How Kazakhstan became more Kazakh

LIKE MOST autocrats Nursultan Nazarbayev, who ruled Kazakhstan for three decades, thought a lot about how best to honour himself. The 81-year-old resigned as president in 2019 and took on a role pulling strings from behind the scenes, but not before ensuring that the capital city would bear his name. At the start of January days of unrest and violence forced Kassym-Zhomart Tokayev, his successor as president, to promise wide-ranging changes to the regime Mr Nazarbayev had built. But one part of the older man’s legacy will not be easy to undo: the dramatic demographic transformation of the country which he engineered during his decades in power.