By: Bodhi Ghoge
A peaceful protest over recently increased petrol prices turned revolt in the country’s largest city, Almaty, ended with the city hall ablaze, the glow of the flames, devouring, shining through its windows, lighting the city in a faint amber incandesce. The revolution, if that is what it was, was as brief as it was bloody, leaving 225 civilians, including children, and 16 police dead.
What led to the protests?
When the government lifted price caps for liquefied petroleum gas — frequently referred to by its initials, L.P.G. — a low-carbon fuel that many Kazakhs use to power their cars, anger spread across the nation. However, the protests have more deep-seated roots, including anger at social and economic disparities, aggravated by a raging pandemic, as well the lack of ‘real democracy’. The average salary in Kazakhstan is the equivalent of $570 a month, according to the government’s statistics, but many people earn far less. These protests first began in Zhanaozen, a town in Kazakhstan’s western oil region Within days they had spread to neighbouring towns. Next, the spark raced eastward across the vast steppe to Almaty, Kazakhstan’s commercial hub, and even to the tightly policed capital, Nur-Sultan. Along the way cost-of-living grievances morphed into demands for political change. And then, suddenly, violence: a statue of Nursultan Nazarbayev, the 81-year-old “father” of the nation, after whom the capital is named, was pulled down. Almaty’s city hall (pictured) was torched. A mob stormed the airport.
The Strongman’s Dilemma
Autocrats like Mr. Nazarbayev who stand alone at the top, as opposed to those who rule on behalf of a larger party apparatus, face a tricky challenge.
They must strike a balance between all of their country’s internal factions, ruling elites, security services and military brass, guaranteeing each enough power and spoils to keep them bought in, but without letting any grow powerful enough to challenge them.
As a result, strongmen-led dictatorships tend to be more repressive and more corrupt. And their leaders frequently obsess over potential rivals, whether a regional leader who grows too popular or a security agency with too much autonomy.
In his 29 years of rule, Mr. Nazarbayev was, like many such leaders, notorious for shuffling his government, promoting and demoting deputies to keep them off balance.
But stifling rising stars, hollowing out power centres and stuffing institutions with loyalists (often chosen because they are too weak to pose a threat) leaves the government barely able to stand on its own. And it creates what some scholars call the strongman’s dilemma: how to set up a successor without creating a rival, and how to leave a government able to outlast the leader without making themselves redundant and vulnerable.
Some try to solve this by grooming family members. Two of the rare successes followed this model: Azerbaijan and Syria, where dying autocrats passed power to their sons.
Still, children often prove unable to win the necessary support, inviting challengers to try to take power themselves. North Korea is the only modern non-monarchy to have reached a third generation of family autocratic rule.
Appointing flunkies or other easily controlled subordinates creates a similar problem.
But staying in office indefinitely is a little better. As the leader’s health inevitably falters, rivals or even allies may be tempted to grab for power before someone else can take it first. Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe was 93 and visibly declining when he was deposed in a coup.
This is why despots tend to hide from public view when they have health problems, to avoid any appearance of frailty that might set off a race to replace them. It’s also why the disappearance of a dictator tends to produce panicked rumours as citizens fear the consequences of a power vacuum.
When strongman rule works, the leader is the keystone holding it all together. But any keystone is also the point of greatest weakness. If it falls away, the whole thing collapses. Which is precisely what often happens. “The moment of transfer has almost always been a moment of crisis,” the scholar Andrew Nathan has written, “involving purges or arrests, factionalism, sometimes violence, and opening the door to the chaotic intrusion into the political process of the masses or the military.”
This dilemma has especially hung over the former Soviet world, where autocrats have held on two or three times the average strongman’s tenure, which is about a decade.
But longer rule means a longer fall, for the leader and their country, once they inevitably depart.
This has heightened the stakes, with many post-Soviet leaders extending term limits. Vladimir V. Putin of Russia recently pushed his to 2036, when he will be 83.
With every passing year, it becomes harder for autocrats to hand off power, while the risks rise of disaster if a crisis should force them out.
“The odds of regime survival are very dim if the leader’s departure was forced,” said Erica Frantz, a Michigan State University scholar of authoritarianism.
This is much more than a problem for strongmen. Such leaders are increasingly common worldwide, a point of convergence for both calcifying dictatorships and backsliding democracies. At least two sit in the heart of Europe. Some experts consider China, where Xi Jinping is building a cult of personality and has paved the way for lifelong rule, to now qualify.
And the more of the world comes under this style of rule, the more millions of people are exposed to the dangers of a catastrophically failed succession.
Mr. Nazarbayev had seemingly addressed this problem by stepping halfway out of power as a loyalist nominally took over. In theory, he was to be just present enough to keep the system together, but absent enough to allow it to coalesce around a new order.
But even in such rare cases where it looks like a transition has worked, Dr. Frantz said she has found in her research, the new government tends to collapse within an average of about five years.
“Their successors often face serious challenges in governance,” she said, citing Venezuela, where President Nicolás Maduro has faced ever-mounting crises since taking over from Hugo Chávez in 2013.
Kazakhstan now looks like an example of this, too. It casts doubt on Mr. Nazarbayev’s supposed solution and suggests that the problem of strongman succession may be, on some level, irresolvable.
Until recently, Mr. Tokayev, the current president of Kazakhstan, had sought to promote a somewhat softer image than his predecessor and mentor. But his latest language and actions suggest a strongman desperate to cling to power in a country that has descended into chaos.
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