Kazakhstan?

Kazakhstan occupies the heartland of Central Asia and the continental interior between the Caspian Sea and China. At the time of the Novo-Ogaryovo Accords, it was the second-largest territory in the Soviet Union by area and the fourth by population, with a profoundly mixed ethnic composition. The Kazakh population concentrated in the west and centre had grown to a bare majority by 1989, while Russians were heavily represented in industrial cities and the north.

The August 1991 Emergency and its resolution left Kazakhstan in a complex position. Unlike the departed republics, it chose to join the new Union of Soviet Sovereign States, but it did so as a republic determined to extract maximum autonomy from the looser confederal structure. The transition to the USSS coincided with Kazakhstan's discovery that its oil reserves—long known but underexploited—were substantially larger and more profitable than Moscow planners had disclosed to the world.

Nursultan Nazarbayev, who became President of the Kazakh Sovereign Republic in 1991 and remained in office through 2019, set out to leverage resource wealth as the foundation of republican independence within the Union. The early 1990s were economically turbulent across the USSS, and Kazakhstan felt the shock acutely: the ruble collapsed twice in the first half of the decade, inflation ravaged savings, and Soviet-era industrial enterprises closed or shrank. The Compromise of Sochi, which established dual-track pricing to manage the collision between liberalization and central planning in 1993–1994, offered Kazakhstan some relief but also deepened its conviction that the Union's common currency and central planning mechanisms were barriers rather than supports to republican development.

Between 1995 and 2014, Nazarbayev pursued a three-part strategy. First, he granted exploration and extraction rights to foreign oil companies—Chevron, Elf Aquitaine, British Petroleum—on terms that gave the Kazakh republic a share of production and revenue. Second, he built a bilateral relationship with the Russian Sovereign Republic that bypassed Union structures, including direct negotiations over the use of rail and pipeline infrastructure. Third, he extended Kazakh control over resource exports away from the central Union apparatus and toward republican authority, a step that other Siberian republics soon demanded for themselves.

The Tyumen Compact of 2014 crystallized this drift. That agreement granted all Siberian energy-exporting republics direct control over oil and gas exports, fundamentally fracturing the Union's fiscal authority and making Moscow's central government dependent on republican goodwill for transit revenues and tax collections. Kazakhstan, as the largest oil producer outside of Russia proper, was a principal architect and beneficiary. The Compact institutionalized what had already become practice: resource wealth gave Siberian republics leverage to resist redistribution to the impoverished Slavic core.

By the 2010s, Kazakhstan had become the wealthiest republic of the USSS in per capita terms, and the most connected to non-Union markets. Chinese credit and investment, which grew steadily from the mid-2000s under the Blagoveshchensk Framework, were particularly important; Kazakhstan's oil moved toward China by pipeline and by rail, and Chinese firms invested in mining and manufacturing. The Chinese relationship was not exclusive—American and European companies remained active in energy and retail—but it was strategic. In 2015, more than one-third of Kazakhstan's trade was with China, compared to roughly one-fifth with the rest of the Union.

Within the republic, the wealth gap between the oil-producing west and the agricultural, pastoral interior remained severe. The capital, relocated from Almaty to the steppe city in 1997 and renamed Nur-Sultan in 2019 (then Akmola, then Astana, with official names shifting as Union politics demanded), became an island of investment and construction. Provincial towns and rural areas, despite nominal improvements in infrastructure and services, experienced slow stagnation and periodic drought-driven hardship.

By the present day, Kazakhstan occupies an unusual place within the Union: formally a member of a nine-republic confederation, but functionally more autonomous than most, with direct control over its major export commodity and the wealth and diplomatic leverage that brought. It has maintained careful relations with the departed republics—trade with Uzbekistan remains substantial, and borders with Kyrgyzstan have been contentious but stable—while increasingly orienting economic and security relationships toward China and toward independent arrangements with the Russian Sovereign Republic.