule of law but a controlled version of both. Instead he fell into the great regional temptation of equating the country’s stability with his own presence – the standard deal of saying to the populace…you stay out of real politics and we keep the country stable and prosperous for you.

We have seen this before. Some version of it exists in all the world’s authoritarian countries. It can work in the short and middle term but, inevitably, the implicit contract breaks down in the long term because the elite’s in-built corruption soaks up all the excess wealth in the system. Much of it gets siphoned out to dark money havens. So it is with Russia, Turkey, Georgia, Venezuela and the like. That’s arguably what happened in Kazakhstan over the last decade or two. Meanwhile Nazarbayev became a permanent ruler in a legal position above the law as ‘father of the nation’ and head of a kind of security council. The sitting President Tokayev was, in effect, his puppet. Again we see a version of this model in Georgia where the country’s richest man who runs the political machinery cannot be elected out. All his cronies occupy the political and economic heights. In Turkey and Russia, Putin and Erdogan have changed the implicit contract to the following: we offer you military pride as of old, but not prosperity, and in return you let us rule. Problem is, Kazakhstan has no such past imperial glory to invoke. For the populace, it’s prosperity or nothing. Then came the rise in gas prices (which Tokayev has since rescinded).

Once the current crisis hit critical mass, Tokayev dismissed ‘father of the nation’ Nazarbayev from his post and replaced his appointees with his own, as in the Prime Minister and Chief of Security. It isn’t merely an empty populist gesture, though it is that too. It’s also a bid to acquire the overall political power that should go along with his position but for Nazarbayev in the background. Various observers have been tracking strange private jet flights out of the country to Kyrghztan, Moscow or the Gulf, and the speculation is that Nazarbayev and many of his allies have fled. Therefore, the crisis is not just about a popular uprising but also an internal coup. Now President Tokayev was faced with a quandary – with all the security structure (police, military etc) hitherto loyal to the existing shadow heirarchy how could he depend on it? Well, as we’ve seen, he didn’t. He went over their heads and appealed to Moscow. Elements of the police were already refusing to attack the protesters. For some reason, the army wasn’t deployed in force at Almaty big enough to swamp the problem. Instead the Russians were called in.

Some have argued that Kazakhstan’s 40,000-man military isn’t large enough to do the work effectively and also guard other locations around the country, including strategic ones like oil pipelines. But that doesn’t compute. Several thousand choppered into Almaty would have kept the peace as effectively as some 2000 Russians charging in (the same unit that invaded Crimea). In fact, it appears that most of the dirty work was already accomplished by government forces and therefore no need existed to call in foreign troops. No, it’s more likely that Tokayev didn’t want a huge Kazakh military force in Almaty that would potentially usurp overall power, and perhaps insist on staying loyal to Nazarbayev, the suddenly dismissed permanent ruler. So there goes all the meticulous work done by Nazarbayev over the decades to keep Kazakhstan independent. He has only himself to blame.

As things stand, Tokayev now derives his legitimacy from Russian patronage. (Belarus’s rather dimwitted leader, Lukashenko, has publicly stated that he and Putin and Tokayev have together discussed the situation in recent days). Tokayev has predictably called the rioters ‘terrorists’, a common ruse. He has also talked darkly of outside forces trying to destabilize the country. Also a common ruse. According to my Kazakh sources, there really is a criminal element of Kyrghyz folk causing mayhem and shooting back at the security, and robbing places. But other sources and Kazakh journalists have spoken of outsiders dressed in dark outfits being bussed into Almaty in groups who suddenly became the famous Kyrghyz marauders. Some have even been videotaped breaking into gun shops and distributing the weapons. My sources have even relayed tales of wounded protestors in hospital speaking Arabic. And so, inevitably, we’ve heard loud murmurs of speculation from Western observers that the whole thing is too suspicious. One or two days of rioting, strange terrorists entering en masse and facing slaughter by Kazakh government forces then a swift invitation to the Russians, who arrive within a day, as if they’ve been waiting on standby.

There is a suspicious element of seamless (if bloody) theater to the whole thing, one slightly reminiscent of previous incidents. The somewhat older reader will recall the Romanian Revolution of 1989, the mass marauding of ‘terrorists’ for many days in Romania, accompanied by endless outbursts of gunfire, when Caucescu and communism were overthrown. He and his wife were swiftly executed so they couldn’t talk. Order was eventually restored by the army but virtually no one was outed or prosecuted and the elites continued to preside in what became a clunky type of democracy. Since then we’ve seen versions of this scenario enacted in various countries. In Venezuela, just when Chavez was at his most unpopular, a sorry charade for a non-existent coup seemed to occur. He fled to Cuba. The supposed coup swiftly collapsed and he returned as the saviour of the nation and democracy – and stayed til he died. With Erdogan it was a pathetic version of a military coup which is still shrouded in confusion with many observers saying that elements of the army were deliberately provoked, some were even told they had orders to save the country from a coup. Erdogan prevailed and he doesn’t look like leaving soon. There are other such examples.

I have reported on some of these incidents in various publications over the years. So for what it’s worth, here is what it looks like now. Tokayev has exploited the unrest to ditch Nazarbayev and effectively taken his place. He has done so by selling out the country’s independence, offering to keep it from falling not merely into the Western camp but equally from Chinese control. Russia has been asking Kazakhstan for a while to affix its China oil export prices to Russia’s prices. Latest word is that Kazakhstan has now agreed. This means, in effect, that the country’s economic independence has also been sold out. The question is, will Moscow’s grip hold. Not if the unrest is genuine and folks take to the streets to reject the foreign incursion. But if it has all been theater, the unrest will fade, the ‘terrorists’ disappear, and as smoke clears Tokayev will become the new leader for life supported by Putin.