This week, people all over Central Asia celebrate Nowruz, a festival marking the beginning of the Persian new year and the spring equinox. It is a celebration of change, with local populations rejoicing for the arrival of warmer air after the long and bitter winter.
For citizens of Kazakhstan, the 2019 spring festival brings rather unexpected change. On 19 March, Nursultan Nazarbayev, the only president to rule the country since the collapse of the Soviet Union, resigned in a televised address, announcing the establishment of an interim leadership temporarily fronted by Senate Chairman Kassym-Jomart Tokayev. He will serve as the country’s president until a new election scheduled for 2020. Nazarbayev, meanwhile, will retain a series of influential posts, including chairmanship of the National Security Council and of the Nur Otan party, while remaining a member of Kazakhstan’s Constitutional Council.
Nazarbayev’s resignation is a watershed in Eurasia’s recent political history. This week, we have witnessed the departure from power of a man who sat in the last Politburo of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, and who went on to navigate the tumultuous political and economic transitions instigated by the collapse of the Soviet superpower. Throughout almost 30 years of uninterrupted and unchallenged rule, Nazarbayev shaped Kazakhstan’s politics and, to some extent, its society, in his own image. With his departure, Kazakhstan finally leaves the post-Soviet era: the president personified the last visible connection between the nomenklatura of the 1980s and the more complex power structure of the late 2010s.
