Amid disaster, Kazakhstan’s chief selected his path: embrace Russia

Written by Valerie Hopkins
The embattled president of Kazakhstan has the pedigree of a world technocrat. The son of outstanding intellectuals, he studied in Moscow at a premier academy for diplomats and later labored within the Soviet Embassy in Beijing. He served as a key adviser to the strongman who dominated the oil-rich Central Asian nation as a fief for almost three a long time — after which, in 2019, turned his inheritor.
The rise of Kassym-Jomart Tokayev to the presidency was checked out as a potential mannequin by different authoritarian regimes on find out how to conduct a management transition with out shedding their grip on energy. Instead, Kazakhstan erupted in violence this week and Tokayev has overseen a ruthless crackdown on protesters whereas ousting his former benefactor, Nursultan Nazarbayev, 81, from his final foothold of authority, as head of the nation’s highly effective Security Council.
For assist, Tokayev has turned to a different autocrat: President Vladimir Putin of Russia.

It is just too quickly to know for sure whether or not Kazakhstan’s second of disaster shall be a victory for Putin, who shortly responded to Tokayev’s request for assist by sending troops as a part of a Russia-led effort to quell the rebellion. Moscow has a historical past of sending “peacekeeping” forces to nations that by no means depart. And Putin is intent on sustaining a sphere of Russian affect that features former Soviet republics comparable to Kazakhstan.

But analysts and specialists on Central Asia say that when his authorities was beneath siege and his place was teetering, Tokayev, 68, was neither highly effective nor impartial sufficient to go it alone. And his swift alignment with Moscow portends probably transformative modifications in a area that has seen fierce jockeying for affect among the many United States, Russia and China.

In impact, analysts mentioned, towards a backdrop of chaos and violence, Tokayev selected Russia to make sure his political survival.
Tokayev “traded his country’s sovereignty to Russia for his own power and the interests of kleptocratic elites,” mentioned Erica Marat, a professor at National Defense University, a army college in Washington.
This transfer “is really about making Kazakhstan a more submissive, more loyal partner,” she mentioned, including that Kazakhstan would “have to be more aligned with Russia against the West in geopolitical and global matters.”
In a menacing speech Friday, during which he warned that authorities safety forces may shoot to kill to suppress protests, Tokayev displayed deference to Putin, providing particular because of the Russian chief for offering help “very promptly and, most importantly, warmly, in a friendly way.” He once more expressed “special gratitude” to Russia in a cellphone name with Putin on Saturday, the Kremlin mentioned.
But the connection between the 2 leaders encompasses a important imbalance in stature: At a information convention final month in Moscow, Putin appeared unable to recollect Tokayev’s identify.

Tokayev took workplace, hand-picked by Nazarbayev, pledging to show the autocracy right into a “listening state” that was “overcoming the fear of alternative opinion.”
His transformation nearly three years later to a frontrunner promising this week to “fire without warning” on the protesters, is a drastic one, mentioned Luca Anceschi, a professor of Eurasian Studies on the University of Glasgow. “He has become a truly authoritarian leader, projecting power which he doesn’t really have,” Anceschi mentioned.
“If you have to rely on power from Russia, are you powerful?” he added.
When protests turned violent this week, Tokayev responded by dismissing his Cabinet and ousting Nazarbayev, who had retained nice affect because the “leader of the nation,” chair of the ruling Nur Otan occasion and head of the nation’s Security Council.
Tokayev additionally fired Nazarbayev’s key allies from outstanding roles within the nation’s huge safety equipment. Then pitched battles broke out.

The timing of the shift from the preliminary, peaceable protests within the nation’s West to the violence and looting in Almaty, Kazakhstan’s largest metropolis and financial middle — which intensified after Nazarbayev and his loyal head of the nation’s highly effective intelligence company, Karim Masimov, have been fired — has given rise to widespread hypothesis that the rioters have been organized by proxies for feuding factions of the political elite, pitting Nazarbayev and his allies towards Tokayev.
Into the safety vacuum, at Tokayev’s request, got here elite troops — largely Russian — from a Kremlin-sponsored alliance known as the Collective Security Treaty Organization, Russia’s model of NATO.
Internally, Tokayev’s resolution to welcome the troopers, tanks and airplanes from the alliance may additional erode public belief within the president.
Many working-class Kazakhs have lengthy been livid on the corruption that funnels the wealth from Central Asia’s greatest financial system to an elite few. Seeing a frontrunner who supported and benefited from that system, and now chooses to be propped up by Moscow as an alternative of listening to real grievances, will infuriate peculiar Kazakhstanis, Marat mentioned.
“People did not come on the streets to ask for Russian interference in their daily lives,” she mentioned.

For Putin, dispatching troops to Kazakhstan represents “a low-cost engagement with high returns,” Marat mentioned.
For a long time, Tokayev constructed a fame as an efficient technocrat adept at serving to Nazarbayev steadiness Kazakhstan’s international coverage between its more and more assertive neighbors, China and Russia, and its highly effective financial investor, the United States.
And for 28 years, he was successfully Nazarbayev’s understudy.
Since taking workplace, Tokayev has not needed to take care of actual political competitors. Under his management, there was a big crackdown on opposition events, human rights teams say. And real opposition figures are “consistently marginalized,” in keeping with the watchdog Freedom House, whereas “freedoms of speech and assembly remain restricted.”
But now, Tokayev has to take care of obvious rivals inside the highest echelons of presidency — a few of the folks closest to Nazarbayev, a number of analysts mentioned.
Days after the protests started on Jan. 2 over ballooning inflation and rising gasoline costs, Tokayev mentioned he would rescind the value will increase. But demonstrators had already begun demanding the tip of the kleptocratic political system that Nazarbayev had constructed and maintained because the nation declared independence from the Soviet Union in 1991.
By midweek, protesters have been shouting, “Shal ket!” — or “Old man out!” — in reference to Nazarbayev. But then Tokayev fired the previous president and the intelligence company chief, Masimov, together with Nazarbayev’s nephew, who was the company’s second in command.
Masimov was detained on suspicion of “high treason” Thursday, the company — referred to as the National Security Committee — mentioned in an announcement Saturday.
Rioters quickly broke into a minimum of one authorities weapons depot, the place they met little resistance, in keeping with native information experiences. They raced to take over authorities buildings and the airport in Almaty, the place many of the unrest came about. (Elsewhere within the nation, particularly the West, protests remained peaceable.)
Akezhan Kazhegeldin, who served as prime minister of Kazakhstan from 1994 to 1997 however resigned over considerations about corruption, mentioned it was probably that Tokayev decided that he had “lost control over the military and law enforcement bodies,” main him to dismiss Nazarbayev, Masimov and the federal government.

Kazhegeldin, who has been in exile for many years, mentioned he was nonetheless holding out hope that Tokayev, who served as his chief of Cabinet when he was prime minister, may flip issues round.
But he warned that it might be a mistake for Tokayev to proceed in search of assist from Russia, with whom Kazakhstan shares a 4,750-mile land border. Kazakhstan maintains shut relations with Russia, and is a member of the single-market Eurasian Economic Union. Putin, although, has at occasions performed down Kazakh independence, using messaging just like his latest statements on Ukraine.