Spotlight on Kazakhstan, a Central Asian giant and energy powerhouse of unprecedented protests due to the rise in energy prices, opening a scenario of crisis and uncertainty followed with the utmost attention by its partners, Russia in the first place. Kazakhstan is the largest of the nations born from the ashes of the Soviet Union – excluding Russia – the last to have declared independence since its dissolution on December 16, 1991.
It is located in Central Asia but the westernmost part, beyond the Ural River, is geographically part of Europe. Its truly remarkable extension makes it the ninth country in the world in size, more than 2.7 million km2, as well as being the largest country in the world without access to the sea as the Caspian Sea is considered a lake. To the north and west it borders with Russia, to the east with China, to the south with Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan.
Historically inhabited by nomadic groups and empires – in succession Scythians, peoples of the Achaemenid Persian Empire, Turks, Mongols from the Empire of Genghis Khan, Kazakhs and Russians – Kazakhstan is still today a mosaic of ethnic groups, with a Muslim majority – 70.4 %, mostly summed up – but with a Russian subsidiary. 24.8% of its approximately 18.7 million inhabitants are Christian, mostly Orthodox.
Its history of the last 30 years is closely linked to that of its former president, the “father of the nation”, Nursultan Nazarbayev, who even gave his name to the capital, formerly Astana until 2019. Authoritarian modernizer, he guaranteed to the country, peace and stability between the different ethnic groups as well as transformed into an energy power. Kazakhstan possesses immense mineral resources – 60% of those of the former Soviet Union – including iron (Kustanaj basin, North-West), coal (Karaganda and Ekibastuz), petroleum, methane and various metals used in electronics, nuclear engineering and rockets. Resources that make it the leading economy in Central Asia, as well as the most important oil producer and exporter within the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS).
The country is also home to 20% of the cultivated land of the former USSR, which is an immense field of wheat capable of producing a third of the total of the former Soviet bloc. In the cultivated areas of the South, fruit, vegetables, tobacco, rice, hemp and cotton grow while the drier areas of its vast steppe are used for the seasonal grazing of sheep, cows, horses and camels. Finally, opium plantations – legal until 1991 – are present in various parts of Kazakhstan, previously destined for the production of opiate medicines, in addition to those of cannabis, especially in the Central-Southern State (on paper, the government program against drug trafficking is started in 1993, not without implementation difficulties).
The former president Nazarbayev was also able to maintain an enviable geopolitical and strategic balance: on the one hand the alliance with Vladimir Putin’s Russia, on the other the continuous mediation, including economic, with China, and this without ever losing view dialogue with the West. A line of foreign policy that has allowed Kazakhstan to be the host country for the negotiations on the Ukrainian crisis, those on Iran and for the international talks on Syria. The emblem of sustained economic growth driven by the rich energy sector – at least until 2014 – is the state capital Astana, transformed from a sleepy provincial town into a glittering metropolis with ultramodern buildings designed by world-renowned architects.
Today the renamed capital Nur-Sultan is the symbol of a power that promises to go well beyond the new millennium, despite the recent popular protests symptomatic of the growing socio-economic discontent starting in 2019. Managed with authoritarianism, the presidential republic of Kazakhstan, a one-party state – the Nur Otan, of which Nazarbayev is the leader – in which frequency the population is openly critical of the regime.
Kazakh women took to the streets two years ago, demonstrating in favor of greater support for families and better housing conditions. Direct consequence of an economic growth that has suffered numerous setbacks in recent years, the result of the collapse of the oil price in 2014. As already happened in 2019, it is now the government of President Kassym Jomart Tokayev that is accused of inability to improve living standards and failing to make the country a little more independent from oil and gas.