Shaped in the crucible of central Asia, Kazakhstan, the largest landlocked country in the world, remains for most foreigners a huge void on the map, somewhere between Russia and China. With a surface area five times the size of France, it has long sailed along with history and the great empires.
From Alexander to Genghis Khan, from the Russian conquest in the 19th century to the integration into the Soviet Union, it has hardly known a period as a nation state, as Vladimir Putin liked to point out perfunctorily in August 2014, a few months after the annexation of Crimea: “The Kazakhs have never had a state,” suggesting that their only way out was to be integrated into the great Russian entity. A notable exception: the autonomy of Alash, from 1917 to 1920, a liberal-nationalist political breathing space between the Tsarist and Soviet authoritarian eras, on a territory roughly corresponding to that of the present republic.
In the fallow ideological space created by the break-up of the Soviet Union in 1991, of which ironically it was the last member for four days, Kazakhstan had to construct an alternative discourse of national cohesion, an attempt to define itself in the eyes of the world, but also to claim a distant glorious past, in order to remain definitively master of its destiny.
This is a complicated challenge, since its territory was an open-air laboratory for the industrial, atomic, agricultural, political and social experiments of the Soviet Union, traumatic experiments whose after-effects are still felt in the national psyche. This was an immense challenge for a country whose intellectual elite was strangled by the Stalinist purges and whose communal balance of power in the Soviet Union favoured Slavic groups and Russian speakers.
At independence, Kazakhs were in the minority in their own homeland. In order to change the demographic balance, a repatriation programme over 25 years (from 1991 to 2015) brought the return of more than 1 million people – about 5% of a population of more than 19 million inhabitants. Most of the exiles were descendants of those who fled the USSR in the 1920s and 1930s to escape repression, forced collectivisation and famine.
For the 51% of the population born after independence on 16 December 1991, Ninety One is more likely to remind them of of the Q-pop group than the year of independence, although one is named after the other. Since then, contemporary Kazakhstan has been going its own way, incognito, far from the eyes of the west, despite the international fame of the film Borat. It reinvents itself. Connected to the world, trying to forge a modern and hi-tech identity, carrying from its Soviet past an industrial glory, and from its nomadic origins a rural nostalgia.
Oralman are descendants of Kazakhs who fled the Soviet regime from 1920 onwards, Kazakhs in the ethnic sense of the word and mostly living in other central Asian states. Zukhra Mukanova and her daughters moved from Uzbekistan to Kazakhstan in 2010. Although she has a residence permit, she has started the process of obtaining citizenship so that her daughters will automatically become Kazakhstani. Aizhan Mukanova, pictured above wearing an orange scarf with her daughter resting on her legs, said: “Sometimes my child gets sick, and I couldn’t go to the doctor. When she was born, we went to Shymkent to do an MRT, all newborns have to do it once every two to three months, but we can’t do it in the public hospital because of a lack of papers. We have to use private doctors.”
The country built its new capital in the middle of the steppe to prevent the dreaded expansionism of the Russian big brother, and to give new life to the atrophied Aral Sea. A society whose soul is symbolised by kokpar, an ancestral equestrian sport, and whose cultural virtues include opera and ballet. A nation, the cradle of apples, whose subsoil contains 99 periodic elements. An immensity irrigated by the memory of itinerant times and whose umbilical cord remains the train, an artefact if ever there was one of sedentary life. A space whose cardinal points are unknown to each other, while in Almaty, the cultural capital, activists and young protesters electrify the gatherings and nights.
Formerly the headquarters of the central committee of the Communist party, inaugurated in 1980, the huge Akimat dominates the city from its elevated position, overlooked by the Ile-Alatau mountains. Its rapid reconstruction is a priority to prove the return of control by the government and the return to normality.
The name of the country in -stan, so pejorative to Elbasy (Father of the Nation) Nursultan Nazarbayev, that he suggested calling it Kazakh Yeli (Country of the Kazakhs) in 2014. Since 1991, more than 30 years passed largely under his rule. First secretary of the Kazakh Communist party in 1989, he retained the leadership of the country after the fall of the USSR, where no election was ever recognised as free and independent by international observers. He finally handed over the presidency in 2019 to a loyalist, Kassym-Jomart Tokayev, in a departure that was more formal than real, since he retained a major influence
The subtle mixture of geopolitical invisibility, relative prosperity paid for at the price of a policed authoritarianism and immobile evolution in which Kazakhstan bathed was pulverised last January during disturbances that were as brief as they were bloody. The official death toll of at least 227, including 19 members of the security services, hardly bears witness to the trauma in Kazakh society.
The end of an era? In any case, that of the Nazarbayev dynasty. A new chapter? On 16 March 2022, President Tokayev promised extensive political reforms and constitutional changes to move from a “super-presidential” regime to a presidential republic with a “presidential” structure.