Home › Books & Reviews › Capsule Reviews › Kazakhstan: Unfulfilled Promise

Kazakhstan: Unfulfilled Promise

Martha Brill Olcott
Reviewed by By Robert Legvold
March/April 2002
Print Email
Login or Register to leave a comment.

Sign-up for free weekly updates from ForeignAffairs.com.
Martha Brill Olcott
Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
2002
310 pp.
0870031899
$44.00

Kazakhstan is a country three-quarters the size of western Europe, with oil reserves second only to those in Russia and the Persian Gulf, but the Western scholar who knows the country best doubts its chances. Olcott is far from writing it off, but she fears that an increasingly imperious and venal leadership has set the wrong course. Not daring to deal with the country's deep ethnic divides, its weak sense of identity, and its growing socioeconomic inequalities by giving society a political stake, the president and his cohort have essentially appropriated the state and much of the economy. They have done so, Olcott adds, not merely for selfish reasons but with the mistaken notion that stability can best be preserved that way. Her account of what has happened to independent Kazakhstan in its first ten years not only shares the lucid insights and depth of a seasoned observer, it also greatly enriches the literature on post-Soviet transitions.

Related

Essay, Nov/Dec 1998
OPEC as Omen
Jahangir Amuzegar

The next great oil boom is on: four former Soviet republics on the Caspian Sea are sitting atop an economic bonanza. But they should remember the fate of OPEC, whose members squandered their 1970s windfall. Where did all the money go? The state took on too dominant an economic role and wasted the wealth at home in a rash of boondoggle projects and military buildups. All OPEC members came down with "quick-money fever." They became addicted to supposedly limitless oil revenues even as boom turned to bust. The Caspian states, too, risk going from riches to rags if they do not resist the temptations of petromania.

Read
Snapshot, August 20, 2010
Reimagining Eurasia
Samuel Charap and Alexandros Petersen

The United States may have reset its Russia policy, but the U.S. approach to the other states in the region is in dire need of a conceptual revolution.

Read
Essay, Sep/Oct 2001
Russia's Unformed Foreign Policy
Robert Legvold

Although Russia has projected itself more forcefully on the world stage since the beginning of the Putin era, its foreign policy still lacks any sort of grand strategic vision. Russian leaders continue to squabble over issues from NATO expansion to the world economy. But they are particularly concerned about Russia's identity, especially with regard to the post-Soviet states. If the Bush administration fails to devise a coherent policy of its own toward its former rival, it may face serious problems down the road.

Read