(I’m interrupting an ongoing series I am working on to highlight a current event you may have read about recently in the news. I don’t want to do this often; I’m not a journalist, and I don’t have much interest discussing current political conflicts. However, this news piece highlights an ongoing struggle that I’m trying to grapple with in this newsletter—namely, a question of identity and what it really means for someone to be Central Asian. I’ll get back to my series in the coming weeks.)
I lived in Kazakhstan for eighteen years. My first home was in a Khrushchyovka apartment building, five stories tall, gray as smoke from nearby smokestack factories. My first playground was made from Soviet metal. My first memories involve walking through streets, seeing rows upon rows of hazy-colored homes, and pushing little boats made of newspaper along concrete drainage canals near the sidewalk.
This was the space I grew up in, and, for whatever reason, I grew up learning to pay attention to changes in its landscape. Those changes were sometimes hard to detect; in many ways, the cities in Kazakhstan look the same as they did twenty or thirty years ago. It’s still impossible to find a city in Kazakhstan without a Soviet style apartment block. You can still find Ladas on the road. The old parks and the playgrounds have not changed, except for the addition of more rust. The imprint of the Soviet Union has not left the region.
But while the old has not disappeared, plenty has been added. At first, we saw it in the restaurants and shops. Fast food chains began to show up—initially called things like “Rostyk’s” and “King Burger,” then replaced with “KFC” and “Burger King.” Then malls were added, and the trend spread like wildfire. It’s easy now to find business centers made of glass and coffee shops like Starbucks on every block.
Billboards lining the sides of apartments used to be all in Russian. Then, digital signs were added, and stores and companies from Russia and the West brought their advertisements to every street. Other signs are now in Kazakh; and more and more, that Kazakh is being written in Latin script rather than traditional Cyrillic.
The names of places have changed as well. In 1997, the country’s President, Nursultan Nazarbayev, decided to move the capital from Almaty to a small village called “Akmola”—“White Tomb” in Kazakh. The name was changed to “Astana,” meaning “capital.” In 2019, in honor of the first President, the city name was changed to “Nur-Sultan.”
A few months ago I was talking with a friend who lives in Nur-Sultan. “Everyone still calls it Astana,” he told me.
. . .
Last week, Kazakhstan made the front page of BBC, CNN, the New York Times, and plenty of other websites, as protests over the price of liquid petroleum gas spiraled into the worst riots Kazakhstan had seen since the origin of the nation.
As a general rule, Kazakhstan is not the kind of country that makes the news. And, to be honest, that may be a good thing; it’s not often that the news has anything good to say when a country makes headlines. When it comes to news, the pattern seems to be that countries doing poorly are the ones highlighted, while countries that are stable are often ignored. And so, in Kazakhstan, years of economic and political stability have frankly left it a pretty boring country to report on.
So what does it mean, then, when a country that has not had a profile on the news for decades suddenly makes headlines on several global news outlets? For one, it means that something has changed—or, that changes have been happening, and we in the West just haven’t been around to see them. Stability is never something lost overnight.
. . .
The reality is (and many news sites have examined this point well), these protests haven’t entirely been about liquid petroleum gas.
Sure, it’s reasonable to assume that doubling the price of fuel will spark outrage in a country. But when we read headlines saying that protesters are burning the Mayor’s office and the President’s residence, that a fire-without-warning order has been issued, and that statues of the former President are being torn down, we get the sense that there’s more gravity to this situation than initially assumed. The problem can’t be just a high price tag.
I’m not going to make the claim that I understand the depth of this issue—I highly doubt anyone outside of Kazakhstan (and possibly even Kazakh citizens themselves) are fully aware of why events have unfolded the way they have. But what I do want to suggest is that these protests are indicative of a deeper struggle, one that has to do with this young nation’s identity and their movement forward in this world as an independent state.
Kazakhstan, like other Central Asian nations, is a place constantly grappling with its own identity. You can see this in things like changing the name of the capital, or switching from the Cyrillic alphabet to the Latin one. Kazakhstan is only thirty years old; it’s still trying to figure out what kind of country it wants to become. And as a result, changes are always happening in the region, even if they are hidden from our view.
But what happens when changes start happening in opposite directions? When one portion of the country wants to go one way, and the other portion wants to go another?
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Most people might not realize it, but Kazakhstan changing its capital to “Nur-Sultan” and changing its alphabet to Latin are actually steps away from one another. To many, the act of changing to the Latin alphabet indicates a step away from its Russian-dominated background, an attempt to distance itself from the cultural influence of imperial Russia and the Soviet Union.
On the other hand, Nursultan Nazarbayev is often seen as a representation of the old Soviet system found in Kazakhstan for nearly a century. Before the collapse of the USSR in 1991, Nazarbayev was the Kazakh SSR’s highest elected leader for years. For nearly thirty years Nazarbayev held leadership over the country, echoing the authoritarian system found in the Soviet era. A name change in honor of this leader indicates to some an attempt to honor that portion of the past and to continue aligning closer to Russia.
The push both towards the past and away from the past can be seen in the protests last week. As many sources have mentioned, protesters are calling on the Kazakh government to distance itself from Russia’s style of government, calling on reforms towards greater democracy. The President, on the other hand, responded to the protests by both firing Nazarbayev from his newer role as a security commander and immediately calling on Russia for help. A change towards something new, countered by a return to the old, and a tug between these changes leads to a particularly Central Asian identity crisis.
I can’t say much more other than this: these are simply the growing pains of a nation still learning what it wants to become. Some citizens are wanting change to go one direction; others want it to go another way. When these desires for change act against one another, it only takes a spark (like a change in fuel prices) for conflict to erupt.
My hope and prayer is that Kazakhstan will work through these growing pains in a way that leaves it stronger rather than weaker, more resilient than rigid, finding itself mature in a world of instability. The identity crisis will end eventually, for better or for worse, depending on what Kazakhstan does in the coming months and years. I don’t know what kind of identity Kazakhstan will establish for itself, but I certainly hope it will continue changing in ways that keep it out of the news.