President of Kazakhstan's book "The Kazakhstan Way"
Modern Kazakhstan is the success story of central Asia, and a power that counts not merely regionally but globally.
The ninth biggest country in the world, Kazakhstan stretches from Europe to China, supplying from vast resources its petroleum and gas by pipeline to Western markets via the Mediterranean and the Black Sea, and simultaneously to China.
Economically, politically and socially Kazakhstan is increasingly recognised as an exemplar of prosperity, sound management, national – albeit ethnically diverse – cohesion, and international sagacity befitting its pivotal geo-political position.
Critical to this reputation has been its President, from that virtually unforeseeable moment in 1991 when Kazakhstan won independence from the collapsing USSR: Nursultan Nazarbayev.
With the repeated democratic endorsement of his constitutional mandate as President, the 67-year-old author of The Kazakhstan Way lays out in this highly readable work his detailed analysis and testament of what has guided him to guide – and indeed shape – his nation, and the principles of governance that he seeks to ensure for the evolution of Kazakhstan in the years ahead.
Author:
Born into a family of transhumant herders of eastern Kazakhstan in July 1940 – his mother working a hectare of sugarbeet and fearful of the wolves – Nursultan Nazarbayev’s education began with his walking 6km to school in all weathers after rising at 5am to tend the cattle. His first paid employment was at the blast furnace of Termitau’s steel-works.
He was soon to enter the political scene, by the only possible route under Soviet colonial rule, as Party Secretary of Karaganda’s metallurgical Kombinat.
Graduating from Karaganda’s Polytechnic in 1967, within five years he had become Party head of Kazakhstan Magnita. By 1980, a year before Mikhail Gorbachev’s accession to power in the Kremlin, young Nazarbayev was Secretary of the Central Committee of the Kazakh Communist Party; and in 1984 Chairman of the Council of Ministers, making him – at 44 – effectively Prime Minister.
The author’s candidacy for the Presidency of an independent Kazakhstan in 1991 was massively endorsed by the ballot-box – an endorsement since repeated. He was to steer his new country through the turmoil of the rouble crisis of the mid-1990s to a market economy and into rising prosperity and industrial diversity. The country today plays a major role in regional affairs politically and global affairs economically.
He is married to Sara Alpysovna, and has two daughters and a step-daughter.
