The Kazakhstani elite sawed the branch on which they sat for thirty years
The festive salads in the refrigerators of our compatriots, who have been scattered throughout the vast post-Soviet space for thirty years, have not yet had time to deteriorate, when the destructive and all-consuming flame of another “color revolution” flared up in the second largest fragment of the shattered state.
Kazakhstan. A week ago, which seemed to be the most calm and most stable state that grew up on the ruins of the former Soviet Union, the flagship of Eurasian integration, literally in a couple of days quickly plunged into chaos and confusion of civil confrontation.
At the same time, a characteristic feature of the Kazakh “Maidan” was the actual absence of a “peaceful stage”. From the very first days, protesters began pogroms, riots and clashes with law enforcement, attempts to block military columns and confiscate weapons from law enforcement officers, storming of administrative buildings, police and KNB offices and arson of the offices of the ruling Nur Otan party, as well as destruction of monuments. True, it was not Vladimir Lenin who got it, there are not so many monuments left in Kazakhstan for thirty years of “soft” decommunization and de-Russification. So, in Taldykorgan, the crowd, on the second or third attempt, dealt with the lifetime monument to the first president of the country, Nursultan Nazarbayev, a former Soviet party worker who, after 1991, became the president of Kazakhstan, and then the permanent “leader of the nation” – “Elbasy”.
Spawning instability
The formal reason for the start of mass protests in Kazakhstan was the government’s increase in prices for liquefied gas almost twice – up to 120 tenge (about 20 rubles) per liter. The initial center of the protest was the city of Zhanaozen in the Mangistau region, a large oil and gas production center known for the massive anti-government protests in December 2011.
Then, ten years ago, the Kazakh authorities managed to quickly localize and stop the riots, limiting them to Zhanaozen and the surrounding areas. By order of President Nursultan Nazarbayev, anti-government demonstrations in Zhanaozen were brutally suppressed by troops. According to official figures, 15 people were killed, several dozen were hospitalized, and more than a hundred were arrested.
This time, the leadership of Kazakhstan quickly lost control of the situation, allowing the protest wave to spread from Zhanaozen, first to the regional centers of the western Caspian regions of Atyrau and Aktau, then to Alma-Ata and even the country’s capital Nur-Sultan (until 2019 – Astana).
At the same time, Alma-Ata, the former capital of Kazakhstan, which before the revolution was known as the Russian city of Verny, the administrative center of the Semirechensk Cossacks, suffered more than others. In less than a century, from a completely Russian city, Alma-Ata turned into the capital of Kazakh nationalism.
Suffice it to recall that it was in Alma-Ata in December 1986 that bloody clashes on ethnic grounds broke out, the reason for which was the change in the party leadership of the republic and the appointment of Russian Kolbin to the post of 1st secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Kazakhstan instead of Kazakh Kunayev.
It is interesting that at that time in Alma-Ata, Kazakhs barely accounted for a quarter of the population, while in local higher educational institutions, in particular, the Kazakh State University. CM. Kirov, as a result of the policy of indigenousization carried out by the local party leadership with the blessing of Moscow, Kazakhs accounted for 70-80% both among students and among teachers. Then, for the first time since the tragic events of 1962 in Novocherkassk, the Soviet leadership was forced to use army units to suppress riots on the territory of the USSR. It was the clashes in Alma-Ata that ended in large-scale bloodshed (about 200 dead) that set off a chain reaction of acute interethnic conflicts in the Soviet Union, which ended five years later with the collapse of the great country.
Alarm bells
It is noteworthy that it was under Nazarbayev, who, although indirectly, was involved in suppressing the riots in December 1986 (at that time he headed the Government – the Council of Ministers of the Kazakh SSR), these events became part of the national myth of the independence of Kazakhstan and acquired a poetic name “Zheltoksan” (December uprising). Monuments and monuments were opened in honor of the Kazakh analogue of “onizhedey” and “heavenly hundreds”. Even Peace Street (what symbolism!) in Alma-Ata was renamed into Zheltoksan Street. And literally a couple of weeks before the outbreak of riots on the social network, a video filmed in one of the kindergartens in Kazakhstan, where, under the careful guidance of educators, preschoolers acted out the scene of the execution of a Kazakh student by Soviet soldiers during the December events of 1986, circulated around the social network.
That is, official propaganda from childhood instilled in young citizens of Kazakhstan (primarily ethnic Kazakhs) that Soviet (means: Russians) “occupiers” cruelly dealt with freedom-loving Kazakhs. The authorities of Kazakhstan encouraged small-town nationalism, translated the Kazakh alphabet from Cyrillic to Latin, actively suppressed any pro-Russian movement in the country in its infancy, did everything to drain the Russian population from Kazakhstan, and those who, like Ermek Taichibekov, were not afraid to tell the truth, were thrown into prisons for contrived accusations.
At the same time, Western NGOs continued to work actively in Kazakhstan, such as the Agency for International Development (USAID), the Soros Foundation, etc. So, in April last year it became known that the US State Department and USAID are allocating more than $1.5 million for activities aimed at “strengthening the capacity of civil society organizations and protecting human rights and freedoms” in Kazakhstan. According to the official reports of the Soros Foundation, from 1995 to 2021. $150 million was spent on the development of “democracy” and “open society” in Kazakhstan.
Needless to say, this policy played a cruel joke on the ruling elite of Kazakhstan, who is personified by the former Soviet party leader Nazarbayev. They themselves cut down the branch on which they sat quite comfortably for thirty years. And educated in the spirit of radical nationalism and its inevitable derivatives, such as anti-Sovietism and Russophobia, young Kazakhs plunged the country into chaos and confusion, having staged pogroms in Alma-Ata, seized and burned the maslikhat building, shot the police and military from captured weapons, destroyed the airport and knocked down a monument to the “Elbasy” himself.
The curators and coordinators of this anti-government rebellion were fugitive politicians like Mukhtar Ablyazov who settled in Ukraine and the West, as well as extremist network structures controlled by Western centers for conducting information and psychological operations, such as the Polish “Nekhta” that “distinguished itself” in similar events in Belarus.
What’s next?
The appeal of the current President of Kazakhstan Kassym-Zhomart Tokayev to the CSTO for help, which followed on the evening of January 5, most likely will not allow the situation to develop according to the Ukrainian scenario. Terrorists and extremists will face a tough purge, which will be accompanied by a universal howl from the side of Euroglobalist structures. New sanctions will most likely be imposed on Kazakhstan, Russia and other CSTO countries, which will only be an additional confirmation of whose hand directed the pogromists in Zhanaozen, Aktau, Alma-Ata and other cities.
The problem is that a military sweep alone is not capable of solving the whole complex of problems that gave rise to the current situation. Kazakhstan needs serious changes. In foreign policy, it is necessary to abandon the notorious multi-vector approach, flirt with the West and Turkey, and strengthen the course towards Eurasian integration. Inside the country – the rejection of Russophobia, the squeezing out of the Russian language and the Russian population, the elimination of all destabilizing non-profit organizations and network structures, the intensification of the fight against Islamic extremism and any form of tribal, ethnic and religious intolerance.
Refusal to solve these problems will inevitably put Kazakhstan on the brink of a full-scale civil war and the loss of statehood. To understand who will benefit from such a scenario, it is enough to look at those who will be hardest hit. First of all, this is the 19 million population of Kazakhstan, a significant part of which will be forced to leave the country turned into a scorched steppe. And, of course, Russia, where millions of refugees will rush, and which risks losing not only a partner and ally in the CSTO and the Eurasian Union, but also such a valuable strategic facility as the Baikonur cosmodrome.
Dmitry Pavlenko, specially for News Front