Russia–Kazakhstan Relations in the Early Post-Soviet Era: Explaining the Roots of Cooperation

Christopher A. Stevens

Europe-Asia Studies, 2020, vol. 72, issue 7, 1153-1185

Abstract: After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Kazakhstan was faced with domestic conditions that made cooperation with Russia rational. Kazakhstan inherited a large ethnic Russian population and a severe economic depression. These conditions affected other countries emerging from the Soviet Union, but only Belarus matched Kazakhstan’s level of strategic cooperation with Russia. President Nursultan Nazarbaev’s dominance of Kazakhstan’s national security agenda offers a partial explanation for the cooperation, but we still need to ask what makes him different from the leaders of other post-Soviet countries that faced the same conditions. Kazakhstan’s pattern of historical development provides the key to understanding the cooperation. The timing of the country’s contact and experiences with the Russian-led empires led to a ‘dominant ally’ image of Russia that continues to decide the two countries’ relationship to the present day.

Date: 2020
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/09668136.2020.1719979 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:ceasxx:v:72:y:2020:i:7:p:1153-1185

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/ceas20

DOI: 10.1080/09668136.2020.1719979

Access Statistics for this article

Europe-Asia Studies is currently edited by Terry Cox

More articles in Europe-Asia Studies from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().