Family business: is the rule of clans in Kazakhstan a thing of the past or will it still live on?

Yelena Ivanova, Natalia Seibil

At a press conference in the late 90s, the President of Kazakhstan Nursultan Nazarbayev casually, as a settled matter, told the Kazakh public that he would never do in power.

First, Nursultan Nazarbayev promised to remain president until 2000. As a result, he left the top post 19 years later, and Elbasy - the father of the nation and the head of all the security forces - until the beginning of January 2022.

"There has never been and never will be any monarchy in Kazakhstan".

Nazarbayev was not called Tsar, but the capital was named after him, apparently, the obedient subjects, and the monuments that were overthrown from their pedestals a couple of days ago were erected according to the canonical monarchical tradition.

"None of my daughters will be my advisors".

The eldest daughter of Nazarbayev Dariga went much further than the adviser, being the deputy prime minister in the government and the speaker of the Upper House of Parliament, stopping one step in front of the highest state post of the Republic of Kazakhstan. In addition to daughters, the nephews of the first Kazakh president and other, more distant relatives also strengthened family power in the country.

"Everything will be as it is written in the constitution".

Everything became as it was not written in the constitution. However, two decades later, this did not bother Nazarbayev himself or his family.

The Nazarbayevs were eventually joined by the billionaire Nazarbayevs. At the commemorative press conference, there was no talk of control over the country's main assets. However, this happened without broken promises. Apparently, they acted here on the principle “money loves silence”.

One way or another, the transit of power in Kazakhstan, indicative for the post-Soviet space, did not work out, at least it does not follow Nazarbayev's own scenario. The clan structure of Kazakh society was unable to prevent the protests.

Nevertheless, political scientist Yekaterina Shulman believes that the clan structure can mitigate social conflicts:

- Since everyone is more or less related to each other, the deployment of such carpet repressions, as in Belarus, in Kazakhstan is more difficult, because everyone is someone's nephew. On the one hand, the cost of life is lower, on the other hand, the state, the universal apparatus of suppression, has less freedom of hand, because it is not so easy to apply repressive norms to everyone at once: it is always necessary to make an exception for someone.

Historian and orientalist Andrey Zubov notes that clans are superior to families in terms of conflicts inherent in them. Even in the family there are disputes and showdowns, but in any clan there is rivalry.

In such a complex matter as the transfer of power, disputes between relatives only get in the way. According to the apt definition of Ekaterina Shulman, the struggle for power with the participation of clans resembles an old, but well-known game:

- The presence of clans does not help the transit at all, turning any transfer of power into a potential elimination game: the zhuz who owns the power, who is now the senior, wants to continue to be the senior, and the middle and the youngest want their share, if not their chance at all, to turn over this domineering pyramid.

The post-Soviet space is generally quite unhappy politically: so far, few have managed to establish a more or less stable peaceful life without state dictatorship and periodic shocks, as well as combinations of the first and the second.

No matter how archaic for the Russian ear such words as "zhuzes" sound, in the modern political situation in Kazakhstan this is not a greeting from the Middle Ages, as it might seem to outside observers, but simply other names for very modern processes in society.

"Yes, there are connections based on clannishness, zhuzes or teips in Chechnya, but, in fact, the groupings of the power elite are formed taking into account modern institutions and the modern economy. They are formed under a specific institution or under control over specific economic assets. That is, zhuzes are not institutions of power, but are spontaneously formed groupings. The difficulties of the transit of power are the difficulties of a modern society, not a traditional one", - said Boris Makarenko, president of the Center for Political Technologies.

Mass protests are one of the new political institutions that manifests itself in many countries, recalls Doctor of Political Sciences, Professor Yuli Nisnevich. Clannishness, on the other hand, promotes protests, rather than contradicts them:

"There are interest groups who want to take advantage of the protest. Even if protests start independently, there are always people willing to fish in troubled waters. The transit of power seemed calm, but as it turned out, it was not. Despite all the assurances that the new president is a henchman of the previous one, there are still economic contradictions. The Nazarbayev clan actually owns a lot of economic entities, not everyone is happy with this. There, probably, from there legs grow".

Recently, there has not been a single autocracy in the world where the process of transfer of power would go smoothly, analysts say. Even in old autocracies like the Mugabe regime, violent protests have ended. In the post-Soviet space, in such seemingly calm countries as Azerbaijan or Uzbekistan, it is not clear how cleanly the transit went. The main word here is "bye", recalls Yekaterina Shulman.

In Azerbaijan, the transfer of power from father to son took place relatively calmly, because the country is small, rich in resources, and mono-ethnic. With Uzbekistan it is already more difficult, but some weakening of the criminal code as the basic legislation in repressive autocracies is visible. In Turkmenistan, power was transferred from the despot to his dentist.

"Central Asian autocracies (Turkmenistan can be called a dictatorship) cope with the task of retaining power as best they can, until their youth overhang grows, the influence of Islam, which these more or less secular autocracies seek to more or less control, simultaneously with it flirting. All of them play with this dynamic, all are trying to stand between Russia and China, while maintaining their conditional sovereignty, all are trying to export their resources. Who is allowed to go there - to Europe, who is not allowed - to the Arab countries, China and Singapore", - says Yekaterina Shulman.

In Kazakhstan, the authorities seem to have held on, but will be forced to renew themselves. How quickly this can happen will be shown by the appointment of a new government on January 11. It is rather difficult for Russian observers to judge the processes in Kazakhstan because of the “Belarusian trauma”. Political scientist Shulman believes that the situation in Russia's southern neighbor is different from that in Belarus.

However, it is obvious that the personalist regime is finite, the only question is what this end will be, says Boris Makarenko:

- Any personalist mode is finite. Not only for physical reasons, but also because the personalist regime is very bad at adapting to a changing situation. And here's how it ends ... Lee Kuan Yew very successfully finished the personalist regime, gradually transferring power to one, then to the second.

However, Singapore, like Azerbaijan, is a small country. Kazakhstan has a very complex rural periphery, which is difficult to calculate in socio-economic models.

Andrey Zubov believes that conflicts in the post-Soviet space are inevitable:

"The only replacement for this conflict, which leads to human casualties, is simply the restoration of the system of self-government and democracy. Democracy is also a conflict, but, if you like, an institutionalized conflict, when through the system of elections and courts, without killing people, some people gain power, others lose power. When everything is done “according to concepts”, then what happened in Kazakhstan will inevitably happen in other authoritarian countries, including Russia".

Even in the most stable autocracies, elites parasitize on society: and despite all the declarations, no one shines with true patriotism. This is how the 30-year post-Soviet cycle ends, and its stability may be undermined by a rather random chain of circumstances.

"Experience should tell us that these are ongoing processes: here nothing ends quickly, nothing is forever, nothing is final, and no one is completely removed from the game, who has not died yet. Those who, it seems, have now fled the country forever, can return, they still have resources, property, clientele. Only the dead are not involved - everyone else is involved", - summarizes Yekaterina Shulman.