Those observing the developments in Kazakhstan cannot but be astonished by the abnormal rigidity, cruelty and senselessness of the actions taken by the Kazakh police force against the few protestors and journalists. This, however, is neither stupidity nor despotism on the part of individual officials; it is a result of a deadly terror.

Simply put, the First President of the Republic of Kazakhstan and his successor are extremely anxious. De-facto, they are now up against the wall and afraid that the internal political situation may suddenly spiral out of control. And the events that took place in Kyrgyzstan nine years ago when the protestors took over the presidential palace in Bishkek and literally obliterated the quasi-authoritarian political regime of Kurmanbek Bakiyev despite the firearm attack launched against them shows that such a turn of events is quite possible.

Even though today’s Kazakhstan is significantly different from the Kyrgyzstan of nine years ago in terms of a higher level of life and Akorda’s readiness to further increase the social support of the citizens, they are united by one circumstance – large numbers of the people who have migrated from rural areas to the big cities. These migrants are being rapidly marginalized, downgraded and have already become a rather “combustive” crowd.

This is making any protestation attempt on the part of the citizens against the authorities much more dangerous than its organizers and participants believe. Simply because the authorities understand full well that they are sitting on a powder keg that may explode any moment. For the presence of a large number of those who have nothing to lose except their own chains is building up a pre-revolutionary situation in the country. For this reason, the police and the law-enforcement agencies are trying to suppress any protestation attempt as quickly and violently as they can so that nothing happens (God forbid!) and the opponents realize that being active is dangerous, senseless and ineffective.

There is, however, an exception to this rule. It is when the escalation of violence is either too dangerous or its outcome is unpredictable, for instance, when the protestors are mothers of large families or when the unemployed citizens of Zhanaozen are demanding to provide them with work places with decent wages.

Nursultan Nazarbayev’s main political opponent of today, Mukhtar Ablyazov, is actively exploiting this weakness. Having chosen (consciously or not) the trolling tactics on the Internet including the constant scheduling of the protest actions in the country, he is throwing the flames into the Kazakh internal political space hoping that, sometime, it might blow up.

Ablyazov also gains political “profit” from the adversarial position when Akorda and the law-enforcement agencies are afraid not so much of the Democratic Choice of Kazakhstan - 2 and its leader as of the fact that some incident may provoke violent civil disturbances. For, by solving the current task of preserving the political stability in the country via the prohibitive and tough actions, the authorities are simultaneously increasing Ablyazov’s political weight in the eyes of foreign observers which minimizes the probability of him ending up on the defendant’s bench again not only in Kazakhstan but in France.

The First President of the Republic of Kazakhstan, his successor and the entire authoritarian system simply cannot act in a different way since, as we have said before, they are very scared of violent civil disturbances that they will have to suppress by force and with numerous fatalities. And, it is quite possible that they may not be able to suppress them at all.

In our opinion, it is this circumstance that became one of the main reasons for the cardinal changes in the state social policy at the end of 2018, of the dismissal of the previous government as well as of Nursultan Nazarbayev’s decision to surrender his presidential powers to Kasym-Zhomart Tokayev.

Unfortunately for Nazarbayev, these half-measures do not help to solve the main problem – the presence of several millions of the “superfluous” people in the country. With that, the likelihood of thousands of foreign investors’ coming to the country and cardinally changing the situation in the national economy in the next couple of years equals zero. Therefore, the Kazakh authorities, regardless of who is in charge, are fated to increase the funding of the social welfare programs simply not to allow for the protest moods to burst into flames.

Given the absence of the drivers for the accelerated growth of the national economy and its qualitative changes, the social and political stagnation in the country may drag on for a couple of decades until the oil process drop, say, twice or three times against the current level and the money from the National Fund of the Republic of Kazakhstan is spent on backing the state budget.

In the worst-case scenario, the blowup may happen no later than tomorrow, and this will not be a revolution or an organized action with a leader of a group of leaders; this will be a spontaneous and violent protestation of the people pushed to the brink. And, at some point, these people would find in themselves and in those standing next to them in the crowd the readiness to respond to violence with violence. And then a riot will break out, nonsensical and ruthless.

The authorities will suppress it, of course, but there will be blood, a lot of blood that may drown those in power.