Kazakhstan, Russia

The rhetoric around the long-standing friendship between Russians and Kazakhs is a vestige of Soviet historiography, which emphasized the “voluntary” submission of the Kazakh khans to the Russian empire in the 19th century. But Kazakhs were in more or less continuous rebellion against Russia from the 18th century through the 20th, as Russian settlers inexorably encroached upon the nomadic Kazakhs’ traditional grazing grounds. The Kazakhs were ultimately too weak to withstand the Russian advance, however, and were forced to accommodate Russia’s demands that they submit politically and give up nomadism.

Today, that story is being retold: Kazakhstan is under economic pressure from Russia, in the form of Moscow’s “Eurasian” integration projects, most notably the Eurasian Economic Union (EEU), which was formally created in May in Astana and includes Belarus, Kazakhstan and Russia. The timing of the signing, coming in the wake of the annexation of Crimea, was awkward for Kazakhstan. Rare nationalist protests have criticized the EEU as an abdication of Kazakhstan’s sovereignty, while Nazarbayev has repeatedly insisted that the union is only economic and not political.

And just as Nazarbayev has had to delicately balance the desire to Kazakhify the country with the need to avoid alienating its ethnic Russians, he’s carried out a parallel balancing act with respect to relations with the Russian government. Since gaining independence, Kazakhstan has striven toward what it calls a “multi-vector foreign policy, ” which is a delicate way of explaining that it seeks new partners — primarily China, the U.S. and Europe — to balance out the Soviet-era dependence on Russia.