The demonstrations and protests that have taken place in Kazakhstan since last Sunday are due to the exhaustion of a society subjected to the arbitrariness of a corrupt autocracy, backed unreservedly by Russia and China. The increase in liquefied gas priceo, the main source of energy in the country, has been the spark that has ignited in the street, especially in Almaty, the economic capital, and that has led the authorities of Nur-Sultan, formerly Astana, the political capital, to give a letter white to the forces of order to shoot to kill, as the Kazakh president has expressly been interested in recognizing, Kasim-Jomart Tokayev, little more than a puppet whose strings closely move the former president Nursultan Nazarbayev and, at a distance, Vladimir Putin.
If in Chinese support for the repression unleashed there is no other reason than to protect a close supplier of uranium and oil, in Russian matters above all the long-haul operation led by Vladimir Putin to rebuilding the political space that was once that of the Soviet Union. The resource mobilization of the Collective Security Treaty Organization, a military alliance of six former Soviet republics led by Russia, is nothing more than a simulation: the core of the deployment, what really matters, is the contingent dispatched by the Kremlin to the heart of Asia. The rest is mere wrapping.
It is enough to review the sequence of events since the annexation of Crimea by Russia in 2014 to see to what extent Russia’s management of the Kazakh crisis follows the same pattern as in previous ones: recovering areas of influence, even through low intensity warfare in Ukraine, of the use of Belarus or the stimulation of a new-minded Russian expansive nationalism. In Moscow’s reaction there is, moreover, a factor of use to underline its image of a superpower on the march to act where it understands that its national interests are in danger; in the use of no less than 70 planes to transport paratroopers there is an implicit claim to old greatness that vanished with the demise of the Soviet Union.
Probably in the Kazakhstan riots not everything is the result of spontaneity and the fatigue of citizens condemned to lead a precarious existence, but it is also more than evident that corruption and runaway authoritarianism they keep the Kazakh population far below the prosperity that the resources that their country’s subsoil treasures should provide them. At least, this has been for decades Nazarbayev’s speech and his insistence on claiming the deal because of the second economy of the Commonwealth of Independent States following Russia’s. Although finally the material progress has only been made effective in a segment of the population linked to the business of power and the rest has been nothing more than propaganda.
If to the shortcomings that have triggered the protest is added the failure to fulfill the promise of democracy that followed the dismantling of the USSR, the reasons for the frustration are even more understandable. Kazakhstan is a State run by a hegemonic party, lacking a political opposition capable of fighting in the institutions, which brings together many of the minimum ingredients necessary for the social crisis, with dozens of deaths in the streets, to be easily manipulated and become enraged, with the added risk of contagion a not particularly balanced and solid neighborhood.
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