Resultados finales

It has been asserted that in order to legitimise and consolidate his political position amidst the post-Soviet chaos, the Kazakh president Nursultan Nazarbayev has relied heavily on thezhuz-hordes system, the logic of which is based in pre-Soviet structures. The Kazakh hordes were largely ‘political-communal aggregates that were also understood through kinship, although their origins owed little to blood relations’ (Schatz 2001: 20). The traditionally nomadic Kazakh society was divided into three major hordes – separate confederations of nomadic tribes each ruled by their own elected khan – in which membership closely corresponded to distinct geographical areas: the younger or lesser horde [kishi zhuz] occupied the western and central regions (including Kyzrloda), the middle horde [orta zhuz] occupied the northern as well as the central regions, and the

elder or greater horde [uly zhuz] controlled eastern and southeastern Kazakhstan

(including Almaty and Shimkent). Nazarbayev’s alleged strength lies in his ability to ensure that all zhuz receive equal representation in the top levels of government. In addition, he abstains from inter-zhuz struggles for political domination by reserving for himself the position of an arbiter, a power broker. At the end of the 1990s, the

composition of the country’s power structure – when viewed through zhuz lenses – looked as follows: ‘President Nazarbayev [Elder zhus], Chairman of the Senate O. Baigeldi [Elder zhus], Prime Minister N. Balgimbayev [Younger zhus], Chairman of the Majilis M. Ospanov [Middle zhus] and State Secretary A. Kekil’baev [Younger zhus]’ (Hoffman Fall 2000: 245).

Proponents of the zhuz approach point to the fact that Nazarbayev did not revive some old, pre-modern political culture, but rather continued to build on the political system that developed in the Soviet Kazakhstan in the form of traditional structures, which merged and co-existed with the Leninist regime (Schatz 2000: 162; Schatz 2004: 98–103), in order to strengthen their point. That is to say, the politics in Soviet times were largely controlled by traditional zhuz leaders behind a façade of Communist Party organisation. Nurbulat Masanov, a late Kazakh political scientist turned political activist, noted that Dinmukhammed Kunaev, who ruled Kazakhstan throughout Brezhnev’s era (1964–1986), was partly able to stay in power for a period of more than twenty years because he surrounded himself with party functionaries from the youngerzhuzwho could not seriously compete with him for power, due to their insufficient influence in the capital (itself partly because of their traditional place of residence in the countryside). At

the same time, his main rivals from the middle zhuz were allowed to occupy various

secondary positions, such as chairman of the council of ministers and secretaries of the

oblast party committees, but were not promoted to any sort of position in the Central Committee Bureau of the Kazakhstan Communist Party.23

In recent years, a number of studies – explicitly and implicitly – have reinforced the argument concerning the key positions that the zhuz system plays in Kazakh post- Soviet life by trying to understand the ways in which pre-Soviet social organisations survived and adapted to the Soviet reality on the local community level in Kazakhstan and the other Central Asian republics. It has been argued that the Soviet project did not eradicate these traditional social structures, but rather forced them to adapt to the formal institutions. According to Kathleen Collins, ‘clan structure and identity should be more likely to survive repression than other, more institutionalised identities, such as Islam’ 23

Nurbulat Masanov, ‘Perception of Ethnic and All-National Identity in Kazakhstan,’IDE-JETRO, ‘The Nationalities Question in Post-Soviet Kazakhstan’, 51, March 2002; Nurbulat Masanov, ‘The role of clans in Kazakhstan today,’ inPrism, 4 (3), 6 February 1998.

(1999: 133). Bolsheviks could shut down mosques, but they could not shut down clans. Moreover, even though the Soviets treated Central Asia as a special base of resource extraction, there was little overall modernisation carried out there. Instead, both Lenin and Stalin reinforced feudal-like relations, in which the majority of the native population worked for little compensation, effectively creating a situation in which clan networks remained vital for the survival of many (Alimov 1994: 14–17). Moreover the outsiders, namely the Russians and Slavs, lived in the capital and in other big cities, whereas the native populations lived in the countryside and were largely non-integrated, with little regular contact between the two groups, which enabled traditional structures to coexist with the Soviet regime in the peripheries.

It was suggested that the most important factor in sustaining clan structures was ‘the process of regionalizing and territorializing pre-Soviet clan and tribal groups within Soviet administrative and political structures [which] left a particular legacy for the transition at both the elite and mass level (…) [reinforcing] the traditional clan-based organization of society and politics’ (Schatz 2000: 166). Edward Schatz further asserted that ‘the Soviet state was critically responsible for the perpetuation and politicisation of clan divisions in Central Asia’ (2001: 7). Moreover, the command economy recreated subethnic clan divisions as networks of access to goods in short supply, and political patronage ‘continued along subethnic lines long after the countryside had been Sovietised’ (2001: 13; see also Roy 2000: 89–94). In the 1990s, the clans – which are especially likely to be active in the periods of transition or economic hardship, and hence during times of uncertainty when the state is unable to perform its basic functions – came back into the open (Collins 1999: 134). Some argued that clans filled the post-Soviet void and consequently emerged strengthened out of the collapse of the Soviet regime (Collins 2002; Schatz 2000).

The zhuz-horde, tribe, and clan-based explanations of the political structures in post-Soviet Kazakhstan and studies that deal with the way in which pre-Soviet institutions survived ‘Soviet assault’ (Zelkina 2003: 96) imply that in order to maintain in power, the Kazakh regime has been prone to relying on informal techniques of regime maintenance which have their roots in the country’s distinctive tradition. This thesis attempts to broaden our understanding of the ways in which the regime sustains itself in a

dominant position, as it analyses the regime oil–industry relationships through the prism of alternative tools – primarily formal (corporatism) and informal (patron–clientelism), which were also widely employed in the Soviet Union. It is important to stress that this thesis does not argue that zhuz or clan affiliations do not play any role, but rather that different approaches can bring to the open mechanisms that get lost or are omitted in more traditionally based explanations. This study it should be added, is not the first one to propose a move from thezhuz-hordes, tribe, clan-based approaches.

David I. Hoffman, for instance, pointed out that in post-Soviet Kazakhstan many

ties supposedly based on zhuz connections could also be explained by ‘regional

affiliations, kinship ties, or Soviet-era associations, be they ‘‘Komsomol connections’’ between Soviet-era schoolmates, professional associations gained while working in the state economy, or political connections forged within the CPSU’ (Fall 2000: 246). Similarly, Sally N. Cummings argues that zhuz ‘may best be understood as only one of many techniques of power maintenance’ (2005: 100). Some anthropologists went one step further, suggesting that the role of thezhuz in post-Soviet Kazakh politics has been grossly overstated.

Joma Nazpary stated that ‘although the Kazakh elite regional divisions coincide with the old Zhuz divisions, the Zhuz [in the post-Soviet period] no longer existed as a form of social organisation but only as a myth’ (2002: 8). Shirin Akiner asserted that under Soviet rule, ‘traditional structures were weakened to such extent that if they retained any power at all (and whether they did or not is still matter of debate), it was largely in the informal, private sphere’ (1995: 44). In addition to that, she goes to say that modern ‘clans’ ‘drew on a wide range of social relationships, such as, for example, school-friends, military service comrades, neighbours, people from the same town, work, Komsomol and Party contacts’ (1995: 53). Finally, zhuz-based explanations imply that post-Soviet Kazakhstan abandoned the Soviet institutions and began building new ones based on traditional structures. Yet this assumption has been recently also called into question by Luong, who argues:

The process of state-building in Central Asia (…) challenges the presumption that the CARs were merely colonies of the Soviet Union and would thus reject Soviet policies and institutions after independence.

These states are neither being built from scratch nor being rebuilt based on pre-Soviet or traditional structures. Rather, the Central Asian leaders have consciously employed templates from their Soviet past as well as the international present and often vigorously pursue Soviet policies that counter Western political and economic prescriptions. (24: 2004)

Arguably, this cursory discussion validates the direction which this thesis attempts to take, namely to shift from zhuz-horde, clan explanations to other possible tools of regime maintenance. Despite the scepticism towards the role of the zhuz, this study acknowledges that the lack of a thorough analysis of the role that these affiliations could possibly play in regime oil–industry relationships is a considerable shortcoming. Hence, this thesis should be seen as a starting point for further studies of the oil industry, including detailed ethnographic work on the Kazakh oil industry power structures, rather than a decisive statement on the Kazakh regime oil–industry relationship.