Last Sunday, I wrote about a small protest in western Kazakhstan over the price of liquefied petroleum gas and argued that, if the demonstrations spread, the fuel price would probably turn out to be the trigger rather than the complete cause.
Seven days later, that distinction feels considerably less theoretical.
The government has already reversed the fuel-price increase. The protests did not stop. Instead, demonstrations spread across Kazakhstan, including to Almaty, the country’s largest city. Government buildings were attacked and set on fire, the airport was briefly seized, armed confrontations broke out, security forces opened fire, President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev dismissed his government and declared a state of emergency, and Russian-led troops entered Kazakhstan after Tokayev requested assistance from the Collective Security Treaty Organization.
The president has also ordered security forces to use lethal force against what he calls terrorists and bandits, saying they can “shoot to kill without warning”.
Whatever Kazakhstan was experiencing last Sunday, it is no longer principally a dispute about LPG prices.
The more interesting question is why a political system that appeared relatively stable for three decades could move from a local fuel protest to nationwide disorder so quickly.
Kazakhstan has often looked like one of the more stable states to emerge from the collapse of the Soviet Union. It avoided many of the civil wars and severe political crises experienced elsewhere in the former Soviet space. It accumulated substantial wealth from oil, gas, uranium and other natural resources. Foreign companies invested heavily. Nursultan Nazarbayev governed from independence until 2019, and when he resigned, Kassym-Jomart Tokayev succeeded him without a national political rupture.
From the outside, that continuity looked like stability.
This week makes me wonder whether we sometimes use the word stability to describe two very different things.
One kind of stability comes from institutions successfully processing disagreement. Citizens complain, opposition parties organise, governments lose elections, courts rule against politicians and policies change. The political system looks noisy because dissatisfaction is constantly becoming visible, but the institutions absorb it.
Another kind of stability comes from disagreement remaining largely invisible. Opposition is weak, protest is restricted, media is controlled or constrained, political elites remain unified and governments rarely change.
Both systems can look stable on an ordinary day.
They behave very differently during a crisis.
In the first system, political pressure is continuously released through institutions. In the second, pressure can accumulate without producing obvious political movement. The absence of visible opposition may therefore indicate public satisfaction, but it can also indicate that dissatisfaction lacks an effective mechanism through which to organise.
That makes authoritarian stability unusually difficult to measure.
An election gives us information even when the incumbent wins. Opposition parties reveal what different groups want. Independent media exposes grievances. Polling can measure dissatisfaction. Protests occur without necessarily threatening the entire political system.
Authoritarian governments possess less of this information—or at least outsiders do.
If citizens believe protesting is dangerous, the number of protesters before a crisis tells us relatively little about the number of dissatisfied citizens.
Silence becomes ambiguous.
It can mean consent.
It can also mean fear.
This creates an information problem for the government itself. Authoritarian rulers often appear to possess extraordinary amounts of information because they control security services and surveillance institutions. But political repression can simultaneously make truthful information harder to obtain.
Local officials have incentives to tell superiors that everything is under control. Bureaucrats may hide failures. Citizens may tell pollsters what they believe is safe. Political elites may conceal disagreements until they believe the leader is vulnerable.
The ruler can therefore become extremely powerful and surprisingly poorly informed at the same time.
That is one reason apparently stable authoritarian systems sometimes experience sudden crises. The political pressure was not necessarily created overnight. It became visible overnight.
Kazakhstan’s protests demonstrate this dynamic particularly well because the government rapidly conceded the original economic demand. Fuel-price caps were restored.
If the protests had been principally about LPG, that should have removed much of the reason to continue demonstrating.
It didn’t.
That suggests the fuel issue provided a coordination point around which broader grievances could accumulate. Protesters raised economic complaints, political demands and anger towards the political establishment that has dominated Kazakhstan since independence.
One slogan heard during the unrest was essentially “Old man, go away!”, referring to Nazarbayev.
That is striking because Nazarbayev has not formally been president for almost three years.
He did not need to be.
His continuing political influence demonstrates the distinction I wrote about last week between formal office and actual power. Nazarbayev retained leadership of the Security Council after leaving the presidency and continued to occupy an extraordinary symbolic position within Kazakhstan’s political system. His family and associates were widely perceived as deeply embedded within the country’s economic and political elite.
Then, on Wednesday, Tokayev removed Nazarbayev as head of the Security Council and assumed the position himself.
That decision may ultimately prove more politically important than the fuel-price concession.
The crisis is not simply challenging the government.
It may be changing the balance of power inside the regime.
This is another reason we should be careful describing authoritarian politics as government versus protesters. Authoritarian systems contain factions, institutions and competing elites just like democracies. Those disagreements are simply less visible.
A crisis can therefore operate simultaneously on two levels. Citizens challenge the state from below while political elites reposition themselves above.
Tokayev entered office in 2019 partly through a transition designed by Nazarbayev. He was widely perceived as the successor operating within a system Nazarbayev had constructed. By taking control of the Security Council during the crisis, Tokayev may be attempting to establish authority independent of his predecessor.
If so, the protests have created an opportunity as well as a threat.
This is an uncomfortable but important feature of political crises. Leaders do not merely respond to emergencies. They can use emergencies to alter institutional relationships that would otherwise be difficult to change.
That does not mean Tokayev created the crisis or wanted the unrest. There is no evidence necessary to make such a claim. It means political actors adapt strategically once a crisis exists.
The same event can weaken one part of a political system while strengthening another.
Tokayev’s request for CSTO assistance introduces a second major question: why did Kazakhstan’s government believe it needed foreign troops to restore domestic order?
The Collective Security Treaty Organization includes Russia, Kazakhstan, Belarus, Armenia, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan. It is sometimes loosely compared with NATO because it contains a collective-security commitment, although the organisations differ enormously in their structures and political roles.
This week, the CSTO deployed forces to Kazakhstan after Tokayev requested assistance, with Russia providing the largest contingent.
The official argument is that foreign-backed terrorists were involved in the unrest and that the CSTO deployment is helping protect strategically important facilities.
There have unquestionably been serious acts of violence. Government buildings were attacked. Weapons were seized. Security personnel and civilians have been killed.
But Tokayev’s description of the unrest almost entirely as a terrorist operation deserves scrutiny.
Governments facing large protests have strong incentives to change the category through which those protests are understood.
A protester has political grievances.
A rioter creates a public-order problem.
A terrorist creates a national-security threat.
Each label expands the range of government actions that appear legitimate.
If somebody is protesting peacefully, shooting them is obviously unacceptable.
If somebody is heavily armed and attacking civilians or security forces, the state’s right to use force is much stronger.
The difficulty is that large episodes of unrest can contain both kinds of people simultaneously.
A peaceful political movement can coexist with looting and armed violence. The existence of the second does not automatically erase the first.
This is why Tokayev’s order permitting forces to shoot to kill without warning is so concerning. States have a legitimate responsibility to restore order and protect people from armed violence. But the use of lethal force should depend on the threat presented by the individual, not simply on the government’s political classification of the wider movement.
Once every opponent becomes a terrorist, the distinction between security and repression begins to disappear.
The CSTO intervention also demonstrates how domestic political survival can become an international-relations issue extremely quickly. Russia has an obvious interest in preventing instability in Kazakhstan. The countries share a long border, deep economic connections and historical ties, and Kazakhstan is strategically important across Central Asia.
For Vladimir Putin, instability in another former Soviet republic also carries broader implications. Russia has repeatedly demonstrated that it considers political developments across the post-Soviet space strategically important, particularly when governments friendly to Moscow appear threatened.
But Kazakhstan is not simply a Russian satellite. It has historically attempted to maintain relationships with Russia, China, Western countries and other partners simultaneously. Its foreign policy has often been described as multi-vector, designed to prevent dependence on any single great power.
Inviting Russian-led troops into the country changes that balance, at least temporarily.
Foreign military assistance creates obligations and perceptions even when officially limited in duration.
If Russian forces help Tokayev’s government survive its most serious domestic crisis, Moscow gains political leverage simply because Tokayev knows what happened when he needed help.
This does not mean Russia now controls Kazakhstan.
It means dependence changes bargaining power.
The weaker actor does not need to surrender sovereignty formally for the stronger actor’s influence to increase.
This is a pattern that appears repeatedly in international relations. Belarus became more dependent on Russia as Alexander Lukashenko became increasingly isolated from Europe. Kazakhstan’s circumstances are very different, but the mechanism is worth watching.
External support can strengthen a government against domestic challengers while making that government more dependent on the external supporter.
Regime security and national autonomy can therefore move in opposite directions.
A leader may increase his personal ability to remain in power while reducing his country’s freedom of manoeuvre.
That distinction between regime interest and national interest is important. Governments frequently present the two as identical.
They aren’t always.
There is also China. Kazakhstan shares a border with China and occupies an important position in Beijing’s Belt and Road Initiative. China has enormous economic interests in Central Asia and also values political stability along its western frontier.
That means both Russia and China have strong reasons to prefer order in Kazakhstan, although Russia possesses much deeper security infrastructure in the region.
For Kazakhstan, balancing these relationships has historically provided room for manoeuvre.
The more dependent Tokayev becomes on one partner for immediate political survival, the harder that balancing strategy may become.
The economic grievances that began this crisis have not disappeared either.
Kazakhstan is resource-rich, but wealth is unevenly distributed. The country has experienced economic development, yet many citizens perceive enormous gaps between politically connected elites and ordinary households.
This is where the concept of a social contract becomes useful even in an authoritarian system.
Governments do not survive through coercion alone. Repression is expensive. Stable political systems usually offer citizens something in exchange for political compliance: economic growth, security, nationalism, public services, ideology or some combination of them.
Kazakhstan’s implicit bargain appears to have involved political continuity alongside relative economic stability and development.
If citizens begin believing that the economic side of that bargain is failing while political participation remains restricted, the system loses one of its important sources of legitimacy.
That does not mean everyone suddenly wants liberal democracy.
Political dissatisfaction is not automatically democratic ideology.
People can be angry about inequality, corruption or elite privilege without possessing a unified vision for what should replace the current system.
This matters because protest movements are frequently much better at expressing rejection than constructing alternatives.
Against the government can unite groups whose answers to what government instead? are completely different.
That fragmentation can make revolutions easier to begin than political transitions are to complete.
The Arab Spring demonstrated this repeatedly. Removing an authoritarian leader did not automatically produce agreement over institutions, ideology or distribution of power afterwards.
Kazakhstan is nowhere near that point as of tonight, and assuming regime collapse would be reckless. Tokayev remains president, security forces appear to be re-establishing control, CSTO troops are present and the government retains enormous coercive capacity.
But this week has still fundamentally changed our understanding of Kazakhstan.
A political system that appeared highly stable was capable of experiencing nationwide unrest within days.
That should make us reconsider what political stability actually means.
Perhaps stability should not be measured primarily by the absence of visible conflict.
A system in which nobody protests because everyone trusts the institutions and a system in which nobody protests because protest is dangerous can produce the same observable result on an ordinary Tuesday.
Zero protests.
The difference becomes visible during a shock.
Strong institutions absorb shocks.
Brittle institutions suppress pressure until the shock exceeds what they can absorb.
That distinction exists outside authoritarian politics too. Democracies can be brittle. Authoritarian governments can construct durable institutions. Regime type alone does not determine resilience.
But systems with fewer mechanisms for receiving negative feedback face a particular danger.
They can confuse silence with satisfaction.
The fuel-price increase was therefore useful information. It revealed a level of political frustration that Kazakhstan’s formal political system had not successfully processed.
The government’s response will now determine whether it learns from that information or simply suppresses the people who delivered it.
Lowering fuel prices addresses the trigger.
Economic reform might address some underlying grievances.
Reducing corruption and elite privilege could address others.
Creating more credible channels for political participation would address the institutional problem.
Repression can restore order more quickly than any of those things.
That is precisely why governments use it.
The danger is that repression changes behaviour without necessarily changing beliefs.
People return home.
The streets become quiet.
The government declares stability restored.
From the outside, Kazakhstan may eventually look much as it did two weeks ago.
That would not necessarily mean the political problem had been solved.
It might simply mean it had become invisible again.
Last Sunday I wrote that prices can reveal what people think their political system is worth.
This week revealed something else.
The absence of protest does not necessarily reveal what people think at all.
Sometimes it only reveals what they believe they are allowed to say.
