16 The Economist January 15th 2022
BriefingCentral Asia
T
he revolution, if that is what it was,
was as brief as it was bloody, leaving at
least 164 civilians, including children, and
16 police dead. Peaceful protests against a
rise in fuel prices began early this month in
Zhanaozen, a depressed town in Kazakh
stan’s western oil region. Within days they
had spread to neighbouring towns. Next,
the spark raced eastward across the vast
steppe to Almaty, Kazakhstan’s commer
cial hub, and even to the tightly policed
capital, NurSultan. Along the way costof
living grievances morphed into demands
for political change. And then, suddenly,
violence: a statue of Nursultan Nazar
bayev, the 81yearold “father” of the na
tion, after whom the capital is named, was
pulled down. Almaty’s city hall (pictured)
was torched. A mob stormed the airport.
With some of the security forces dead
and his own position as Mr Nazarbayev’s
handpicked successor apparently at risk,
President KassymZhomart Tokayev went
on the offensive. He declared a state of
emergency and an “antiterrorism” opera
tion against “bandits” seeking to overthrow the state. He ordered the security
forces to shoot troublemakers on sight.
Most dramatically, he asked for help from
the Russianled Collective Security Treaty
Organisation (csto), a military alliance of
six postSoviet states. Vladimir Putin, Rus
sia’s president, lost no time dispatching
paratroopers and armoured vehicles by air
to guard crucial sites.
It seemed to turn a murky tide in Mr To
kayev’s favour. On January 11th the presi
dent delivered a speech whose emollience
stood in stark contrast to his ironfisted
pronouncements of a few days earlier. He
acknowledged economic grievances, criti
cised the wealth accumulated by a few
wellconnected families and even prom
ised political changes in a system that has
been run as a mostly oppositionless auto
cracy since Kazakhstan emerged as a state
out of the ruins of the Soviet Union. As The
Economist went to press, a phased with
drawal of Mr Putin’s troops had begun.
Mr Tokayev, pastyfaced and with tinted
glasses, is a diplomat by training, an appa
ratchik’s apparatchik. Only a week ago helooked out of his depth, his future precari
ous. Now, he exudes composure, even con
fidence. In police cells around the country,
some 10,000 face charges (and beatings)
over the unrest, many of them probably in
nocent bystanders swept up in events.
Within government the president has
emerged with a firmer grip on power. He
has sacked the prime minister, Askar Ma
min, replacing him with a malleable tech
nocrat, Alikhan Smailov. As for the power
ful security chief, Karim Masimov, who
like Mr Mamin (and indeed the president
himself ) is a Nazarbayev protégé, Mr To
kayev has not only sacked him but had him
charged with treason. Animosity is said to
have grown between the president and the
security chief since it emerged last year
that Mr Tokayev’s phone had been hacked.
Perhaps most dramatically of all to fol
lowers of Kazakhstan’s politics, Mr Nazar
bayev’s influence in the state that he erect
ed seems to have been severely curbed. He
is gone from his position as chiefforlife
of the allpowerful security council, from
where he was assumed to be Mr Tokayev’s
puppetmaster. Now the puppet appears to
have cut the strings. Neither Mr Nazar
bayev nor his family, despite their still
prominent role in business and politics,
have been seen since the unrest began.
So is that the end of the story? Almost
certainly not. A welter of questions and
contradictions emerge from the events and
the official explanations of them.
That protests erupted in Zhanaozen isA LMATY AND NUR-SULTAN
Kazakhstan’s bloody turbulence will affect all of Central AsiaSteppe in the dark