Central Asia’s time of choice
Thursday
6 January 2022
30 years on from the fall of the USSR, the former Soviet republics are experiencing another upheaval. After Kyrgyzstan in 2019 and the war between Armenia and Azerbaijan in 2020, Kazakhstan is, in turn, entering a turbulent period, as rising gas prices sparked riots in the west of the country. The government’s announcement of a price cap did little to calm the situation, as protests spread to the rest of the country and already left dozens dead, including among the police. On the night of 5-6 January, demonstrators stormed government buildings in the capital.
On President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev’s orders, and for the first time in its history, the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) — a military alliance created by the Kremlin in former Soviet states — sent ‘peacekeeping’ forces to help one of its own members. Armenia, Belarus, Tajikistan and, most of all, Russia are contributing to this coalition; it is not yet known whether Kyrgyzstan will join them.
The social unrest, catalysed by the economic and Covid-19 crises, should come as no surprise. In September 2020, Marlène Laruelle, a specialist in the former Soviet republics, noted that in Kazakhstan, a young and very unequal country, ‘Everyone [was already] conscious of the risk that a surge in the youth population [would] cause a collapse of the social and political order like the Arab Spring’.
