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>>The press service of Almaty International Airport(IATA: ALA, ICAO: UAAA) confirms the lost of control. "There are now about 45 invaders at the airport"

That is a weird place to stage a protest. Im getting little green men flashbacks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_green_men_(Russo-Ukrain...

It should be noted that Kazakhstan is often mentioned as one of the potential flashpoints when it comes to Russian irredentism. This map shows why:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnic_demography_of_Kazakhsta...

That map makes no sense in relation to your comment. The country is mostly ethinic Kazak, and peoples similar in the sense they are more Turkic than Slavic. Calling them Russian seems weird, making a case for irredentism even weirder considering they wont have the same idea as what is the "motherland."

Russia trying to recreate the USSR, I can see. They will start with the states the West is concerned with the least.

>Russia trying to recreate the USSR, I can see.

USSR? Nope. Russian Empire? Maybe. Any resemblance to USSR, IMHO, requires at least some kind of Marxism derivative and state-planned economy.

USSR had a nationalist component to it from Stalin onwards (see e.g. https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1945...). It is that part that the modern ideologues tap into, blending it with similar stuff from the Imperial Russia period.

I agree. But still - I see no Marxism in Putin's Russia.

Oh, sure. But then again, many would argue that there was no Marxism in USSR, either (at least not after the first decade or so).

One particular interpretation that seems to be fairly popular in "patriotic" circles is that the original Bolsheviks were Marxist, and they almost ruined Russia because of that; but then Stalin took power, purged them, and restored the imperial glory.

There's no dichotomy here. In Putin's mind they were one and the same:

"It was a disintegration of historical Russia under the name of the Soviet Union," Putin said of the 1991 breakup, in comments aired on Sunday as part of a documentary film called "Russia. New History", the RIA state news agency reported.

"We turned into a completely different country. And what had been built up over 1,000 years was largely lost," said Putin, saying 25 million Russian people in newly independent countries suddenly found themselves cut off from Russia, part of what he called "a major humanitarian tragedy".

In any case Marxism was pretty much always window dressing in the USSR, anyway, post-Stalin. And in its final years the USSR was ditching any signficant pretext of Marxist-inspired socialism altogether. If it could have survived would probably would have evolved into a hybrid capitalist autocracy like modern China -- with significant state planning characteristics, but with the ideological mumbo-jumbo dialed down to a bare minimum.

I would argue that it was already a window dressing under Stalin; more so than afterwards, in fact, given that it was fairly common for high-level party functionaries and other important figures to have e.g. domestic servants.

Then again, if we take pure Marxism, a socialist revolution was supposed to be impossible in Russia anyway, simply because proletariat was not the majority of the population. Lenin and co had to do a lot of handwaving to explain that away, and one could reasonably claim that the result deviated sufficiently from what Marx had in mind that it shouldn't really be lumped together.

Yeah, I should have said "from Stalin onwards".

In Putin's mind, USSR and Russia might be one and the same. But I'm not sure Putin's words about the ideals and politics of a historical state which was originally built after a revolution led by a radical Marxist faction, the Bolsheviks, should be taken seriously. After all, the first anthem of the Soviet Union was "The Internationale" up until sometime in the 1940s. I am not completely sure about what was on Lenin's mind though, so I might be wrong - maybe he was secretly nationalist (or a left-wing fascist, if I could use this other loose term).

Consider policies like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korenizatsiya. Early USSR was already totalitarian for sure, but I don't think it could be described as nationalist in any meaningful sense.

Whether it was socialist or not is another interesting question. Some would say that it wasn't, on the basis that real socialism cannot be non-democratic, as that precludes meaningful common ownership of property - and Bolsheviks were consistently anti-democratic very early on, what with shutting down the Constituent Assembly, instituting kombeds to suppress local councils that were in opposition to them, and even explicitly writing a formula into the constitution that made urban (i.e. predominantly worker) councils have 5x voting power of rural (i.e. predominantly peasant) councils. But even ignoring that, it's hard to reconcile socialism with suppression of trade unions in politics (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Workers%27_Opposition) - which also happened under Lenin.

The map shows heavy concentration of ethnic Russians in the north of the country. Russian ethnonationalists often refer to north Kazakhstan as "South Siberia" for this reason, and there's a long-standing desire in those circles to annex it to Russia.

This is quite similar to Ukraine, where Crimea is overwhelmingly ethnically Russian.

Wasn't considered a weird place when the people of Hong Kong did that [0]

[0] https://edition.cnn.com/2019/08/13/asia/hong-kong-protestors...

hew hundred people week long sit in escalated by police intervention versus 60 young men showed up out of nowhere and took control of the airport

>President Tokayev says that he is the chairman of security council from now, instead of Nazarbayev

This is a huge deal. Conventional wisdom was that Nazarbayev, an unchallenged strongman for almost 30 years, only gave up the day-to-day duties of running the country to a younger sycophant but retained the ability to make "higher-order" decisions via his chairmanship of the security council - one of the models which Putin might follow as well, since he cannot ever simply retire.

This either means Nazarbayev doesn't want to be associated with the fall of Tokayev and will attempt to feign conflict with him to retain power in case shit goes south, or perhaps Tokayev just used the situation to perform a "forced retirement" coup against Nazarbayev.

It's also unclear (judging from my twitter feed and a few liveblogs I follow) where Nazarbayev is currently located (and what he thinks about this mess).

I wonder if finally someone (Russian/China?) convinces him to go down and retire? After all he has been there for three decades, and maybe the other countries are not exactly happy about his way.

Nazarbayev is 81 years old. It doesn't seem likely he'll emerge as the new ruler, even with Russian backing. ...but he might lend legitimacy to any new leader the Russians try to muscle in.

Amazing how quickly a protest can become a revolution in some parts of the world.

If there aren't constitutional mechanisms in place for peaceful transfer of power-- along with a tradition of mostly following the norms and conventions around the constitution-- it can all go wrong pretty quickly.

People may get very frustrated with democratic governments, but the mechanisms that well established democracies have for the peaceful transfer of power offer a much needed release valve on this sort of pressure.

But it takes time to establish the foundations for this. Heck, the US had been around for most of a century and still had a failed revolution (well, it's called a the Civil War, but that's mostly because it failed. I'm sure if the US South had won, they would have viewed it very much as a successful revolution in the same way the original colonies did when they seceded from Great Britain. Yes, there are subtle differences-- Great Britain was somewhat of an absentee overseer, and colonies are not quite the same as states. Admittedly this makes the gray area resolve closer to Civil War.)

Can happen everywhere. Wait what happens if you cut down food supply to a rich nation like for example the Netherlands. Within a week people will kill each other for food.

It’s completely off topic but the example is hilariously terrible — the Netherlands are second largest world food exporter

Per capita? I find that really surprising!

I'm not sure which metric GP is referring to, but by total value of food exports they're 7th in the world. Extremely impressive for a country of only 17 million people.

[0] https://wits.worldbank.org/CountryProfile/en/Country/WLD/Yea...

It helps that most things I've seen so far are pretty high value per volume such as more expensive vegetables.

It's probably because the Dutch diaspora has succeeded in getting their children hooked on stroopwafels (syrup waffles), salt licorice and those amazing dense raisin buns that seem to be approximately 50% raisins... I for one am happy to continue supporting their export economy!

Not per capita, in absolute numbers, a couple of years ago at least [1]. That said, there are different ways to measure; this is by value. You could also imagine e.g. measuring by calories.

Presumably, per capita it's number one.

[1] This tiny country feeds the world - https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/article/holland-...

When I think Dutch I think 'boring people' followed by 'greenhouses' https://www.archdaily.com/932301/how-the-dutch-use-architect...

We are indeed, but worth noting - that's per dollar exported and a lot of that comes from having Europe's largest ports, as well as a lot of processing and auctioning of food.

Still, we grow a very large amount of food, especially relative to the size of the country. We're the 9th largest potato producer [0] in the world, despite being a tiny country both population and size wise, because we have the highest yields in the world. Someone downthread linked a NatGeo article explaining more [1] but we have far higher yields, several times higher than any other country, on many crops, such as chilies, green peppers, cucumbers etc.

[0] the very helpful FAOSTAT is excellent for things like this: https://www.fao.org/faostat/en/#data/QCL

[1] https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/article/holland-...

Don't even need shortages of anything basic like food, in some places it's just enough to ask people to follow common sense rules, and as a result to that people will take to the streets, people will try to overthrow governments.

This does not only apply to the US, with the January 6. "insurrection", it even happened in places like Germany [0] and recently Romania [1].

It's a combination of entitlement, and 2 years of pandemic forcing many people, and their businesses, into dire economic situations.

Such dire economic situations can trigger regime change anywhere, completely regardless of "democratic institutions" or all these other nice sounding words.

Because most people don't really want that much; As long as they have a job that allows them to put a roof over their, and their families heads, and food on their tables, that long the vast majority of people couldn't care less if the government they live under is considered "democratic" or "authoritarian".

These are way too high and abstract concepts for the vast majority of people to care about. They are too busy with every day live, working to pay rent and getting food on the table.

But what happens if they don't have the work anymore to pay for rent and get food on the table? Then they will take to the streets, they will demand change, completely regardless of what kind of regime they live under.

Even the Roman Empire already knew this; panem et ludos

Give people enough bread and circuses, and they couldn't care less about what happens on the higher levels above them or how they are being wronged in rather intangible ways.

[0] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-53964147

[1] https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/12/21/romanians-protesti...

I think it is a bit naive to think this is a grass roots "protest". This might be a knock-on effect after the US withdrawal from Afghanistan. Nazarbayev was a Soviet man, so it's possible this is a western intervention. It's also possible that Islamic interests are using the gas crisis as an opportunity to establish a new islamic state there also.

...but regardless of who may be have helped organize this sudden protest/coup, it's important to remember that Russian politicians have recently made comments about taking back land given to Kazakhstan during the Soviet days. The northern portions of the country hold the 25% of the Kazakh population that is ethnic-Russian - which includes much of the area just up to the capital of Nur-Sultan, also in the north.

https://thediplomat.com/2021/04/is-northern-kazakhstan-at-ri...

As a conspiracy, as Kazakhstan crisis happens just before Russia/NATO summit, it may not be as simple as a "price protest".

I just wonder what made the government raise the price of gas? Kazahstan sits on a gas mine. Why would they risk such a full scale protest just now? Greed?

There's a pretty steep rise in gas prices in Europe these days related to the Ukrainian situation so I believe there must be some relation between that rise and the Kazakh prices

Yes but a 2x price increase? It seems that Putin has actually triggered this by using Russia's energy resources as tools for foreign policy and worsened the energy crisis. Russia controls most of the gas pipelines to Europe except maybe for the SCP/TANAP/TAP and the ones from Northern Europe.

maybe similar situation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1970_Polish_protests Centrally controlled price rise, conspiracy to overthrow government from within.

No, i've read more about it.

The price hike was part of a government schedule to liberalize gas prices. But they were so dumb or ignorant that they've set the date in 1/1/2022, in the winter, which also happened to occur in the middle of an energy crisis. Kazahstan, being economically dependent on China is having problems with 12% unemplyment and the jobless youth has radicalised. People took to the streets to protest peacefully and requested theat the price hikes ar reversed, the resignation of the government and demanded that the former president, Nazarbayev, leaves and that the 1993 constitution is restored. The acting president Tokayev, used the protests to dismiss Nazarbayev and his allies in the government and the secret service and sieze the whole power for himself. This is when the protests turned violent. The acts of violence were most probably perpetrated by secret service factions loyal to the former president aided by criminal gangs and maybe also radicalised youth is involved. Tokayev ordered a state of emergency but the military and the security forces would not act on his orders, mainly because they take order from the former president whom Tokayev has ilegally dismissed. In a desperate attempt, Tokayev has requested outside help from the CSTO, which is mainly Russia, claiming that outside terrorist forces are trying to overthrow the social order. The key word is outside, because otherwise the CSTO cannot intervene in the internal affairs of another state. When the CSTO stepped in and sent troops, the Kazah military and security forces started to comply with the acting president's orders. Now Tokayev is basically at the mercy of the Kremlin and Putin will quite probably ask for favours in return. There is doubt that anything was planned except for the gas hike. It appears that the actors involved just siezed the opportunity to act in their favour. This is how transfer of power occurs in autocracies, sometimes even when it's carefully planned years in advance. For context, Nazarbayev hand picked Tokayev to be his sucessor but retained important attributes of power, for life, by changing the consitution in 2019.

Its to be expected in very poor countries with a dictatorship masquerading as government.

The people don't have first world problems which they complain about from a chair on the internet.

They live harsh lives with zero perspectives and are somewhat grateful the government doesn't turn more violent or oppressive .

Then some event triggers a no point of return scenario where the people fear prison or death less than the potential future.

Apparently most of the government has been deposed as the president attempts to cling to power:

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/rare-protests-draw-resi...

>Kazakh president appeals for help from Russia-led security bloc

https://finance.yahoo.com/finance/news/kazakh-president-appe...

By the point you’re seizing small arms from police stations you’re toeing the line between riot and revolution

As a Frenchman, it's also what we are taught about the French Revolution. One of the goals of the attack on la Bastille on July 14th 1789 was to seize the weapons there and march upon the rest of Paris and Versailles.

Powder and shot, more specifically. They’d seized cannons and small arms from the Hôtel des Invalides, but the under manned commander had transferred all his powder to the Bastille before the mob stormed his position.

Euromaidan mk2. Putin now has a new problem on his hands, ahead of the Jan 10th talks on Ukraine with the US and now the EU as well. This is just great timing.

So apparently one group of oligarchies are winning over the other.