What exactly happened in Kazakhstan in January 2022? What forces were at play – and what will be the long-term effects? As the country’s communications shutdown ends and facts start to emerge, the scale of events becomes even harder to comprehend, and the gap between official interpretations and people’s experiences on the streets of Kazakhstan widens.
The ‘working version’ of the first week of January is as follows: protests over a fuel price hike quickly morphed into broader socio-economic and political demands in towns and cities across the country, which then moved into confrontations with the police, attacks on state administration buildings and looting.
The potential role of elite groups in the chaos remains unconfirmed, though a number of highly placed members of the family of the previous president, Nursultan Nazarbayev, have since lost or resigned their positions in state agencies and leading businesses. According to official figures, 225 people died in the events – 149 of them in the country’s business capital, Almaty, which became an epicentre of violence. To describe what happened in Almaty, President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev claimed that the city had been under attack from "20,000 bandits and terrorists", but later removed the tweet.
