PolyMatter: Why Kazakhstan is Changing Alphabets

 

UnHerd: How Kazakhstan’s multicultural dream turned sour

Kazakhstan has never witnessed ethnic violence on this scale before, but the turmoil evoked traumatic memories of intercommunal clashes in Kyrgyzstan in 2010 between Uzbeks and Kyrgyz which left hundreds dead. [...]

Nursultan Nazarbayev, the president who ruled Kazakhstan for three decades until his resignation last year, made ethnic harmony a pillar of the nation, partly to avoid antagonising his powerful neighbour Russia, always on the look-out for discrimination against Russians abroad (they are Kazakhstan’s largest ethnic minority, making up 40% of the population at independence and now just under 20%). [...]

Under Nazarbayev, ethnic tensions were a taboo topic. The government steadfastly denied any intercommunal element to such incidents, even flying in the face of evidence on the ground. This time, Tokayev, the president, initially dismissed the violence as a “group brawl”, before obliquely acknowledging an ethnic slant by condemning “criminals” acting under the guise of shouting “pseudo-patriotic slogans”.

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PolyMatter: Why Kazakhstan is Changing Alphabets

The Atlantic: An Aging Autocrat's Lesson for His Fellow Dictators

The most immediate ramifications of Kazakhstan’s experiment may be in Russia, where Vladimir Putin will need to decide on a path forward before 2024, when he finishes his second consecutive term as president, the maximum allowed by the constitution. According to Kendall-Taylor, Putin’s options are to choose a successor, amend the constitution, or abolish term limits altogether, like Chinese President Xi Jinping. Putin toyed with a division of power in 2008, when he and Dmitry Medvedev switched roles as prime minister and president. The key difference is that the upcoming decision may be Putin’s final play—the Russian leader will be in his 70s by the time his second term finishes. As two former Soviet countries with similar economies, comparable GDP per capita, and personalized political systems, Kazakhstan and Russia share a great deal, making the current transition an important test case for the Kremlin. [...]

Research done by Kendall-Taylor and Erica Frantz, an assistant politics professor at Michigan State University, found that the scenario in which regimes were most likely to survive was for dictators to die in office. The same data showed that when dictators, especially in personalized regimes like Kazakhstan and Russia, left office by other means, the regime had a high likelihood of collapse. Nazarbayev’s hybrid model, where he has created a new position that allows him to pull the levers of power from the sidelines, is tough to categorize, but it hints at an eventual settled outcome. “My assumption is that this will look more like a death in office in practice,” Kendall-Taylor said. [...]

Beyond protecting his family’s future role, Nazarbayev, 78, is also motivated by securing his own place in history. As Kazakhstan’s first leader since it gained independence in 1991, he has painted himself as the country’s founding father and has often spoken of Lee Kuan Yew, Singapore’s former prime minister who also stepped aside before his death, as a role model for a type of enlightened authoritarianism. While Kazakhstan remains distant from Singapore in nearly every key metric, cementing his legacy is clearly on his mind, Deirdre Tynan, a senior adviser at PACE Global Strategies and a longtime Central Asia watcher, told me: “Nazarbayev knows Kazakhstan must shake off its post-Soviet mantle, and the reputation of its neighbors, and have a succession process that is, at the very least, not embarrassing.”

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