The demonstrations were organized at the behest of foreign-based opposition figure Mukhtar Ablyazov.

With all the quiet chaos beneath the surface in Moscow, Beijing seems poised to benefit.

Muratkhan Tokmadi was sentenced March 16 to 10 1/2 years in a maximum-security prison for murdering the chair of the BTA Bank Yerzhan Tatishev during a hunt in 2004. It is the second verdict in the case that had been previously qualified as manslaughter by negligence.

Facebook and Telegram have been malfunctioning since an opposition movement was labelled extremist.

Russia and other authoritarian states are gaming the system to go after dissidents.

Lawmakers in Kazakhstan have approved an agreement allowing the United States to use two of the nation’s Caspian Sea ports as transit points for shipping nonmilitary material to Afghanistan.

Russia is rapidly losing its traditional leverage in Kazakhstan. Not only is demographic change swiftly reducing the share of ethnic Russians in the population, but the government in Astana is promoting the Latinization of the Kazakh alphabet (see EDM, April 25) and a new and more radical generation of Kazakh nationalists is coming to the fore.

Nor was it a triumph of democracy

Freedom of the press, a devastating landslide, meeting a manaschi, and a special bonus; weekend reads.