Post-Soviet Chaos: Violence and Dispossession in Kasakhstan

Post-Soviet Chaos lays out with remarkable clarity the impact of the collapse of the Soviet Union on ordinary people in Kasakhstan. It is not a pretty picture. The only 'market opportunities' which seem to have expanded are for women to become prostitutes or mistresses, or, perhaps, work the 'suitcase' trade, hauling goods pretty much by hand from neighboring territories to resell. Hooliganism is on the rise. Cultural opportunities once enjoyed by all have disintegrated. Kasakh men promote patriotic pride, but mostly to lay claim to women who are gravitating to foreign men with money. Nazpary sensitively lays out the national tensions that have emerged--there are the Kasakhs, divided into three segmented groups. There are the people of the former Soviet lands. And there are the wealthy foreigners (not from Soviet lands, but from the West, or maybe China), regarded as most exploitative. One of Nazpary's most interesting points is that, while Kasakhstan is a Muslim country, there is strong nostalgia for the Soviet Union, at least in terms of the collective rights it guaranteed. He finds little evidence of a drift towards a pan-Islamic identity, notwithstanding the presumption of many Western commentators. Strongly recommended reading.

Nazpary's remarkable book surveys the appalling effects of a real counter-revolution. Since 1990, Kazakh workers' rights to jobs, wages, welfare, free education, pensions and savings, have all been ripped away. Their access to cheap housing, electricity, gas, phones, transport, health care, childcare, sport, arts, libraries, have all gone. In the 1980s and 1990s, active NATO and IMF interventions enforced capitalism in Kazakhstan, grabbing oil, gas and metals for firms like Shell and British Gas. 15% of foreign investment is British, 23% South Korean, 29% US. Theft of public property through privatisation has closed factories and destroyed jobs: engineering and agricultural outputs both halved between 1995 and 1998.This is what happens when the working class lets go of its controls over society, its party and trade unions.As a young Kazakh woman said, "Before, in the Soviet time, there were moral limits and the authorities looked after them. There were high moral standards ... People were truthful. They were brought up in a good way. But today people have become like savage animals. They behave according to the law of the jungle."Now violent and corrupt mafiosi, newly freed, traffic in drugs and sex, and become the new rich, while for the workers, there is only loss, insecurity, growing ethnic and gender tensions and huge growths in poverty and migration. Capital goes global; workers are ghettoised. The workers rightly see all these evils as resulting from the infliction of capitalism. Nazpary notes the very strong `Soviet patriotism' among the mass of the people, while the new rich view the Soviet era only as tyranny. He details the networking of family and friends in the scrabble for scarce goods, but as he notes, "tragically and paradoxically, networking as a response to the chaos perpetuates it."In the FSU as whole, an estimated 4.7 million more people have died since 1990 as a direct result of the counter-revolution. As world capitalism, unrestrained by the USSR's existence, grows more brutal and corrupt, Kazakhstan is just one instance of problems common to workers across the world.Kazakhstan's workers need to make a new revolution.