Caspian Cabals: IOCs, Kazakh State Based On Fierce Mongol Traditions Are Beneficiaries, With Alshyns On The Losing End – Analysis
Russian EADaily, in a report entitled ‘The end has come to the Kazakh show-offs: Tokayev declared the need to live within his means’, said: “It’s time to tighten your belts and live within your means. Such a statement was made by President of Kazakhstan Kassym-Jomart Tokayev at an expanded government meeting in Astana [on 28 January].
“Prime Minister Olzhas Bektenov states that Kazakhstan’s budget is experiencing a chronic deficit. At the same time, there is especially not enough money for development”.
Suppose you pay attention to the way Kazakhstani official and non-official figures have been discussing budget problems for the last decade. In that case, you will find that each time, spears are broken around the same unpleasant issues. These are budget deficits, ineffective budget spending, lack of money for socio-economic projects, and much more. It was the same thing this time. And, judging by the experience of past years, there’s most probably no guarantee that the problems mentioned will not resurface next year.
Here is what is noteworthy in this regard. The country’s political leadership sets for the government the task of saving public money in conditions of chronic budget deficits. This is a very common course of action in such situations, and it is pretty much understandable. What is puzzling is something else – the fact that President Tokayev, further on, begins to make such political decisions and give the government such instructions that entail a rapid expansion of budget expenditures. Evidence of this is the following story.
Speaking at the extended meeting of the Kazakhstani government on Feb. 8, 2022, President Tokayev said: “The situation, in which 82 percent of the provinces are being subsidized, is abnormal”. It wasn’t easy to disagree with these words. The budget deficit for the previous year, 2021, had deepened by almost 1 trillion tenge despite the growth of tax revenues and rising oil prices. At that time, only 18 percent of provinces were donors in Kazakhstan. These were the provinces of Atyrau and Mangystau, the cities of Nur-Sultan and Almaty. In February 2022, Kassym-Jomart Tokayev assessed this situation as abnormal. A little more than a month later, on March 16, addressing the Central Asian nation’s parliament, the Kazakh President said he wanted to recreate three provinces that had been merged with other provinces in the 1990s, which effectively meant increasing the share of the provinces in need of help from the national budget at least to 90 percent, let alone the costs of the reorganization itself. Not even three months after that, those words turned into actions. On June 8, 2022, President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev signed a decree establishing three new provinces in regions heavily dependent on subsidies from Astana: Ulytau and Abay in central and northeastern Kazakhstan, that is, on the Middle Zhuz traditional territory, and Zhetysu, in southern Kazakhstan, that is, on the Senior Zhuz traditional territory.
On June 17, 2023, Kazakh President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev announced plans to recreate three districts in Eastern Kazakhstan, Katon-Karagai, Markakol, and Makanchi, that were merged with other districts in the 1990s to optimize the public administration system and to reduce expenditures spent to maintain it. On December 28, 2023, his press service reported on the signing of the relevant decree. Yet another district, Zhana Semei, was also created. All of these administrative and organizational innovations were carried out on the Middle Zhuz traditional territory.
Those transformations, leading to considerable increases in state subsidies for the regions that are parts of the Senior Zhuz and the Middle Zhuz traditional territories, have been and still are put as an added crippling burden on Western Kazakhstan, the Junior Zhuz traditional territory, specifically on the donor provinces of Atyrau and Mangystau, in latter of which, according to the Diplomat Magazine, “the poverty rate was 22 times higher than the country average” not long ago. Doesn’t that remind people of the classic forms of colonial oppression?!
The fact of new provinces and districts and the need to financially ensure their functioning have resulted and will continue to result in very large extra expenditures from the Kazakh State budget, which is facing a mounting deficit. Some Kazakh experts suggest that 2-3 ‘successful’ provinces cannot serve as donors for ‘poor provinces’ [whose numbers have recently been only increasing through President Tokayev’s efforts] all the time, ‘this must come to an end sooner or later and can lead to negative consequences’. Moreover, Kazakhstan is also increasingly expanding its global network of overseas embassies under such circumstances. Such measures by the official Astana are meant to lead to increased budget costs, whereas the country is spending more than it’s earning. This situation did not arise all of a sudden. It has taken shape mainly over the years of President Tokayev’s term of office. And it is getting worse and worse as time goes on.
Here are the opinions of Kazakh experts on how things concerning the Kazakhstani budget had been going in 2022 and 2024. On March 31, 2022, Informburo.kz quoted Arman Beisembayev, a Kazakh financial analyst, as saying: “The budget situation has been real bad for a very long time now. The budget has been running at a deficit for a very long time. The transfers [from the National Fund] are getting larger each time, as the budget expenditures are rising once and once again… Unfortunately, tax revenues have not been and are not sufficient to cover our expenses. We’re spending more than we’re bringing in. And this has been going on for a long time”.
Two and a half years later, on August 1, 2024, Orda.kz, in a piece entitled ‘Shock and a sense of unreality’: Kazakhstan’s budget situation horrified a famous economist’, quoted Almas Chukin, an economic expert, as saying: “All that talk about our critically unbalanced income and expenditure has become a frightening reality this year. With a revenue collection plan [for the first half of 2024] of 6.9 trillion [tenge], we collected 5.6 trillion, or 81% (a shortfall of almost 20%). Moreover, revenue is not only less than the plan; it is even half a trillion less than in the same period last year. At the same time, we reached 95% of the plan in expenditure and spent 10.7 trillion. Just think about it – income of 5.6 trillion and expenditure of 10.7 trillion. A deficit of almost 50%!”.
This whole thing may be hard to explain. On the one hand, the Kazakh President expresses great concern over the situation where ‘tax revenues have not been and are not sufficient to cover our expenses’ and describes the extreme narrowness of the donor income base of the State budget as abnormal. And then, on the other hand, time and again, he issues decrees that mean a sharp increase in government non-productive spending while throwing the matter of dealing with the imbalances between revenues and expenditures into an even deeper crisis and causing further deterioration in the situation with the budget deficit.
The explanation for this seeming paradox probably lies in the political and social features of Kazakh society in the post-Soviet era. So, what are they? Here’s what Seitkassym Auelbekov, a Kazakh philosopher and historian, says in this regard: “I am convinced that in its fundamental characteristics our [Kazakh] society remains patriarchal, tribal, unless, of course, we confuse the technical and technological parameters of the economy with the structure of society, its organization, and state of mind. Based on what has been said, we should be talking about… a society whose principles of organization and functioning are radically opposed to the ones of modern Western society. That is, about a patriarchal society”.
But the thing here is that in post-Soviet Kazakhstan, the traditional patriarchal society that was based on the nomadic way of life and existed in the pre-Soviet era has not survived. Over the last hundred years, the bulk of the Kazakh population has become sedentary and got used to their greatly changed lifestyle. That’s why patriarchalism in the nomadic style, if it showed up, can have been reborn into the Kazakh socio-political and socio-economic life at the end of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st century following a model that was peculiar to the archaic monarchic states with a mainly sedentary population in Central Asia (Bukhara, Khiva, and Kokand) until the Russian conquest, rather than in its original form rather.
Here’s what Hamid Golpira, an Iranian journalist and author, in his article entitled ‘Khans of Central Asia’ and published by the Tehran Times newspaper on January 3, 2008, said on the matter: “When the Central Asian states of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan gained independence after the Soviet Union broke up in December 1991, former Communist Party officials took charge and the authoritarian systems they established closely resembled the old khanates”. The Iranian journalist expressed regret at this unfortunate political situation in the Central Asian region “at a time when progressive elements of the Islamic world are trying to establish the rule of law in Muslim countries”. “This harkens back to the days of the khans of Central Asia, who ruled much of the region before it was annexed by the Russian Empire, which was succeeded by the Soviet Union”, he added. What Hamid Golpira didn’t mention then is what those Central Asian Khan regimes were like back in the XIX century, before the arrival of the Russians and which of the current post-Soviet states in the region most closely resembles them. Let’s try to deal with these issues.
In the region of Transoxiana (that is, in what had historically considered eastern part of Greater Khorasan and later became Russian Turkestan and Soviet Central Asia), the political tradition of gaining and maintaining power through reliance on a certain nomadic tribal group remained current through the second half of the 19th century in the Kokand Khanate (founded by the dynasty of the Ming tribe) and until the beginning of the 20th century in the Emirate of Bukhara (ruled by the dynasty of the Mangit tribe) and the Khiva Khanate (ruled by the dynasty of the the Qungrāt tribe). All three of these tribes are Uzbek in origin, yet they originally came to the areas comprising the interfluve of the Amu-Darya and Syr-Darya Rivers from what is now the territory of Kazakhstan as nomadic conquerors. What were the states that were under their rule like? Here, before proceeding to consider the matter directly, it is necessary to shed some light on its prehistory.
The specificity of the norms in the Inner Asian political tradition that goes back thousands of years to the nomadic past is such that for at least a thousand years until the beginning of the 20th century, the rulers were coming to power in countries with a predominantly sedentary population and keeping it (at first, in any case) relying primarily on their clans and/or tribes. That was the case in the 10th century, when the Kayi tribe, an Oghuz Turkic people and a sub-branch of the Bozok tribal federation, established the Ghaznavid empire, encompassing Afghanistan, Iran, and the Punjab. It also was the case in the 11th century, when people of the Qynyq tribe, a branch of Oghuz Turks, founded the Seljuk Empire, which, at the time of its greatest extent, was controlling a vast area, stretching from western Anatolia and the Levant in the west to the Hindu Kush in the east, and from Central Asia in the north to the Persian Gulf in the south. In later times, the same Kayi tribe established the Ottoman beylik (from which grew the Ottoman Empire) in Asia Minor, and the Qizilbash tribal confederation contributed to the foundation and rise of the Safavid Empire in Iran.
By the mid-19th century, that form of state structure and power was already perceived as something that had long outlived its time. Examples of its type then still lingered in the far depths of Asia as long as they found themselves out of the coverage area of the colonial conquests by the Western countries. But they, too, eventually came under the authority of a European power in the face of the Russian Empire, succeeded by the Soviet Union. But that was later.
At the time, these three Central Asian kingdoms or khanates, Kokand, Bukhara, and Khiva, with a total population of some 5-6 million, were concentrated in highly populated oases along the Amu-Darya and Syr-Darya Rivers complimented by sparsely populated areas of desert and semi-desert. These were absolute monarchies in their form, but in practice, there was little internal cohesion, and their rulers exercised only limited authority as they had to reckon with the interests and ambitions of the beks – chieftains of nomadic tribes and clans who were the main base of support of their power in the countries with predominantly sedentary populations. In Kokand, the Ming tribe dynasty ruled in alliance with the Kipchak tribe, and Bukhara, the Mangit tribe dynasty, with the support of the Ming tribe and Khiva, the Qungrāt tribe dynasty, along with the Mangit tribe. The regimes were medieval, in essence. The oppression of the sedentary population by the nomads was their common trait.
Here, for example, is how things looked like during the reign of Khudayar Khan, the last ruler of the Kokand Khanate (1865—1875) of the Ming tribe, whose elites, imperial in ambition, had founded a new ruling dynasty in Kokand about 1710: “Wide people masses existed in conditions of heavy oppression by the nomads”, “Violence and atrocities by nomads had become commonplace”, “The period of nomadic dominance was aggravated by the fact that they treated the masses of the settled population as the ones inferior and impaired”.
En masse, Uzbeks nowadays consider themselves descendants of the sedentary population of the time of existence of those three Central Asian kingdoms or khanates. Still more, of course, is this the case with the Tajiks. Therefore, it may hardly be appropriate to compare the regimes of power in modern Uzbekistan and, especially, Tajikistan with the ones that had been in the Central Asian khanates of the 19th century.
In the past, the Kyrgyz led a nomadic life just as the Kazakhs did. However, pastoral nomadism on a massive scale was brought to an end under Soviet rule. In 1920-1930s, both Kyrgyz and Kazakhs underwent a process of Sovietization based on sedentarization. By the 1990s, they were already used to a sedentary life, and at that time, the memories of the nomadic past were vivid in the minds of only the elderly. But the post-Soviet political and social development went differently in Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan. Since it gained independence, Kyrgyzstan has long been described as an ‘island of democracy’ adrift in authoritarian Central Asia. This fact alone is enough to consider Kyrgyzstan unsuitable for comparison with the above-mentioned Central Asian khanates. Turkmenistan is also not suitable for this because the regime in this country seems to be more similar to the ones that existed or are still existing in some countries of the MENA region.
The Kazakhs were not much involved in the Central Asian khanates’ inner affairs during the period before the arrival of the Russian Empire in Transoxiana. However, the Kazakh steppes as part of the Inner Asian world, which were dominated by pastoral nomadic communities up until fairly recent times in our current accepted history timeline, kind of constituted a strategic hinterland to their ruling tribal dynasties or a seat of danger to countries and populations who were ruled by them depending on circumstances. After all, these Uzbek tribes themselves had once come to Transoxiana from there to expel its previous rulers. And there had always been a danger to them of repeating, in their turn, the fate of the latter. Well, these khanates were ultimately conquered by newcomers from the north. But these were not other nomadic tribes, but Russians.
But anyway, the tradition of laying claim to imposing their power on whole countries with a predominantly sedentary population and exploiting their productive resources exceptionally for one’s benefit was inherent in Eurasian tribal communities since ancient times. Has it continued into the twenty-first century? If so, what form could it have taken? If one agrees that “in its fundamental characteristics, our [Kazakh] society remains patriarchal, tribal”, it might be conjectured that this kind of tradition has hardly been completely forgotten. Achieving that kind of scenario has seemingly represented a model of success for any nomadic group initially originating from Inner Asia. It’s quite obvious that in post-Soviet Kazakhstan, such an understanding of success has not only preserved its significance but has become even more important, and it now makes a foundation for social-political relations. In Kazakh, there still is a saying, “It is better to be a regular man in your homeland than to be a sultan in a foreign country”, reminding us of those days. It tells that one should appreciate his homeland. But there also is a mention in there about being ‘a sultan in a foreign country’ as an alternative to remaining at home.
Such an alternative started to lose its connotation with the advent of firearms. Under the new, changed conditions, sedentary states no longer retreated before the nomads but, on the contrary, began to advance on the steppe regions. In a situation like this, all the latter could do was raid the former’s border areas. Thus was born the so-called raid economy. It, too, has seemingly left its imprint on the consciousness of the Kazakh society. As one Kazakh journalist said, not without irony, “if we had a raid economy in our history, then people with criminal tendencies in principle cannot have a negative reputation with us”. But as the Russian Empire expanded its control into the Kazakh steppes, the nomadic raiding practices regarding Russia’s border areas were gradually suppressed. Under these circumstances, a tradition known as ‘barymta’ (which can be defined as a raid on a hostile tribe to seize wealth) went to the growth. However, according to the administrative and legal reform of 1867-1868, undertaken by Russian authorities, ‘barymta’ was banned. Cases of ‘barymta’ were transferred to the jurisdiction of the imperial legislative system, and those guilty of committing it were to be punished with imprisonment. Here is how Seitkassym Auelbekov, a Kazakh philosopher and historian, defines the new environment developed then: “Kazakh society found itself in a paradoxical situation: barymta as an instrument of inter-tribal struggle was banned, while internal systemic contradictions and conflicts remained”.
Has the basis for those “internal systemic contradictions and conflicts” disappeared in the 100 odd years (1868-1991) during which the Kazakh steppes were under Russian tsarist and then Soviet rule? By all accounts, not at all – merely that it has changed somewhat since then while adjusting to new political and social conditions associated with the fact that the population switched to a settled way of life.
Because of the latter, patriarchalism in the nomadic style just can have been reborn into the Kazakh socio-political and socio-economic life at the end of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st century following a model that was peculiar to the archaic monarchic states with a mainly sedentary population in Central Asia (Bukhara, Khiva, and Kokand) until the Russian conquest, rather than in its original form rather. The only question was apparently who should be assigned to play the role similar to what had been envisaged for the sedentary working population in the Central Asian khanates who had found themselves on the lowest rungs of the socioeconomic ladder while having been ensuring a material foundation for their states’ well-being. It is clear already now what choice was made on this matter. Before proceeding to consider it, we have to pay attention to things that just give a sense of what the Kazakh society and country stand for.
It’s a long-held stereotype beyond Kazakhstan that the triune Kazakh population have historically made up a homogenous society, sticking to a single political and ideological tradition in shaping statehood and defining legal culture. However, the reality is that in Kazakh society, there have long been two types of understanding of what should be considered as the historical and ideological foundation of the state. As kinds of traditional views and attitudes, they are alternative, even antagonistic to each other. Two parts of the indigenous population of Kazakhstan, the Senior and Middle Zhuz members, who now, under the leadership of President Tokayev, are united together as never before and hold practically all power in Kazakhstan, have historically and traditionally considered the ideology of Genghisism as the only ideological and legal base for state-building and public development.
Its third part, the Junior Zhuz members, or the Nogaily people, i.e. Western Kazakhstan natives, who see themselves as the bearers and continuers of the traditions of Edigeism, that is, the traditions of statehood and law alternative, or even antagonistic to Genghisism and based on faith to extraordinary charisma of Edige-bi, who lived 600 years ago, and his heirs, over the last 35 years, have been forced to undergo severe marginalizing in terms of the access to mainstream social role and national governance in the independent Kazakh state based on the Mongol-Oirat ruling traditions and an uncompromising attitude towards them.
Hence, the question arises: So, who are contemporary Kazakhs? Back in 2009, Ia-centr.ru, the website of Moscow University’s IAC (Information and Analytical Center), gave the following answer to that question: “Senior Zhuz Kazakhs are Mongols, Middle Zhuz ones, Oirats, Junior Zhuz ones, Turks”.
Today, the Senior Zhuz traditional territory spans Zhetisu, Almaty, Jambyl, and Turkestan provinces. The Middle Zhuz traditional territory covers northeastern, central, and a part of southeastern Kazakhstan, i.e. it spans Kostanai, Karaganda, Ulytau, Abai, Pavlodar, Akmola, Kokshetau, North Kazakhstan, and East Kazakhstan provinces. The Junior Zhuz areas coincide with Western Kazakhstan, Aktobe, Atyrau, Mangistau, and part of Kzyl-Orda provinces. Thus, it turns out that in Kazakhstan oil ‘thanks to which, Kazakhstan’, according to Oraz Zhandosov, ex-deputy prime minister of the Republic of Kazakhstan and former chairman of the National Bank of Kazakhstan, ‘has become rich without a real development model’ (“Le Kazakhstan bousculé dans son modèle pétrolier”, French newspaper La Croix), is produced only in the Junior Zhuz traditional territories, Western Kazakhstan.
As Sally Nikoline Cummings concluded in her study “The Political Elite in Kazakhstan Since Independence (1991–1998): Origins, Structure and Policies”, the Kazakh pyramid of power had the following form in the late twentieth century: “Approximately 40% of members of the 1995 political elite appeared to be from the Senior Horde [Zhuz], 28% from the Middle and 9% from the Junior”. The balance has radically changed in favour of the former two since then. As of now, approximately 55% of members of the Kazakhstani political elite appear to be from the Senior Zhuz, 45% from the Middle Zhuz. There are also single representatives of other population groups, including those of the Junior Zhuz. They all occupy positions of minor significance in the formal structures of the Kazakh political environment. That is, the Junior Zhuz was and remains in an absolute losing position even though its homeland, Western Kazakhstan, is a region-donor for all other provinces of Kazakhstan.
Now, let’s consider the following question: What does today’s Kazakhstan have that would resemble what the Central Asian Khanates of the 19th century had?
The basis of the economic life of the Khiva Khanate was agriculture, and in particular farming; other sectors did not play a significant role in the country’s economy. In all of those khanates, agriculture was based on the labor of dekhkans (farmers). They could be rich or poor, but they had no rights in the face of the tribal nobility.
Kazakhstan’s oil and gas industry is considered the backbone of the national economy. There are only two donor-provinces in this country. These are the oil-producing provinces of Atyrau and Mangystau. In 2008, for example, the difference between the average per capita income in the provinces of Atyrau ($23.6 thousand) and Mangystau ($19.0 thousand), which were and still are the only two provinces-donors of Kazakhstan, on one hand, and in the provinces of Almaty ($2.4 thousand), Zhambyl (1.9 thousand), and South Kazakhstan ($1.8 thousand), on the other, was nearly ten times. Yet despite those facts, speaking certainly in favor of the former ones, the poverty rate in ‘the Mangystau region, where Zhanaozen is located, was 22 times higher than the country average’ in 2015. Is it any wonder then that South Kazakhstan’s natives, according to a Russian author, contemptuously call people living in oil-producing Western Kazakhstan “Barbarians”? Here one involuntarily recalls how the beks (tribal chieftains), and after them their simple fellow tribesmen, contemptuously treated simple peasants in the Bukhara Khanate.
This suggests a conclusion about Kazakhstan being a country with very much unbalanced regional development, a country where welfare dynamics is, as counterintuitive as it might seem, inversely proportional to economic dynamics. At the same time, new provinces and districts have been formed in the heavily subsidized regions that are the traditional territories of the Senior Zhuz and Middle Zhuz, whose representatives make up almost 100 percent of the elite layer of the Kazakh political and business establishment. Thus, the Senior Zhuz and Middle Zhuz elites have gotten new growth opportunities, and vacancies have been opened in the civil service for thousands and thousands of their countrymen. This seems to be much more important for the state than the chronic budget deficit. One can’t explain it any other way.
There is a very good project called Caspian Cabals. Here is what is reported about activities within it: “A new investigation led by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) and 26 media partners, including RFE/RL, dug into financial dealings surrounding a key pipeline in Kazakhstan and the oil fields that feed it.
he project, Caspian Cabals, and the two-year investigation are based on tens of thousands of pages of confidential e-mails, company presentations, and other oil-industry records, audits, court documents, and regulatory filings, as well as frontline reporting and hundreds of interviews, including with former oil company employees and insiders at Shell, Chevron, and Exxon”.
That’s a lot of work. But, a very important issue that a while ago, Imangali Tasmagambetov, the then governor of the Atyrau province, brought up, “The Atyrau province is very rich, but its residents get nothing from this wealth”, remains largely sidelined.
The most important thing in this whole energy story is that the Kazakh state, as such, based on the fierce Mongol-Oirat ruling traditions, and the International Oil Companies engaged in West Kazakhstan’s oil industry, are net beneficiaries, while Alshyns (West Kazakhstan’s natives) are on the losing end.
Above, this author has tried to provide an insight into that situation.
