Protesters across Kazakhstan, infuriated by rising prices and corrupt governance, took to the streets this week. While the overwhelming majority of protesters were peaceful, the country’s largest city, Almaty, saw rioting, looting and ongoing street battles. Caught off-guard, security forces cracked down hard, and deaths among protesters and police were reported.
Rather than repress further, many in the security forces switched to support the protesters in key cities across the country. In the span of a few hours on Jan. 5, the tides shifted decisively, with some protesters seizing government buildings. President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev declared a state of emergency, fired his cabinet and addressed the nation, promising major political reforms in an effort to placate the protesters.
What’s happening in Kazakhstan, a Central Asian country roughly the size of Western Europe, offers a reminder that much remains in flux behind the apparent stability of authoritarian governments. The immediate spark in this case was a sharp rise in fuel prices, but to understand why Kazakhstan suddenly found itself aflame, my research suggests it’s important to understand three broad factors.
Authoritarian rulers often are overconfident
Like authoritarians elsewhere, the Kazakhstani leadership was frequently overconfident in its policymaking — and political and economic elites were often distracted by enriching themselves. The country’s long-serving first president, Nursultan Nazarbayev, accomplished much after the country declared independence from the Soviet Union in 1991 — from forging a balanced “multi-vector” foreign policy, to avoiding large-scale ethnic conflict, to engineering economic growth based on the country’s oil and mineral reserves.
But these successes in the 1990s and 2000s came at a significant cost. The government silenced journalists and allegedly murdered opposition politicians — and socioeconomic inequality rose sharply, even as officials claimed that the country was on a clear path to its own form of “democracy.” And the country’s elites benefited enormously from global capitalism in ways that became difficult to hide from public view.
Kazakhstan’s police are cracking down on protesters — as political activism keeps rising.
Yet Kazakhstanis generally bought into a tacit social contract in the 2000s. As long as neighboring countries were worse off, and as long as their personal prospects looked reasonably bright, the trade-off seemed smart: security and material prosperity in exchange for curtailed freedom. It was the Kazakhstani version of what political scientists would call a typical “autocratic bargain.”
But tacit social contracts work only until they fail. Nazarbayev became progressively less adept at placating labor mobilizers, youth activists, pensioners and wage laborers, among other groups. He formally stepped down in 2019 but continued to guide policymaking behind the scenes. As commodity prices and sudden currency devaluations ratcheted up the cost of living, many young people started to ask what the “old man” had done for them lately. While the government promised reforms, few concrete achievements emerged.
Authoritarians rely heavily on myths
Second, authoritarians — when they aren’t simply entrenching themselves in power — rely on creating myths. These narratives, often of dubious veracity, help structure citizens’ sense of the world. In Kazakhstan, one such central myth promised citizens a comfortable middle-class life.
The promise was clear: Kazakhstan was unlike other oil-rich authoritarian nations. The government would use its immense wealth to bolster public education, generate broad-scale development and diversify the economy. Kazakhstan’s wealth would be managed by capable technocrats using global best practices. And this meant Kazakhstanis could expect to become comfortably middle class. Kazakhstan’s ruling Nur Otan party positioned itself as the champion of this vision.
The challenge was that those working in the oil sector — the very source of Kazakhstan’s immense economic growth — continually found themselves locked out of the economic gains. The gap between the promise of becoming middle class and the reality of living with barely enough became harder to bear over the past decade.
Oil workers in the Zhanaozen region erupted in protests over low wages and substandard working conditions in 2011, and the government responded not with concessions, but with violence. Since then, the regime strategy for workers has been a combination of ongoing harassment and efforts to undermine unions, coupled with some expressions of sympathy about working conditions and occasional concessions.
But even middle-class citizens became increasingly concerned about rising costs and economic precarity. Covid-19 accelerated these anxieties significantly, with global supply-chain disruptions and currency depreciation ratcheting up prices for basic goods. Whatever legitimacy the regime had enjoyed while the oil economy boomed quickly eroded, and Kazakhstanis were no longer forgiving of poor governance and in-plain-sight corruption.
What happens to Kazakhstan’s dictatorship now that its dictator has quit?
Nazarbayev’s successor miscalculated
Political scientists point out that authoritarians — when they aren’t willfully ignorant — need to develop an exit strategy. Nazarbayev surprised his country in 2019 by announcing that he was resigning from the presidency, while continuing to head the National Security Council and the pro-presidential Nur Otan political party.
Observers were flabbergasted. Why would Nazarbayev give up his formal powers willingly and therefore prematurely? This, too, was a form of hubris — an overconfidence that Nazarbayev’s governance represented an enlightened and transferrable model for his handpicked successor, as well as other autocrats. Some analysts soon speculated that Russian President Vladimir Putin might be wise to consider a similar strategy: anoint a successor, manage affairs in the background and slowly exit the political stage.
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In fact, Kazakhstan’s public was ready for the next chapter, and Tokayev, the handpicked successor, immediately misread the room. He directed that the capital, Astana, be renamed Nur-Sultan to honor his mentor and cement Nazarbayev’s cultlike status. Resentments percolated across society. The first post-Nazarbayev elections in 2019 were marked by significant street protests demanding fair elections. Young citizens, in particular, remained eager for systemic political change. Frustrated by their life prospects, they increasingly blamed a stagnant and corrupt authoritarian system.
In January, an opening came. The arrival of “peacekeeping forces” from a Russian-led military alliance deeply complicates the situation in Kazakhstan, but whatever changes now result will serve as an ample reminder that authoritarian regimes can be fragile.
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Edward Schatz (@SchatzEd) is professor of political science at the University of Toronto and author of “Slow Anti-Americanism: Social Movements and Symbolic Politics in Central Asia” (Stanford University Press, 2021).