Dark Shadows

Inside the Secret World of Kazakhstan

Joanna Lillis

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781786724519
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Communism, Post-Communism & Socialism
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Dark Shadows is a compelling portrait of Kazakhstan, a country that is little known in the West. Strategically located in the heart of Central Asia, sandwiched between Vladimir Putin's Russia, its former colonial ruler, and Xi Jinping's China, this vast oil-rich state is carving out its place in the world as it contends with its own complex past and present. Journalist Joanna Lillis paints a vibrant picture of this emerging nation through vivid reportage based on 13 years of on-the-ground coverage, and travels across the length and breadth of this enigmatic country that lies along the ancient Silk Road and at the geopolitical and cultural crossroads where East meets West.
Featuring tales of murder and abduction, intrigue and betrayal, extortion and corruption, this book explores how a president, Nursultan Nazarbayev, transformed himself into a potentate and the economically-struggling state he inherited at the fall of the USSR into a swaggering 21st-century monocracy. A colourful cast of characters brings the politics to life: from strutting oligarch to sleeping villagers, from principled politicians to striking oilmen, from crusading journalists to courageous campaigners.
Traversing dust-blown deserts and majestic mountains, taking in glitzy cities and dystopian landscapes, Dark Shadows conjures up Kazakhstan as a living, breathing place, full of extraordinary people living extraordinary lives.

‌Chapter 1

‌Arise, Kazakhstan

Astana, 2008

Kazakhstan’s capital is in festive mood. The lustrous surface of a giant pyramid twinkles turquoise and yellow, reflecting the Kazakh flag as it flutters patriotically in the breeze. A gleaming obelisk thrusts into the bright blue sky, and beside it a horde of gold-clad warriors is feting the nation’s leader. As Kazakhstan’s president departs with a regal wave, the warriors drop to their knees and bow their heads in respect. It looks like a scene from a historical drama – but this is how Nursultan Nazarbayev likes to be glorified in the modern day.

‘We love this holiday, we love this city, and we love Nazarbayev,’ gushes Sara Gabdiyaliyeva, who is shepherding her family out of this pageant and off for a day of festivities in Astana, the brash capital city that is the president’s brainchild. Today is Astana Day, when this glitzy town of idiosyncratic architecture celebrates its anniversary – but this year is a special occasion. On 6 July 2008 Astana is marking a decade since it was unveiled as Kazakhstan’s capital at a stroke of Nazarbayev’s pen. In fact, the whole country is also joining in the celebrations, because it has been declared a national holiday. It also just happens to be Nazarbayev’s birthday.

The golden warriors are part of a spectacle to open a new monument called Kazak Yeli (Kazakh Nation), the latest architectural embellishment to adorn Astana, whose construction was ordained by the president after independence – a brand-new capital for a brand-new country. Erected alongside that ostentatious glass pyramid that is one of Astana’s many offbeat landmarks, the obelisk rises 91 metres into the sky – symbolising Kazakhstan gaining independence from the collapsing Soviet Union in 1991 – and is topped by a golden samruk, a phoenix-like mythical bird that, legend has it, lays the golden egg that starts a new cycle of life. Nowadays, a familiar face peers out from the side of the soaring column: Nazarbayev, whose image is carved into a bas-relief featuring him taking his presidential oath. The message is crystal clear: l’état, c’est moi.

Former steelworker and communist boss Nursultan Nazarbayev has been Kazakhstan’s president since it gained independence in 1991 as the USSR shattered around it. He was last re-elected in 2015 with an eye-popping 98 per cent of the vote, and in 2016 the strongman marked a quarter of a century in power – and counting. In fact, Nazarbayev has been at the helm of his homeland for even longer: he became leader of Soviet-ruled Kazakhstan in 1989, and was propelled from there into the presidency of a sovereign state at independence. A whole generation has grown up never knowing another president but Nazarbayev, a man with a big personality that he has stamped on the nation. Ruthless despot to his detractors, visionary leader to his acolytes, Nazarbayev leaves few in Kazakhstan indifferent. For his fans, he has presided over years of political stability and petrodollar-fuelled prosperity, and forged a coherent nation state out of a melting pot of peoples inherited from the USSR. For his critics, he has created a repressive get-rich-quick kleptocracy, clinging on to power by rigging elections, crushing dissent and nourishing a creeping – and creepy – cult of personality.

Nazarbayev was born on 6 July 1940 into Stalin’s Soviet Union, in a rural community in the village of Shamalgan on the south-eastern fringe of the USSR. He is the ‘son, grandson and great-grandson of herders’, he says in his autobiography, harking back to a past that had just disappeared by the time of his birth: the ancient nomadic lifestyle of the Kazakhs, which was wiped out by the Soviets.1 Nazarbayev’s father worked on a collective farm, where, according to his official biography, the future president, the eldest son of four children, helped out with the herding and haymaking when he was not at school, where he was an outstanding student.2

At the age of 18, Nazarbayev escaped the rural backwaters of Kazakhstan, first for a stint at technical college in Ukraine, then for a baptism by fire into the world of work. He became a blast furnace operator at the Karaganda Metallurgical Plant, a steelworks in the town of Temirtau in the industrial heartland of central Kazakhstan a thousand kilometres north of his birthplace. It was a tough job, but the ideal place for an ambitious young man to forge a political career: workers (along with peasants) were the ideological bulwark of the Soviet state, and in the factories of the USSR they were ideally placed to take up jobs as Communist Party functionaries – the way to get ahead in life. ‘I was an ambitious young man and party membership was the route to advancement,’ Nazarbayev has recalled. To further his ambition he would have become a Buddhist if necessary, ‘but as it was I became a member of the Communist Party – and a good one’.3

In the 1960s, Nazarbayev combined his job in the steelworks with studying for a metallurgical engineering degree and working his way up the ranks of the Komsomol, the Communist Party’s youth wing, before leaving manual work behind to embrace a political career as a full-time apparatchik. Personable and politically savvy, Nazarbayev leapfrogged up the ranks: by 1984 he was chairman of the Council of Ministers of the K‌azakh Soviet Socialist Republic (the prime minister of Soviet Kazakhstan’s government, which had limited autonomy to administer the republic). From there, he ascended to the top job in his homeland: appointed in 1989 by the last Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, as first secretary of Kazakhstan’s Communist Party, then sliding smoothly into the role of Kazakhstan’s president when that new title was introduced in 1990.

Nazarbayev’s political star was still rising: the village-born ex-steelworker was tipped for a high-flying career in Moscow, but fate intervened to grant him a more precious prize: the USSR’s collapse in 1991 propelled him into the presidency of an independent Kazakhstan.

‘We found ourselves in unique conditions: a single body of the Soviet economy burst open and we ended up like a shard of a broken plate.’4 The comparison Nazarbayev later reached for reflects the shock many apparatchiks, as well as ordinary people, felt when the monolith of the USSR suddenly shattered into 15 countries after ruling Russia and its former tsarist colonies for 70 years. For the party bosses turned presidents, inheriting a nation state was a heady experience that opened up myriad opportunities – but it was also a poisoned chalice.

Like other countries emerging blinking from the rubble of the USSR, Kazakhstan woke up to independence to find itself going broke: the Moscow-controlled command economy was falling apart; factories and farms were grinding to a halt; jobs were disappearing; and an emboldened and impoverished population – used to living in a communist state that provided at least the basics to get by – was taking to the streets to protest. The first five years of independence were grim: the economy shrank by 9 per cent a year on average, hitting its nadir in 1994 when it slumped by 13 per cent and inflation hit a whopping 1,547 per cent.5

As he wrestled with the nosediving economy, Kazakhstan’s new president was also grappling with a national security dilemma: how to shape a nation state out of a land that sceptics doubted was viable as a country at all. Many Soviet republics had emerged from the melting pot of the USSR with large ethnic minorities – but Kazakhstan was the only one where the people whose name the country bore were outnumbered by other groups combined. Waves of immigration under the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union, including the forced deportations of entire peoples from other parts of the USSR to Kazakhstan under Stalin, had combined with demographic disasters that had decimated the indigenous population – notably a devastating famine in the 1930s – to push Kazakhs into a minority in their new country. Among its 125 or so ethnic groups lived a large, restive Russian minority left feeling angry and dispossessed by the collapse of their Soviet motherland, some harbouring dreams of splintering off to join Russia, so the demographic challenge raised the spectre of disintegration for the fragile new Kazakhstan. ‘We tumbled about and worked to ensure survival,’ Nazarbayev said of the tempestuous 1990s. Defying bleaker expectations, Kazakhstan ‘became a state’.6 ‌His stewardship of the country during these tough times won international plaudits from an early stage: in 1991 James Baker, the US Secretary of State, reportedly praised Nazarbayev privately ‘as an intelligent, careful leader who appreciates the depth of the Soviet crisis and the need for urgent but thoughtful change’.7

One lifesaver was oil. Kazakhstan was sitting on massive reserves, which would become key to getting the new country on its feet. Foreign energy companies were eager to flash their cash in this emerging market – and Kazakhstan was keen to suck it in. After bust came boom: investment poured in, and petrodollars began powering the economy into double-digit growth. It hit 14 per cent in 2000, and over the next decade the economy expanded by an average of 9 per cent a year.8

Oil has been a blessing for Kazakhstan in many ways, creating a feel-good factor that has kept Nazarbayev’s popularity ratings sky-high. Yet it can be a curse too. ‘Black gold’ has played a role in spawning the massive graft that blights Kazakhstan, typified in the ‘Kazakhgate’ scandal in which Nazarbayev was personally fingered by US prosecutors investigating kickbacks shelled out for oil contracts in Kazakhst...