BISHKEK – The protests that erupted across Kazakhstan on January 2 quickly turned into riots in all of the country’s major cities. What do the protesters want, and what will be the outcome of the country’s most severe civil unrest since independence in 1991?

Although the initial trigger was a doubling of fuel prices, the protesters soon demanded the dissolution of parliament and new elections. Moreover, they want former President Nursultan Nazarbayev to exit the political scene for good.

Nazarbayev, the country’s ruler for the first 30 years of independence, gave up the presidency in 2019, but not before having himself named “leader of the nation” and thus ensuring that he would maintain a tight grip on the country’s politics. Protesters toppled a statue of him in Taldykorgan, the capital of the Almaty region, with chants of “Shal ket!” (“Old man, go away!”).

As of January 7, clashes had killed dozens of law enforcement officials and demonstrators, and Nazarbayev’s hand-picked successor, President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev, had declared a state of emergency and requested assistance from the Kremlin. Russian President Vladimir Putin quickly answered the call, deploying Russian troops to help quell the protests. Tokayev has given the security forces permission to “fire without warning” on protesters.

With conditions on the ground changing by the hour, it is too early to predict how the confrontation will end. Nonetheless, some preliminary conclusions are already possible.

For starters, the authorities clearly panicked when the protests erupted. How else to explain Tokayev’s frantic call for foreign troops to enter the country to impose order? Instead of recognizing that the protests are an angry – and predictable – response to the government’s own policies, he has conjured the specter of an external aggressor.

Tokayev claims that the rioters received extensive training abroad. In his appeal to the members of the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) he insisted that his government needed help to overcome a “terrorist threat.” But the rationale for appealing to the CSTO remains in question: Why would any other country bother to offer “serious training” to “bandit formations” to disrupt Kazakhstan’s regional centers?

By calling on Putin, Tokayev has made a risky bet. What would happen if Russian paratroopers started mowing down Kazakhstani women or children, or if a Russian military helicopter were to crash in some densely populated area? Any such event would deepen the crisis, as well as the scale of Russia’s intervention. In fact, it is hard to see how the presence of CSTO “peacekeepers” could do anything other than inflame the situation and awaken anti-Russian and nationalist sentiment in Kazakhstan.

Obviously, the real issue concerns the government’s own competence and legitimacy. With well-trained police and security forces and a fully equipped army, why couldn’t the authorities manage the protests on their own? Most likely, they could have done so. But by seeking Putin’s help, Tokayev hopes to shape the internal situation in ways that will buttress his own rule vis-à-vis rival factions. And, indeed, Tokayev is clearly worried, having ordered the detention of Karim Massimov, a former chairman of the National Security Committee, on suspicion of treason.

Although the protests and rallies initially were relatively peaceful, comprising mostly young men and women, organized groups showed up on January 4 and started seizing warehouses and weapons. The government’s official line is that these groups are foreign mercenaries; but that claim does not withstand scrutiny. Since Kazakhstan neighbors my own country, I know first-hand that it has an effective border service. The idea that several thousand foreigners could suddenly appear in the country, undetected, is nonsense.

It is far more likely that these quasi-military groups received special training and funding from local oligarchs who are seeking to influence events in their own favor. According to former Kazakhstani officials with whom I have communicated, some of this support has even come from officials who are currently in power. Yermukhamet Yertysbayev, a former minister of information and ex-adviser to Nazarbayev, recently acknowledged that, “The National Security Committee of Kazakhstan for years hid information about the training camps of militants in the country.” There are well-founded rumors that the Nazarbayev family, which was ousted from power during the protests, is trying to use these military groups to regain influence.

These oligarchs reportedly want to be able to mobilize paramilitary groups to influence elections. Their preparations often take place under the cover of oligarch-sponsored “sports clubs,” where young people gather, train, and receive cash allowances. (One can find similar schemes in my country.)

While these informal groups have been deepening their roots in Kazakhstan for many years, the current crisis seems to have brought them to the surface. Several organized-crime figures have “unexpectedly” returned to Kazakhstan from abroad. According to the Kazakh Interior Ministry, “Six members of the organized criminal group, led by Dikii [Wild] Arman [Dzhumageldiev], were detained during a special operation by the Almaty police department.” We know that these “thieves in law” – a typical phenomenon in post-Soviet politics – hold real authority, especially among unemployed youth. The question, then, is whose interests they are serving.

If the riots and more violent forms of protest really are being fueled by these shadow groups, there simply are no legal grounds for introducing CSTO troops into Kazakhstan. What started as a protest over socioeconomic issues has quickly escalated into a chaotic battle among oligarchs for political influence. And, because the demonstrations were driven not by the organized opposition, but by ordinary citizens, the authorities can conveniently dismiss participants as opportunistic bandits, hooligans, and looters, rather than seeking a settlement through dialogue.

But I believe that Kazakhstan will soon become a country where there is no room for corruption, authoritarianism, and nepotism. The Kazakh people will no longer allow this.

ASTANA – On March 19, the only president that independent Kazakhstan has ever known, Nursultan Nazarbayev, announced his resignation after almost three decades of near-absolute power. In a televised speech, Nazarbayev praised the country’s achievements and called on its youth to build a bright future.

Yet it was not a full farewell, because Nazarbayev said that he was not leaving the political scene. The big question now is what comes next for Kazakhstan.

Although Nazarbayev’s resignation came as a surprise, his promise to remain in politics was years in the making. He previously received the titles of First President (2000), Leader of the Nation (2010), and, in 2017, Elbasy, a Kazakh word meaning head of the nation or people. Because of his “historic mission,” he was given the lifelong right to present initiatives on state-building, domestic and foreign policy, and national security. What’s more, Kazakh state bodies are obliged to consider his proposals.

The “First President” also heads the Assembly of the People of the Republic of Kazakhstan and the Security Council (which was elevated from an advisory to a constitutional body in 2018), and is a member of the Constitutional Council. Nazarbayev, his family, and their property and bank accounts have also been given full immunity from prosecution. In addition, he is chairman of the ruling Nur Otan party.

This exit without leaving resembles the semi-departure of Singapore’s founding father Lee Kuan Yew, and is very different from the resignation and full political retirement in 1999 of Boris Yeltsin, independent Russia’s first president. Singapore has always been a major inspiration for Nazarbayev, who held Lee in the highest regard. Effective and highly respected at home and abroad, Lee tops the short list of leaders who made authoritarianism look good.

Nazarbayev would like to follow Lee in becoming an elder statesman, thereby avoiding the less pleasant fate of other authoritarian rulers. He is certainly well aware of the fragility of power. He became Kazakhstan’s leader amid the tumultuous collapse of the Soviet Union, and has witnessed the downfall of authoritarian peers around the world.

Resigning, and having to trust new Kazakh leaders, must therefore have been a difficult decision. Nazarbayev’s record in office, marred by corruption scandals, is more controversial than Lee’s, and he felt betrayed by his own family when his son-in-law attempted a coup d’état over a decade ago.

In addition to his personal security, Nazarbayev is eager to ensure his legacy as a statesman and founding father. Balancing these two goals will not be easy. He could best guarantee his security by maintaining the status quo and continuing to exercise tight political and economic control. Burnishing his legacy, on the other hand, will require reforms that boost further development and prosperity. Adding to the challenge are a build-up of domestic problems and a more dangerous and unpredictable international environment.

The careful preparations for Nazarbayev’s post-presidency suggest that his resignation is most likely part of a long-term strategy. As the Kazakh constitution stipulates, the speaker of the Senate, Kassym-Jomart Tokayev, a Nazarbayev loyalist, was appointed president until the end of the current presidential term in 2020. His daughter, Dariga Nazarbayeva, was elected to be the new speaker of the Senate.

Although there are few clues as to what will happen next, speculation tends to focus on three issues: political power relations, social discontent, and Nazarbayev’s personality cult.

Nazarbayev has built a political system that combines Singaporean-style technocratic governance with feudal loyalty. True, Kazakhstan has made some progress in fostering a professional state. But, unlike Lee, Nazarbayev has not built strong institutions, such as a competitive political-party system, or an independent judiciary. This will make the political transition particularly difficult, because institutions will need to be built along the way.

Some decentralization of power seems inevitable. If the current highly presidential system remains intact, Nazarbayev and his successor will probably maintain a duopoly. But if the new president cannot consolidate power sufficiently – a distinct possibility – then multiple power brokers will emerge, with no strong parties to help channel their differences. In this scenario, even Nazarbayev might not be able to keep the resulting conflicts under control.

In this context, recent and ongoing protests could be precursors of more serious upheavals later. Although there are currently no clear demands for democracy, there is growing dissatisfaction with social injustices. And, ad hoc measures aside, Kazakhstan currently has no mechanism for channeling and addressing popular grievances.

Finally, unlike Lee, Nazarbayev ended up encouraging his own personality cult. Public officials and ordinary citizens alike praise the president’s genius, wisdom, devotion, and other qualities. There are monuments to him throughout the country. The most advanced university and schools, the central avenue in Almaty, and the airport in the capital, Astana, had all borne his name prior to resignation.

The cult is getting stronger. On March 20, Kazakhstan’s parliament voted to rename the capital Nursultan (though it remains to be seen whether the voting procedure was fully in line with the constitution), and many cities renamed their central streets after Nazarbayev. This is raising concerns among some sectors of the population – a response that the government should not ignore.

The cult will most probably soften with time. But it is unlikely to be fully deconstructed, because it would be impossible (and unfair) to decouple Nazarbayev from Kazakhstan’s independence narrative. This is why Nazarbayev’s resignation marks a critical juncture for Kazakhstan. He came to power at a time of profound and unexpected change, and his semi-departure could have equally unpredictable consequences.

WARSAW – The outcome of the recent eight-hour-long US-Russia talks in Geneva was not reported on the main news broadcast of Russia’s state-owned Channel One, a primary propaganda outlet for the Kremlin, until the 11th minute. The first two stories focused on events in Kazakhstan, particularly President Vladimir Putin’s virtual consultation with the leaders of the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO). It seems that Putin wanted to impress Russians in other ways than by issuing an ultimatum to the West as a pretext to invade Ukraine.

Russia’s deployment of troops to help quell unrest in Kazakhstan is of a piece with Putin’s efforts to reconstitute the Russian empire through intimidation and military force. Putin is aiming to erase 25 years of Western security policy by curtailing the sovereignty of Ukraine, Georgia, Moldova, and even the former Soviet republics – Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania – that have already joined NATO. To strengthen his negotiating position, Putin wants to show that Russia has something like its own NATO.

Although the CSTO, a kind of “Warsaw Pact-lite,” was founded in the 1990s, the Kremlin has never used it to justify a foreign intervention until now, in the case of Kazakhstan. The CSTO did not intervene when Kyrgyzstan requested Russia’s help in 2010, nor when Armenia did so during its recent conflict with Azerbaijan over Nagorno-Karabakh.

But the Kremlin now seems to have learned the lessons of the popular uprisings in Belarus and Ukraine over the past decade. To launch joint missions with Belarusian dictator Aleksandr Lukashenko’s forces, Putin could simply hide behind the CSTO. Tellingly, the CSTO’s “peacekeeping military mission” in Kazakhstan is headed by Russian Colonel-General Andrei Serdyukov, the same man who led the military operations to seize Crimea in 2014, and who then commanded Russian forces in Syria.

Russia’s entry into Kazakhstan has certainly gotten the West’s attention. Its most important assets are its raw materials (oil, gas, and uranium) and its central placement in China’s Belt and Road Initiative, which branches into Iran, Turkey, and Russia. Under Nursultan Nazarbayev, who ruled for three decades until stepping down from the presidency in 2019, Kazakhstan maintained a policy of relative independence vis-à-vis Russia, China, and the United States; now, however, the balance has suddenly shifted.

But it is unclear exactly what the Kremlin hopes to achieve in Kazakhstan. If it tries to take control of the country’s resources, it will end up in a confrontation with China, which it cannot afford. Nor can it control the political situation in the country. The protesters, after all, have already achieved their goals of forcing the government’s resignation and restoring fuel-price caps (a doubling of prices triggered the unrest).

Nonetheless, after years of the Kremlin standing by and watching as the US and China colonized Kazakhstan economically, those countries now must watch as Russian soldiers help to patrol Kazakh cities. Chevron, ExxonMobil, and European oil companies have fields and installations across Kazakhstan, so the last thing they want is a deeper conflict.

As always with Putin, the domestic audience is a key consideration. Most Russians – including many independent analysts and opposition figures – consider Kazakhstan a part of the “Russkiy mir” (“Russian world”). As with Russian speakers in Ukraine, the assumption is that all Russophones in Kazakhstan are in fact Russians who dream of nothing more than annexation by the motherland. In the 1990s, extreme nationalists, including the Liberal-Democratic Party leader Vladimir Zhirinovsky and the writer Aleksander Solzhenitsyn, openly called for northern Kazakhstan to be incorporated into Russia.

Yet many Russian-speaking Kazakhs are not pro-Russian, nor do they want to incorporate their country partly or wholly into Russia. There are Ukrainians and Kazakhs who speak only Russian and do not want that language to be their country’s official language. But none of this matters to Putin. He sees the mere existence of a Russian minority – whose size he usually overestimates several times over – as sufficient justification to include a neighboring country in Russia’s sphere of influence.

But the Kremlin also has plenty to lose in Kazakhstan. Deploying 2,500 troops may strengthen Russia’s influence, but maintaining a military presence will antagonize Kazakhs, just as previous interventions antagonized Ukrainians and Belarusians who used to consider themselves pro-Russian.

That antagonism will have only marginal geopolitical significance in the short and medium term; but in the long term, it could lead to greater independence. After Georgia in 2008, Ukraine in 2014, and Belarus in 2020, Kazakhstan is another chapter in Putin’s neo-imperial narrative. But that also makes it another traditionally pro-Russian society that Putin is at risk of losing. Though the intervention is supposed to scare the protesters into submission, it could well have the opposite effect, turning Kazakhs decidedly against Russia.

Russia’s military presence in Kazakhstan is an additional source of leverage as Putin pursues his second goal: an unwritten agreement to halt the integration of Ukraine and Georgia into the West. Were it not for Russia’s ultimatum regarding NATO membership, the mere demand to withdraw Western support for Ukraine would be radical. But, against this background, Putin’s objective seems to be a minimum plan – almost a compromise. And the whole course of events in Kazakhstan and along the Ukrainian border serves this purpose.

If, after eight hours of talks, the Kremlin-controlled media do not thunder that Russia was offended and provoked to an appropriate reaction, then it seems that the outcome was not a pretext for invading Ukraine. The West was supposed to learn from the CSTO’s deployment in Kazakhstan that Russia is equal to the US, has its own NATO, and has the ability to expand its influence into large neighboring countries. As Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov said: Russia must get something from NATO.

From now on, an agreement to keep Ukraine out of the Alliance is the minimum, not the maximum, that Russia will demand. It might work. After all, while a country’s admission to NATO needs to be announced, a decision to keep it out permanently does not.

MOSCOW – Paratroopers from Russia’s elite Spetsnaz brigade, the shock troops of the Russian military, have arrived in Kazakhstan to suppress violent, nationwide protests against the country’s Kremlin-friendly regime. The action comes at a time when Russian troops are already massed near Ukraine’s border, and just 15 months after a Russian rifle brigade intervened to end the fighting between Armenia and Azerbaijan in Nagorno-Karabakh. Is President Vladimir Putin really attempting to rebuild the Russian Empire?

Of course, it is impossible to know with any certainty what the Kremlin sphinx has in mind. But, whatever Putin’s intentions, his actions are fatally undermining the idea that underpinned the Russian Federation’s creation 30 years ago.

Boris Yeltsin, Russia’s first post-Soviet president, is rarely a topic of conversation nowadays. If Russians mention him, they are most likely recalling his excessive drinking or, more important, the inflation and poverty that pervaded Russia’s transition to a market economy. They are probably not crediting him with profound historical insights.

It was Yeltsin who recognized the monumental costs of sustaining the Soviet empire – costs that contributed to immiserating Russians and keeping them imprisoned in a police state. Only by shedding these costs – by dissolving the empire and establishing a free-market economy – could Russia deliver liberation and prosperity to its people.

But, on New Year’s Eve 1999, Yeltsin might have doomed his own vision. The man to whom he handed power that night now seems determined to discard his keenest insight. While Putin may not seek to rebuild the Russian Empire per se, he seems resolved to establish suzerainty over former Soviet states. That is a highly costly proposition.

The precise share of Soviet GDP that went toward maintaining the empire is unclear. But, given the demands of industrial production and the Soviet military-industrial complex – which together claimed up to 80% of all government revenues – it is safe to say that the Soviet Union could not afford, say, subsidies to unproductive factories in isolated areas of its constituent states. And this is to say nothing of the empire’s price in blood, highlighted in the years following the 1979 invasion of Afghanistan.

These costs were not lost on ordinary Russians, who resented having to shoulder them, just as British, French, and Austro-Hungarian citizens did during their own empires’ heydays. But the same cannot be said of those in charge. From the czars to Lenin and Stalin to Putin today, Russia’s leaders have almost universally believed that the cost of empire was justified.

This may partly reflect ideology. As the Palestinian scholar Edward Said famously observed, every empire “tells itself and the world that it is unlike all other empires, that its mission is not to plunder and control but to educate and liberate.” Russians have said much the same about their empire, particularly when discussing the Belarusians and their “little brothers” in Ukraine.

If Russia’s leaders did believe in la mission civilisatrice, they believed even more strongly that the empire strengthened national security. But history tells another story. In fact, imperial control quickly leads to overreach, makes a power less secure, and hastens the empire’s collapse.

For Russia, the costs of Putin’s ambitions are mounting. Consider the country’s military expenditure, which increased from 3.8% of GDP in 2013 – the year before Russia invaded Ukraine, annexed Crimea, and supported secessionist forces in the eastern Donetsk and Luhansk regions – to 5.4% in 2016. While military expenditure as a share of GDP declined in 2017 and 2018, it is now climbing once again. With Russian troops stationed in the occupied Georgian region of Abkhazia, the breakaway Moldovan region of Transnistria, Nagorno-Karabakh, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Belarus, this is not a surprise.

More difficult to quantify are the strategic costs of empire, which Putin is loath to recognize. The Kremlin’s imperial agenda, especially the annexation of Crimea, has called into question the post-Cold War settlement in Eurasia, from the Baltic to the Bering Sea. The world’s other powers – particularly the United States and China – are strongly invested in upholding the status quo that Putin is seeking to upset.

The post-Cold War settlement enabled governments to divert resources from military budgets to social programs. The peace dividend not only enabled Russia’s economic transition; it also supported the long economic boom in the West that ended with the 2008 financial crisis.

But the biggest beneficiary was China. Recall that 40 years ago, vast armies were positioned along the Chinese-Soviet border, and thousands of Russian nuclear warheads were trained on Chinese cities. The Cold War’s end thus enabled China to redirect resources toward economic development and poverty reduction. China’s success on these fronts over the last 30 years speaks for itself.

Against this backdrop, one wonders how Chinese President Xi Jinping views Russia’s intervention in Kazakhstan, which shares a nearly 1,800-kilometer (1,120-mile) border with China, especially in light of Putin’s earlier comments diminishing the history of Kazakhstan’s independent statehood. (He has shown similar contempt for the independence of Belarus, the Baltic states, and Ukraine.)

The domestic costs – and polling by the Levada Center in Moscow suggests that few Russians are willing to trade their living standards for enhanced global status – ought to be sufficient to convince Putin to abandon his imperial ambitions. If not, the possibility of reigniting a rivalry with China surely should. But it is far from guaranteed that Putin will give reason its due. He is already ignoring the lessons of Russia’s own history.