45tions,” he said, adding: “There are no politically active organisations representing
the Russian diaspora and it is in Russia’s interests that Kazakh President Nursultan
Nazarbayev’s stable rule continues.”
The people factorSince the 1990s ethnic Russian organisations and movements have either died
out or, like the Lad movement, have been incorporated into the official Assem-
bly of Kazakhstan’s People (a body made up of ethnic minority organisations that
promotes interethnic harmony and accord in multicultural Kazakhstan.) Repeated
attempts to speak to Lad’s North Kazakhstan regional branch on Russian senti-
ments in the region have yielded no result, but led to a phone call from a police
top brass who showed interest in New Eastern Europe’s reporting from the region.
At the same time, the “stable rule” of Nazarbayev, who has governed Kazakhstan
with an iron fist since he was first appointed as the country’s communist leader by
the Soviets in 1989, raises the question of what will happen in Kazakhstan after the
veteran president’s eventual departure. Russia’s seizure of Crimea and meddling
in eastern Ukraine has opened up a discussion about Astana’s relations with Mos-
cow. As a result, prominent public figures have called for the Kazakh government
to rethink its position on integration with an increasingly assertive Russia. Former
Senator Gani Kasymov urged the government to revise its relations with Moscow
in order not to jeopardise its relations with western countries. “Today our rela-
tions with Russia bear the nature of a strategic partnership, and from this point of
view we ended up on the same side of the barricades,” Kasymov said at the time.
“We should not lose our established positions in the world [because of Russia].”
In August 2014, under pressure to reconsider the relationship with Russia, Naz-
arbayev suggested that Kazakhstan would exercise the right to leave the Eurasian
Economic Union if it felt threatened and the free-trade bloc became increasingly
political. Russian President Vladimir Putin issued a thinly-veiled rebuke, praising
Nazarbayev as a “unique man” and “very wise and experienced leader” who “has
done a unique thing – he has created a state on a territory that had never had one.”
In Kazakhstan some interpreted Putin’s comments as a threat to its statehood,
should an administration that would replace Nazarbayev in the future change its
geopolitical alignment away from the Kremlin. If Putin does decide to carry out
a Crimean-like scenario or a project similar to the one the Kremlin is trying to
implement in Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region and “little green men” appear in
Kazakh towns, some residents of Petropavlovsk have not ruled out that certain
locals might support them.
The crawling threat of the Crimea scenario, Naubet Bisenov Opinion & Analysis