Talk:Kazakhstan

Surplus

• Moreover, some of the biggest planning disasters in the world occurred in Soviet agriculture, notably with cotton production in Soviet Central Asia, a sphere in which rampant corruption, and the serious misreporting of production statistics, vied with fundamental environmental degradation not least due to excessive irrigation that caused the exhaustion of the Aral Sea. These problems were a major issue for Mikhail Gorbachev who, in the early 1980s, was the Politburo member responsible for agriculture. Environmental issues included the whisking into the air, as injurious dust, of dried out soil contaminated by chemical fertilisers. This led to an increase of birth defects among Uzbek and Turkmen children. The children living in eastern Kazakhstan were afflicted with such horrors due to the aftermath of nuclear bomb tests.
  • Jeremy Black, The Cold War: A Military History (2015)

• There are approximately 3.5 million Orthodox Christians in Kazakhstan, about 18 percent of the population. Most of them are ethnic Russians, and those behind the autocephaly drive want them to use the Kazakh language and identify completely with the Kazakhstan government rather than show any allegiance to Moscow.
  • Paul A. Goble, "Some Orthodox in Kazakhstan Seek Independence from Moscow Patriarchate", Window on Eurasia (December 13, 2023)

• I have always been and remain a sincere supporter of the well-known formula – "Economy first, then politics". This principle is comprehensive, extending to both domestic and foreign policy of our country. This approach ensured consistency in all spheres of Kazakhstan's development, i.e. from economic reforms to building pragmatic relations with partners in the international arena.
  • Nursultan Nazarbayev, "Speech At Moscow State University" (2014)

• Perhaps one of those factors will be implemented in the coming three or four years. Kazakhstan needs to get ready in order not to miss this moment and to take advantage of the benefits that one or the other situation will bring. To do that, the country needs continued focus on structural reforms, improvement in infrastructure and innovation development in high-tech and low-tech sectors. These will help the country to regain its positions.
  • EBRD Associate Director and regional lead economist Dr. Agris Preimanis, The Astana Times (February 3, 2016), "EBRD Advises Kazakhstan to Focus on Preparing for Better Times"

• Only four countries in history have surrendered their nuclear weapons. And three of those countries—Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Ukraine—did so with nuclear arms that they inherited from the defunct Soviet Union, and didn’t have the wherewithal to control and maintain. (The decision to dispose of this weaponry, in exchange for support from the United States and security assurances from Russia, is still remarkable; had Ukraine and Kazakhstan kept the arsenals on their territory, they would have become the world’s third- and fourth-largest nuclear powers, respectively.)
  • Uri Friedman, "Why One President Gave Up His Country's Nukes". The Atlantic, (9 September 2017).

• [Central Asian folk Islamic religious movement] Ata Zholy was founded in Kazakhstan in 1999 by Kadyrali Tarybaev (1961–2009), and registered as a travel agency organizing Islamic pilgrimages to various sites in Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan. Its local groups are called “hordes.” The most popular Ata Zholy pilgrimage is to the mausoleums of the Five Forefathers, religious and national figures who lived between the 18th and the 20th century and gave to Kazakhstan its ethnic and religious identity, located in the Zhambyl District of the Almaty region.
  • Massimo Introvigne, "Ata Zholy: Crackdown on a Kazakh Islamic Religious Movement in Russia", Bitter Winter (August 16, 2022)

• Ukraine, Kazakhstan and Belarus, three states of the former Soviet Union that have nuclear arms on their territory, formally agreed with the United States and Russia today to give up those weapons by the end of the decade and not to seek nuclear arms again. In a wordless, austere ceremony in the barroom of a Lisbon hotel, Secretary of State James A. Baker III and officials of Russia and the three other nuclear-armed former Soviet republics signed a protocol, or legal supplement, to the 1991 Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START), pledging to carry out its terms. They thus laid the groundwork for ratification of the landmark START treaty and for permitting negotiations to go ahead between the United States and Russia for deeper cutbacks in nuclear arms. The full significance of the occasion, which took months of difficult negotiation to arrange, went far beyond the pale legalism of the six-page documents the diplomats signed. Today's ceremony was a hard-won milestone in a mostly invisible, yet intense diplomatic struggle to maintain control over the world's largest and most awesome array of long-range nuclear weapons, as the Soviet Union, the nation that created and held them during the decades of the Cold War, splintered into more than a dozen parts.
  • Don Oberdorfer, “3 EX-SOVIET STATES TO GIVE UP A-ARMS”, Washington Post, May 24, 1992