June 22, 2019 marked the thirtieth anniversary of Nursultan Nazarbayev’s election as the First Secretary of the Kazakh SSR’s Communist Party’s Central Committee (he was serving as the Head of the regional Ministers Council at the time). It was then when Nazarbayev, de-facto, took charge of Kazakhstan. De-jure, he took over the leadership of the republic (at the time, still a member of the USSR) on April 24, 1990 when, on a single bidder basis, he was elected the President of the Kazakh SSR at the Supreme Soviet meeting.
A presentation of a research on the means of survival and the methods of developing the media independent from the authorities and oligarchs in the countries with different levels of autocracy – Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Russia, Kyrgyzstan and Ukraine - has been held in Almaty.
“It may come as a surprise to you, but Kazakhstan was the last Soviet republic to declare independence. We had been sitting tight until the very last moment waiting for what was to come”, confessed Nursultan Nazarbayev at his meeting with Bill Clinton in 1994...
The purpose of this research conducted by a team of the KazakhSTAN 2.0 expert portal (kz.expert), was to determine the exact mechanisms of Russia’s influence on the Russian-speaking population of Kazakhstan as well as to elicit the most susceptible groups of the population. Note that, talking about the Russian-speaking population of Kazakhstan, we mean all those who understand the Russian language regardless of their ethnicity.
