Kazakhstan

Surprises and Stereotypes After 20 Years of Independence

Jonathan Aitken

• Publisher: Continuum
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781441117946
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia del XXI secolo

Jonathan Aitken has written an insightful and illuminating portrait of 21st Century Kazakhstan as it approaches its 20th Anniversary of independence from the former Soviet Union. Surprises abound in Aitken's lively pages as he captures the creative tensions between Old and New Kazakhstan. Thanks to his unique access, the author has probed the darkest corners of the fading Soviet era, reporting from inside the prisons, the KGB and the Special Prosecutor's Office. He has also enjoyed the bright lights of the country's cultural renaissance, particularly in Almaty with its four orchestras, 19 theatres, 27 concert halls and Opera Houses. Aitken is at his best unravelling the economic and political surprises which are flowing from the Caspian oil boom with its knock on effects on foreign policy, GDP, and political reform. 'Kazakhstan is the newest powerhouse of Asia. From its President to its painters, poets, economists and entrepreneurs, this is a nation confidently on the move.' says Aitken 'we need to understand the new national identity of this increasingly successful player on the world stage.'

1

Towards a New National Identity

Towards a New National Identity

Writing about contemporary Kazakhstan is like making a journey into unexplored territory, for it is one of the least known yet most surprising nations of the post Soviet world. It may be a timely moment to offer a portrait of this new country as it passes the historical milestone of its twentieth anniversary as an independent state.

At the time of Kazakhstan’s premature birth into independence, conceived amidst the chaos of the Soviet Union’s disintegration in December 1991, the consensus of opinion held that the infant nation was too poor and too politically unstable to survive. This view, later encouraged by ridicule from the movie Borat, prevailed for several years.

Today the international community takes Kazakhstan seriously because of its growing economic importance. Yet even now most westerners know little or nothing about its history, culture, character and future potential. Nevertheless there is a growing understanding that a new powerhouse is coming of age on the Steppes. At this strategic crossroads where Chinese, Russian, Central Asian and Western civilizations converge, Kazakhstan has arrived as a stable and significant nation state.

One sign of the changing times is that international recognition of Kazakhstan is rising. From its hosting of the OSCE summit to the performances of its acclaimed orchestras and musicians, the country is making its mark on the world stage. Its economic power to move oil markets, stock markets, grain markets and the world uranium market is well known to global traders. Kazakhstanis themselves are becoming more confident as they travel and study abroad in large numbers. This is a nation on the move.

Kazakhstan’s governance and politics are interesting too, although you would never guess it from the lazy reporting of too much of the world’s media. Stereotypes and clichés abound, among them ‘police state’; ‘ruthless dictatorship’; ‘sinister regime’; and even ‘worse than North Korea’. Forgive them their press passes! This author has been able to report from the country’s darkest corners, such as its prisons and security services; on its brightest scholars and students; on its cultural show pieces of theatre, ballet and music; from its rural auls; its intellectual schools; its richest industries; its liveliest young entrepreneurs; its two greatest cities and in interviews with its most prominent public figures. At the end of such a writer’s journey I have no complaints about lack of access or openness. As a result, this book contains some criticisms, some compliments, and many fresh insights. The most intriguing discovery is the emergence of a new national identity.

Portraying the national identity at the time of Kazakhstan’s twentieth anniversary is challenging because the picture is not static. So much in the country is developing and changing fast. Yet for all its growing wealth, the nation’s most important resource is its people. They are a combination of the talented and the traditional, full of futuristic ambition yet with deep roots in their ancestry and culture. Defining these roots is difficult because they are a fusion of ancient Steppe values; Turkic-Islamic heritage; and the testing experiences of Soviet colonisation. To understand Kazakhstan’s past and potential, three themes are surprisingly important: Suffering, Survival and Success.

National character can be strengthened in adversity. By this measure the resilience of the Kazakhstani people was tested to the full by the tragic sagas of their twentieth century sufferings.

The first of these tragedies was the Bolshevik revolution of 1917. Uprooted from their ancestral lands by the revolutionary ending of the Russian empire, 1.5 million Kazakh nomads fled with their herds of sheep and cattle into China and Mongolia in the early 1920s.

The second tragedy was the Communist policy of agricultural collectivizm which had a devastating effect on the remaining nomads and their livestock. Between 1930 and 1933 over three million Kazakhstanis died of starvation as they were forced off their traditional pastures and into the disastrous experiment of Soviet-directed collective farms.

Accompanying collectivism came the reign of terror and repression ordered by Josef Stalin. He subjugated the Kazakhs with ruthless brutality. At least 300,000 of them were executed or died between 1937–54. These losses were accompanied by deportations into Kazakhstan of 500,000 victims of Stalin’s purges from other parts of the Soviet Union.

Many of these deportees were prisoners incarcerated in a network of sinister penal camps – The Gulag. An extra dimension to the sorrows of twentieth century Kazakhstan was added by the realisation that its northern territory became the principal location, after Siberia, for these prisons.

Whether they were locked up in the Gulag or dumped into collective farms, this compulsory migration of multi-ethnic foreigners diluted the indigenous Kazakh people still further. In addition to Stalin’s deportees, when Nikita Khrushchev ruled the Soviet Union over a million workers were moved to another disastrous agricultural experiment on Kazakh soil – the Virgin Lands Scheme. By this time the Kazakhs had become an oppressed minority in their own country, almost losing their way of life. Reduced to a rump of 37 per cent of the population their nationhood was steadily suppressed by their Soviet occupiers – for example, by 1961 the capital city of Almaty was allowed only one Kazakh language high school.

Perhaps the most terrifying exploitation of Kazakhstan during the Soviet era was the use of the Semipalatinsk region as a nuclear weapons testing site. Between 1949 and 1989 tests took place there at the rate of one every three weeks. In those four decades there were 752 nuclear explosions in Kazakhstan – 114 of them in the atmosphere or at ground level with no protection for the domestic population. The regularity and radioactivity of these tests had appalling consequences for the national environment and for the health of the local people. As a result, a climate of fear and revulsion spread across the Soviet Republic of Kazakhstan when the secrets of Moscow’s nuclear testing program began to leak out through deformed births, increased cancer rates, crops disease and other horrors. The mental and physical scars of these radiation effects are still felt deep in the heart of Kazakh society today.

Understanding the ordeals of the country’s twentieth century past provides a clearer perspective of its twenty-first century future. For Kazakhstanis are tough, stoical people well schooled in surviving the climatic extremes of the steppes and the political extremism of colonial occupiers. Despite many efforts to obliterate them, Kazakhstan’s language, poetry, music and national character were well preserved in times of suffering and are now flourishing in times of success.

This spirit of survival was needed after the Soviets departed in 1991. Independence in the ruins of the collapsed super power was initially more painful than joyful. The country was left bankrupt and dysfunctional. It had no currency, rampant inflation, inadequate food production and useless factories. Pensions and salaries could not be paid by the government. Families went hungry. The country teetered on the brink of economic and political chaos. But during the first few years of self government its people discovered moral as well as material assets which enabled them to pull though the many crises they had to endure.

The first of these moral assets was tolerance. Kazakhstan is a country made up of over 138 nationalities and ethnic groups. The parents and grandparents of today’s society were thrown together in adversity. The rising generation of their descendants have learned to live together in prosperity. This national chemistry of flexibility and tolerance is a miraculous successor to the previous era of oppression. Kazakhstan has become the melting pot of Asia as its sorrows fade into memories. It is a young country whose 16 million people have an average age of 31. Their eyes are fixed optimistically on the future with a second moral quality underpinning their tolerance. It is their trust – in each other and their leadership.

Building a new country is exhilarating as it becomes successful. Trust grows as results are achieved. Twenty years ago Kazakhstan was an impoverished and backward Central Asian state. Today it is the powerhouse of the region, rising in economic performance and international respect.

Since independence Kazakhstan’s GDP per capita has risen twelvefold and exceeds $9,000 – a level of prosperity roughly equivalent to Malaysia’s. It is climbing so much faster than in most other emerging economies that the GDP per capita figure is forecast to reach $28,000 by 2020.

The current rate of unemployment, now 5.6 per cent, is falling and is lower than in the United States, Britain, France and Germany. Perhaps the most hopeful sign of all is the arrival of a young and ambitious middle class. Too many of them seem to prefer a safe career in government to an entrepreneurial career in business but that also is changing.

Economic statistics tell only one part of the story. As the title of this book suggests, Kazakhstan is full of surprises. Its people are warm, hospitable, good humoured, open-minded, cultured, fond of telling stories, frequently musical, splendidly convivial and full of laughter and joie de vivre. They are an attractive nationality whose qualities range from physical beauty to Steppes-centred romanticism.

Inevitably, an ex-Soviet country has its faults and failings. Although Kazakhstan feels like a free society it has not yet become one. The Soviet legacy dies hard in many of the national institutions. Parliament is comprised of only one party. The courts and judiciary are not delivering well because of the lack of new judges with high standards. There is too much corruption. The media is restricted. A fully fledged democracy with truly free and fair elections is some way off. However, as later chapters of this book show there are signs of real progress in most of these areas.

Western democracies have a tendency to be cynical and mistrustful towards political leaders. Kazakhstani public opinion takes the opposite tack. This is partly because of traditional respect for seniority and hierarchy and partly because the people genuinely trust their President. They look on him as the founding father of their nation and refer to him, affectionately, as Papa.

The trust and the affection have grown because President Nursultan Nazarbayev has delivered. Kazakhstan, at its present level of development, would not have survived without his leadership through the years of turbulence. My previous book Nazarbayev and the Making of Kazakhstan (Continuum 2009) tells his story. Yet even since this biography was written the country has leapt out of recession and into international prominence. These achievements were made possible by a rising tide of confidence at all levels.

This book tries to analyse the spirit and identity of the country as it reaches the twentieth anniversary of its independence. A good starting point for this analysis is the surprisingly creative tension between New Kazakhstan and Old Kazakhstan.

2

New Kazakhstan

v

Old Kazakhstan

(i)	The Surprise of the Non-Referendum
(ii)	Election Day and the Reactions to the Result
(iii)	Does the Opposition Exist?
(iv)	Signposts for the Future

(I) THE SURPRISE OF THE NON-REFERENDUM

In the early weeks of 2011 there was a power struggle between New Kazakhstan and Old Kazakhstan. New Kazakhstan won.

Since most of the arguments in this discreet dispute took place well below the parapet of public debate few people could understand what was happening, let alone appreciate the significance of what eventually emerged. But now it is possible to lift the veil and relate the story as a fascinating chapter in Kazakhstan’s political development. This episode gives many clues to the future direction of the country as it reaches the twentieth anniversary of its independence.

At the end of 2010, Kazakhstan and its President were on the crest of a wave. The country had weathered the storms of international recession in far better shape than most experts predicted. Although the 2008-9 global banking crisis had hit the construction companies and the financial sector, the slump struck early, the right measures were applied, so recovery came more swiftly and strongly than in the US and Europe. By the autumn of what was expected to be a difficult year, Kazakhstan’s economic growth had climbed to 7 per cent, unemployment was down to 5 per cent and the government felt able to announce a number of confidence building measures such as a 25 per cent pay rise for public service employees and several major infrastructure projects.

The most important boost to national self confidence was a diplomatic success: the holding of the OSCE summit in Astana on December 1–2 2010. To outside observers it may seem strange that a conference under the leadership of an international organization whose initials many people would have difficulty recognising (OSCE = Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe) could cause a surge of political excitement in the host country. Yet as detailed in Chapter 9 of this book, this is precisely what happened. When 56 national leaders flew into Astana for the summit (headed by US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton; President Dmitri Medvedev of Russia; Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany; President Nicolas Sarkozy of France and Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi of Italy) Kazakhstanis at all levels in society felt immense pride at their country’s arrival on the world stage as a respected and recognized player.

In the aftermath of the OSCE summit there was an understandable sense of elation among Kazakhstan’s political elite. Most of them were men over 50 or older who grew up in the former Soviet Union, were educated in Soviet Universities and who are still imbued, however hard they may try to break away from it, with a Soviet mentality. It is no disrespect to describe this group as ‘Old Kazakhstan’. They are still the backbone of the government, which despite occasional mistakes and failings, they have served well.

Old Kazakhstan likes the status quo, which to them means their jobs under the present system of Presidential patronage. So in the warm glow of mutual admiration following the OSCE summit they came up with a method of praising their President and preserving their own position. This was described as ‘The Referendum to extend the President’s term in office’.

Their political initiative started mysteriously in the eastern city of Ust-Kamenogorsk when a forum of 850 provincial citizens voted unanimously to exercise their constitutional right to demand a referendum. Its objective was to cancel the presidential election scheduled for the end of 2012 and to extend President Nazarbayev’s term in office to 2020. The leader of this ‘citizen’s initiative’ was an obscure University Rector Erlan Sydykov, but he was evidently being backed by far more heavyweight political figures. For within ten days of the forum, the referendum had been registered by the Central Election Commission, authorized by a vote in Parliament and supported by 300,000 signatories, 100,000 more than the number required to call a referendum under the constitution. Two weeks later the number of signatories had grown to 5 million, although it also became clear from critical comments posted anonymously on the internet that a significant number of students, teachers, business people and government officials were complaining of being put under pressure to sign the petition.

President Nazarbayev professed surprise at the referendum initiative and handled it by referring the matter to the Constitutional Council. However this was a delaying mechanism rather than an outright rejection. It seemed extremely unlikely that such a proposal would ever have got so far without some form of tacit presidential approval. The explanation doing the rounds was that leading figures from Old Kazakhstan had ‘bounced’ the referendum on Nazarbayev. He was initially attracted by it, reinforced in his attraction by the more traditional expressions of support from the rural areas, yet his sixth sense of political caution told him to handle it with care.

Other voices were urging him to kill the referendum stone dead. The western diplomatic community was horrified that on the coat-tails of an OSCE summit designed to strengthen democracy the host country should be contemplating such an anti-democratic move. But envoys have no votes and their views were not being forcefully expressed at face to face presidential meetings, particularly as there was no US Ambassador in post. From Almaty, traditionally the most liberal city, ...