Now Kazakhstan, another rebellion against totalitarianism
Kazakhstan has been under the rule of Nursultan Nazarbayev for thirty years, who took power in the last republic to declare independence when the USSR collapsed in 1991. When Nazarbayev relinquishes power in 2019, he will nevertheless retain his influence and ability to pull strings behind the scenes. To make sure that Kazakhs do not forget that he is still around, he had the country's new capital, Nursultan, named after him, which was built entirely during his long reign and is a showcase for the opulence of an oil and gas-rich country.
His successor, President Kassym Khomarty Tokayev, is not regarded with the same reverence and respect by Kazakhstan's barely 18 million inhabitants, so that protests have taken place, particularly in the Mangystau region. The intensity of the protests has increased as fuel, transport and food prices have gradually reduced the ability of the vast majority of the population to make ends meet.
Like the protests in Belarus under dictator Alexander Lukashenko, Kazakhstan has moved from protests against rising prices to more political demands for freedom and democracy. Hundreds of arrests were made during the demonstrations earlier this week and, for the first time, the clashes were so violent that 95 police officers were injured.
To defuse the pressure, the President dismissed (accepted the resignation, according to the official statement) his Prime Minister, Askar Mamin, and all his ministers. He temporarily appointed Alijan Smailov to calm the situation, declaring a state of emergency throughout the country, with a corresponding night-time curfew.
Although Kazakhstan is formally a democracy, the successive electoral victories of the former president, the existence of severe de facto censorship and the violence of the repression are giving rise to a radical opposition, which is demanding the resignation of the president and his entourage and advocating the storming and seizure of the buildings housing the country's main institutions. President Tokayev has already warned them that they could be considered foreign agents and that they should refrain from continuing their "criminal acts" as they would be severely punished.
Over the past 30 years, Kazakhstan has become the major economic powerhouse of Central Asia, so much so that many multinational companies from around the world, including Spain, have done significant business there. With sustained growth of more than 10% per year, Kazakhstan has far outpaced the other Turkmen republics in Asia: Azerbaijan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan.
The economic crisis in Russia, its main economic and trading partner, and the fall in oil prices have led to a sharp rise in consumer prices, high inflation and a consequent devaluation of the local currency, the tenge.
Despite the country's vastness (2.8 million km2 ) and small population, the protest movement that started in the city of Janaozen in the Mangystau region quickly spread to Almaty, the former capital and main economic centre, and to Aktau, the main city on the Caspian Sea.
Along with the Baltic States, which he considers irredentist, Ukraine and Belarus, Kazakhstan is one of the jewels of the defunct Russian empire, which Vladimir Putin would like to resurrect. A jewel in which the Soviet Union carried out most of its nuclear tests in the open, leaving enormous and serious consequences for the territory and the Kazakh population that suffered them.