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Includes all relevant information on national elections and referendums held in Kazakhstan since 1990. Part I gives a comprehensive overview of Kazakhstan's political history, outlines the evolution of electoral provisions, and presents the current electoral legislation in a standardized manner (suffrage, elected institutions, nomination of candidates, electoral system, organizational context of elections). Part II includes exhaustive electoral statistics in systematic tables (numbers of registered voters, votes cast, the votes for candidates and/or parties in parliamentary and presidential elections and referendums at both the national and regional level, the electoral participation of political parties, the distribution of parliamentary seats, etc.).

After the implosion of the Soviet Union, democratization processes in all the post-Soviet republics took their specific paths. This chapter highlights the particular characteristics of these processes, focusing on three examples: Estonia, Moldova, and Kazakhstan. It demonstrates that the concept of trust has different meanings in the democratization processes in each of these republics, whether it refers to trust in political institutions, in inter-ethnic relations, or in interpersonal relations. All these meanings and kinds of trust have contributed to the stabilization of political systems in the post-Soviet republics and to coping successfully with the hard path of democratic transition. This chapter explores how to establish democratic systems and institutional trust in the post-Soviet republics and peacefully manage the demographic and cultural heterogeneity in building a democratic nation. Consequently, this involves the respect of minority rights that conform to the standards of the Helsinki agreements.

This chapter first sets out the book's purpose, namely to explore the role played by the Gulag in the Soviet polity. It provides a close study of the camps and exiles in the Karaganda region of Kazakhstan along with a general reconsideration of the scope, meaning, and function of the Gulag in Joseph Stalin's Soviet Union. Focusing on Karaganda offers a number of benefits to an examination of the history of the Gulag. First, a concentrated look at a single locality allows for a study of the massive phenomenon of the Gulag without giving up the chronological breadth that is important to understanding shifts in its operations through the period (approximately 1930–57) when it was at its height. Second, exploring the Gulag at the local level reveals the operation of the system at the very point of contact between Soviet authority and its detained subjects. The chapter then describes the sources upon which the book is based, followed by an overview of the subsequent chapters.

This introductory chapter provides an overview of Central Asia, after its five countries—Kazakhstan, the Kyrgyz Republic, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan—became independent with the dissolution of the Soviet Union on December 25, 1991. During the 1990s, the Central Asian countries focused on nation-building and transition to market-based economies, the nature of which varied from country to country. Indeed, the five governments adopted diverse economic strategies, from the most reformist, Kyrgyzstan, to the least reformist, Turkmenistan's personalized autocracy. Given the shared geography, history, and cultural background of the five countries, observers envisioned a natural experiment to test the efficacy of differing approaches to the transition from central planning and of the variety of market-based economic systems. However, completion of the essentials of transition by the turn of the century coincided with the start of a super-cycle in world prices for resources—most importantly oil—that dominated economic performance in the early twenty-first century.

This chapter discusses the national economy and transition strategies of Kazakhstan. Kazakhstan's national economic history divides sharply between 1991 and 1998, and the years since 1999. The first period, dominated by nation-building, saw traumatic economic adjustment to the shocks of the early 1990s and a large unanticipated decline in living standards. As the country started to recover from the economic nadir in 1997 it was hit by the 1998 Russian crisis, and only in 1999 did sustained economic growth begin. However, when growth did begin—stimulated by policy decisions such as a large currency devaluation and sustained by rising oil prices—Kazakhstan enjoyed a decade during which it was one of the fastest growing economies in the world. The chapter also considers the banking crisis in 2007–2008, whose impact was exacerbated by the collapse in the price of oil in the second half of 2008.

This chapter examines the impact of natural resources on transition reform in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan using the rapid reform model. Natural resource endowment was incorporated into the model to improve its explanatory power. It is shown that both countries delayed reform, and had higher levels of rent-seeking behaviour and corruption compared with resource-deficient countries in Eastern Europe and East Asia.

This chapter investigates the reform paths of four Central Asian Republics (CARs): Kazakhstan, the Kyrgyz Republic, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan. It analyses their reform strategies and identifies what kind of economic systems are emerging as a result of the differing reform paths in Central Asia.

Chapter 8 examines the deteriorating levels of corruption in Central Asia and explores how outside actors have contributed to some of these practices. The chapter overviews alleged corruption scandals involving large U.S. and Chinese oil deals in Kazakhstan, including the so-called “Giffen Affair,” and the fuel deals for the Manas base in Kyrgyzstan. These cases demonstrate how these attempts to buy influence are embedded within broader transnational networks involving local elites, private companies, external governments, and the offshore sector; these networks provide Central Asian rulers with private benefits, while allowing foreign governments and companies to maintain plausible deniability when allegations of corruption surface.

In July 1941 Moscow acknowledged a vested British interest in Poland. If Polish soldiers were not pressed into Soviet service or placed under Soviet political discipline, Moscow would feel the lack of Polish tools. The Polish Embassy threw a social security net across the USSR to catch tens of thousands of Poles who were released from camps and prisons in Siberia and Kazakhstan. The Anders army was indiscreet, anti-Soviet, and immune to political reorientation; the soldiers had been drawn back from a lost world, and they were difficult to intimidate; their Polish nonchalance was flourished under the noses of the NKVD. Stalin's attitude to the London Poles was at best ambiguous. The Polish Embassy was never allowed contact with Jewish citizens from eastern Poland, but the Russians sent a surprising number of Polish Jews to Polish army recruitment centres.

This chapter explains the Chinese and Russian interests in policy toward Central Asia. It reviews the various elements in Russian and Chinese relations with the countries of post-Soviet Central Asia (Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Turkmenistan). The chapter also explores the roles of China and Russia in the Shanghai Cooperation Organization and other regional groupings, and evaluates the implications of Chinese and Russian policies and activities in Central Asia for U.S. national interests. It starts by addressing the political and security issues, and then turns to the various forms of economic cooperation and rivalry in the region, particularly in energy. Finally, the chapter deals with the important role of diaspora politics and population issues for Russia, China, and Central Asia. In general, Russian and Chinese interests in Central Asia are closely aligned on political-security issues, and both countries are thoroughly pragmatic in their foreign policies toward the region.

This chapter discusses the lack of true democracy in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbekistan in order to set the stage for a presentation of the study's findings. In the mid-1980s the leadership in the republics of Central Asia was either quiescent in the face of looming changes within the Soviet Union or loyal to the central Soviet leadership and supportive of the Soviet federation's preservation. Ultimately, however, Central Asian governments backed democratization, and the leaders of these republics openly renounced their communist beliefs and affiliations. Western international organizations then launched development, democracy promotion, and security-related projects in these states. Although there were legitimate concerns about these republics' susceptibility to political instability and economic crises, there was also hope that these countries would undergo quick political reform, marketization, and transformation into liberal democratic states. But none of the Central Asian states has met these expectations. Today, Central Asian regimes sit along a continuum of autocracy rather than democracy, their power and authority firmly concentrated in the presidential office and maintained through a combination of repression, co-option, and political constraints on societal institutions.

This chapter begins with a discussion of international perspectives on democratization, premised on the assumption that the strategies of international actors determine the outcomes of democracy promotion abroad. It then offers a novel perspective on international democratization that relies on the concept of frames to discern the content of democracy promotion discourses. Specifically, this chapter looks at democracy promotion frames, which encompass a certain understanding of democracy, assumptions about why it is important, intended goals of democratization, and explanations of how to meet these democratic expectations. This chapter also outlines the various forms of research and analysis the author utilized for the study, including the process by which she examined texts produced by representatives of the US, EU, Russia, China, and the Central Asian governments, as well as her survey design.

This chapter examines alternative democracy promotion frames advocated by Russia and China through their foreign policies toward the Central Asian states, including through regional organizations such as the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO). By the early 2000s, Central Asia had become the prize in a geopolitical race for influence and control of its vast energy resources, with Russia and China being key competitors. They have not, however, promoted their views on governance as actively as the US and EU have. Neither Russia nor China has openly stated an ambition to impose its practices on other states. In their foreign policy statements and internal security documents, both Russia and China have affirmed their adherence to the principle of noninterference in the domestic affairs of other nations. This chapter outlines the competing ideas and strategies for political development and economic modernization proposed by Russia and China for Central Asia, as well as the attractive models they have presented for maintaining stability and generating prosperity in the region without meaningful democratization. Both powers have disbursed growing amounts of bilateral aid to the Central Asian governments for a mix of humanitarian, economic, and political aims.

This chapter explains how the leaders of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbekistan devised and actively disseminated their own rhetorical and ideological subsets of democracy, presented under the guises of “presidential democracy” in Kazakhstan, “consultative democracy” in Kyrgyzstan, and the “Uzbek model of democracy” in Uzbekistan. It discusses the essence of these local democratic varieties, as well as strategies used by these governments to defend their alternative models of democracy and different standards for assessing it. Although these models, which have delegitimized Western conceptions of democracy and efforts at international democratization, do have distinctive features, several characteristics are shared in all three nations. Similarities include a deep ethnic heritage, a strong state personified by a strong leader, the prioritization of security and economic development over political modernization, and the principle of gradual political reform. This chapter posits that, by defining what counts as democracy and democratization and linking these notions to history and culture, the Central Asian leaders not only reinforce their own understanding of their political rule but also foster knowledge of democracy and attitudes about democratization among the people targeted by national democracy frames.

This chapter explores beliefs, understandings, and attitudes toward various aspects of democracy and democratization among the Central Asian populations, discerned through a public opinion survey and focus group interviews carried out in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbekistan. It describes how the survey questions tapped into the respondents' understandings of democracy and their values, priorities in life, and attitudes toward various social and political institutions. The nature of the questions and the combinations of responses in the survey were informed by themes of alternative democracy promotion frames. The survey indirectly measured the respondents' political knowledge and consciousness by asking them to choose from among lists of values and priorities or to express their attitudes toward assumptions underlying various democracy promotion frames. Additionally, interpretive data collected from focus group discussions were used to elucidate quantitative results and add depth to the understanding of democracy embedded in the respondents' political knowledge.

In this chapter, alternative democracy promotion frames used by the US, EU, Russia, China, and the governments of the Central Asian states are assessed on several dimensions of effectiveness, including cultural compatibility, salience, consistency, and credibility. The effectiveness of the Central Asian governments' discursive frames is assessed against the beliefs, values, and dispositions of their own citizens, as determined by the survey instrument and focus groups. By looking at the limitations of the Western democracy promotion frames and the interest-based compatibility of ideas promoted by Russia and China, as well as by investigating the public resonance of national democracy frames, this chapter demonstrates that the alternative models for governance promoted by Russia and China enjoy greater support in Central Asia—just as the Central Asian governments' own models of democracy resonate strongly with their respective populations.