Kazakhstan’s Last Stand: The Final Days of the USSR
In 1990, the USSR, already grappling with a myriad of challenges, began to disintegrate in earnest. Lithuania was the first to secede, followed by a cascade of states until December 1991. At this point, only the Russian, Belarusian, and Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republics remained. Belarus declared its independence on December 10th, and two days later, Russia, the main component of the USSR, also left. This left Kazakhstan as the sole remaining state in the USSR, a status it maintained for four days until it too chose to secede.
This sequence of events raises an intriguing question: why was Kazakhstan the last to leave the USSR? As the Soviet Union was falling apart, a power struggle emerged between Mikhail Gorbachev, President of the Soviet Union, who sought to preserve the USSR, and Boris Yeltsin, the Chairman of the Russian Supreme Soviet, who desired an independent, non-communist Russia. Yeltsin was actively dismantling the USSR’s ministries and bureaucracies and was in discussions with the Belarusian and Ukrainian leaders. These discussions culminated in the Belavezha Accords, which repealed the founding document of the USSR between the three countries and established a successor state, the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS).
In the Kazakh Soviet Republic, this development sparked outrage. Unlike Ukraine, Kazakhstan was still a member of the Soviet Union, and no one had consulted them. Furthermore, there were numerous legal questions regarding whether these three countries had the authority to dissolve a sovereign state. The Kazakh leader, Nursultan Nazarbayev, was dispatched to Moscow by the other Central Asian states to seek a compromise. While all except Kazakhstan had left the USSR, many still desired close cooperation with Russia. However, their leaders were elected within the Soviet framework, and abolishing the USSR might have undermined their legitimacy. They attempted to mediate between Yeltsin’s independence and Gorbachev’s return to the USSR as it was before. This effort was unsuccessful, and on December 12th, Russia left the USSR, leaving only Kazakhstan.
During this time, Kazakhstan was engaged in two main activities. First, it was negotiating with Russia to allow Central Asian states into the new CIS, which they hoped would operate more like the USSR than a mere trading bloc. Second, they were laying the groundwork to become an independent country in case everything fell apart. This included changing the name of the Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic to the Republic of Kazakhstan. However, it was still technically the sole remaining state in the USSR.
So, how did things like foreign relations work during this period? Did Kazakhstan have to represent the USSR at the United Nations or take on its foreign obligations? The answer is no. The USSR’s president and leader were still in the same Moscow office as before, so all international discussions were conducted there. Gorbachev was still the president of the USSR, if it still existed, that is. Things were moving so quickly that very few people knew exactly what was happening internationally. Many countries recognized the independence of Russia and Belarus from the Soviet Union, and thus tacitly acknowledged that Kazakhstan was still a part of it. However, nobody cared, and everybody knew that the Soviet Union was effectively finished, and there was nothing that the Kazakhs could have done about it.
This is why, four days after Russia left, Kazakhstan did the same. It wasn’t that they were holding out or trying to take on the USSR’s mantle. It was just a vain hope that by remaining in the Soviet Union, Kazakhstan would maintain a good relationship with Gorbachev, whose role in the future was unknown. Nazarbayev was a close friend of the president and similarly wanted to preserve the union. But when it became clear that this wasn’t going to happen, Kazakhstan did the same as everyone else and formally left the USSR. Ten days later, to formalize its dissolution, the leaders of the newly independent states met in the Kazakh capital and formally declared the USSR defunct, with Russia becoming its formal successor state.
