Remember Budapest, 1956, and Prague, 1968?

Excellent. How about Chechnya, 1999, Georgia, 2008, the Ukraine, 2014? Well, in that case, you remember that the quisling government officials of all those countries put down popular uprisings by inviting Russia and her satellites to invade.

Vlad-bey, new sultan of Kazakhstan

Congratulations. You have better memory than the leaders of just about every Western government, who are falling all over themselves trying to ‘understand’ Putin and find an ‘accommodation’ with him.

At the moment, they aren’t even doing that, since few of them understand what’s really happening in Kazakhstan. When they look at the map, their eyes slide from that vast space (larger than Western Europe) to a smaller one, the Ukraine.

Is the Russian invasion of Kazakhstan a prelude to a larger-scale invasion of the Ukraine? Is it merely a diversion manoeuvre? Or is Putin hoping to use Kazakhstan as a pretext to withdraw from the Ukrainian borders without losing face?

Good questions, all of them. So good in fact that no one knows the answers. Not the US, not Britain, possibly not even Putin himself. So let’s concentrate on what we do know.

Most people have heard of the Goldomor (Holodomor in Ukrainian) of the early 1930s. That was the time of an artificially created famine, when millions of people were didactically starved to death for failing to grasp the benefits of collectivised agriculture.

Less known is that Kazakhstan was also on the receiving end of that genocidal treatment. Over two million Kazakhs died then, which put the two Russian colonies in the same boat floating on waves of resentment.

There used to be much goodwill towards the Russians in both places, especially in the east of the Ukraine and the north of Kazakhstan. That largely evaporated in the malodorous miasma rising from the millions of corpses.

All Soviet republics, not least Russia herself, suffered untold misery at the hands of the Soviets. Yet it could be argued that the Ukraine and Kazakhstan suffered perhaps even more than most.

Their populations offered much stubborn, if hopeless, armed resistance. The basmachi liberation movement in Central Asia, including southern Kazakhstan, lasted for 20 years after the 1917 revolution, and it took the Red Army to quell it.

Ukrainians also fought against the Bolsheviks for several years after the revolution and, amazingly, for a decade after 1945. Their guerrillas were prepared to take on the might of the Soviet Union and die in the attempt.

That spirit has never quite gone away. I remember visiting Kiev in 1967, where my Ukrainian colleagues, all of them perfectly bilingual, insisted on speaking Ukrainian to me as a gesture of defiance to their Soviet masters. What I lost in comprehension they gained in national pride.

I also visited Almaty roughly at the same time, when my relation was the manager of the opera house there. Since that position put him into the rarefied atmosphere of the local elite, we were invited to a bash at the country house of a local bigwig, second secretary of something or other.

Yet even he, a Moscow appointment, made a point of flaunting Muslim paraphernalia (like introducing his several wives as cousins or nieces). A Muscovite had to be shown what’s what, and never mind the bigwig’s impeccable communist credentials.

When a pressure cooker is at a maximum setting, it doesn’t take much to cause an explosion. And that appliance has been bubbling in Kazakhstan for decades.

For at least three of those, until a few days ago, the country was ruled by Nursultan Nazarbayev, the jewel in the crown of Tony Blair’s evil clients.

When the USSR was still in business, Nazarbayev was a full-time functionary in Komsomol (Young Communist League). Though officially a junior branch of the Communist Party, Komsomol was in fact the breeding ground for the KGB. Interestingly, most Russian ‘oligarchs’, especially the original ones, come from the same background.

In 1990 Nazarbayev was appointed president of the republic, just in time to see the Soviet Union fall apart. He then proceeded to create a curious cocktail of a Stalinist dictatorship, Muslim sultanate and Mafia family.

Kazakhstan was richly adorned by Nazarbayev’s portraits and statues, while he and his family were getting rich on a scale that would have put Harun-al-Rashid to shame. I shan’t bore you with many details, but one is worth mentioning.

Nazarbayev appointed his son-in-law as head of the customs service and border troops. As such, he exacted duties from Chinese lorries carrying goods to Russia. There were about 1,000 of them every day, each paying $10,000. That’s $10 million a day that went straight to the Nazarbayev clan.

At the same time he maintained friendly, if rather subservient, relations with Russia, whose mafioso practices he was successfully emulating, though adding a few unmistakably Muslim touches. Kazakhstan joined the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), then the Eurasian Economic Union (EEU) and, critically, Collective Security Treaty Organisation (CSTO).

Whatever their declared mission, all those setups were created to keep in place the skeleton on which the flesh of a Russian empire could grow in due course. Meanwhile, Nazarbayev became one of the world’s richest men, never forgetting to send little tokens of his appreciation to the capo di tutti capi in the Kremlin (this Italian term describes their relationship quite accurately).

Against that background, the Kazakhs were getting more and more impoverished, with prices going up, the value of their wages going down, and taxes being squeezed out of them at an accelerating rate. Hence the first outburst occurred in 2011, when the people took to the streets.

In the good Soviet tradition, Nazarbayev issued a shoot to kill order. His stormtroopers promptly fired at the crowd, killing 17 officially and Allah only knows how many in reality.

Tony Blair helped him spin that atrocity internationally, but nationally it set the tone for all subsequent discourse between the people and their government. Elections were held in name only, dissidents imprisoned or worse, free information suppressed – there was nothing Putin could teach Nazarbayev.

Then, in 2019, when Nazarbayev was getting on a bit, and the unrest in the country was growing, he relinquished his presidency, becoming instead the éminence grise of the government in his new capacity of Chairman of the Security Council for life. The new president, Kassym-Jomart Tokayev, was to Nazarbayev what Medvedev was to Putin – a lapdog happily doing his master’s bidding.

Meanwhile, the people seethed and finally they had had enough. Over the past year, the price of LNG, which powers most private cars in Kazakhstan, doubled. That was the last straw. Another explosion occurred, this time on a massive scale.

Most of the demonstrations were peaceful, but not all. Armed rioters occupied and trashed several government buildings, including the capital’s administration, courthouse, airport and the headquarters of the Committee for National Security.

Tokayev delivered a speech claiming that the culprits were 20,000 bandits specially trained by, or possibly coming from, some unidentified foreign power. He offered no evidence whatsoever for either the number of those paramilitaries or their provenance. Suffice it to say that even the government TV channels disputed those data.

On the basis of those lies, Tokayev ordered his troops to fire at will, which they did, killing hundreds if not thousands (reports vary).  He then ordered the Internet to be cut off, which meant most Kazakhs lost access to their banks.

Then Tokayev appealed to the CSTO for help, begging for a foreign invasion. Putin and his poodles obliged with indecent haste, with 2,500 heavily armed Russian paratroopers landing in Kazakhstan, supported by contingents from Putin’s client states Armenia and Kirghizstan.

The claim that the CSTO is acting according to its charter is another lie. The organisation was created to thwart foreign invaders only, not to help Kazakhstan fight the Kazakhs. Thus, when Armenia was losing her war with Azerbaijan, her government also asked for CSTO’s help, but was turned down.   

That, however, didn’t prevent Armenia’s PM Pashinyan from now sending a token contingent along for the ride, thereby enabling Putin to claim it was the CSTO, not just Russia, that committed this act of aggression.

Now, even Lukashenko, whose power hung by a thread in 2020, after yet another stolen election was followed by a popular uprising, didn’t ask for a CSTO invasion. The events in Kazakhstan are sui generis in that they mark yet another milestone on Putin’s road to mayhem.

Not only is the invasion criminal in itself, but it sets, or rather revives, a precedent for new, greater crimes. The pattern was first established in 1939, when the Soviets formed a bogus Finnish communist government, which then asked the Red Army to invade.

As a student and admirer of Stalin, Putin has learned his lessons well. He is setting up future developments along the same lines, with ‘friendly’ governments of the former Soviet republics to be formed in Moscow. They’ll then beg Putin to restore order in their countries, with any independent national governments seen as factors of disorder.

Every time that happens, Western leaders can be counted on to express ‘deep concern’, offset by a parallel ‘understanding’ of Russia’s problems. They don’t realise, or rather pretend not to, that the only language that international thugs, such as Putin, understand is that of force.

7 thoughts on “Remember Budapest, 1956, and Prague, 1968?”

  1. I remember that Solzhenitsyn used to call the place Ka-Zek-Stan, because of the sheer number of Gulags and exiles to be found there.

  2. “Most people have heard of the Goldomor (Holodomor in Ukrainian) of the early 1930s. ”

    Negative. Rank and file civilians have not. Academics and an intellectual elite like with what Alexander associates with but not the man-in-the-street.

    The Shoah holocaust almost everyone has heard of.

  3. So many “stans” over there. If Americans have heard of Kazakhstan, it is most likely through the Astana bicycle racing team. And what do we care? It is a “quarrel in a far away country, between people of whom we know nothing.”

    History shows us consequences of a puppet government “inviting” a tyrannical power to help it fight domestic enemies. If only we had access to such information it might help us in this current situation. Someone should invent a way for humans to share information.

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