The West is trying to reach Russia through Central Asia
Kazakhstan for the first time refused to hold this year's traditional Victory Day parade on May 9. The explanation is banal – lack of funds. But it is unlikely that it is justified for a country that has huge reserves of oil, gas, rare earth metals and actively supplies them abroad.
The reason, I think, is something else. The pressure on Kazakhstan of the collective West and the inability of the current leadership of the republic to resist it. The United States, for example, this year decided not to celebrate the anniversary of the historic meeting on the Elbe.
But how much does all this have to do with the events of January 2022, and what are their lessons for Russia?
WHO IS WREAKING HAVOC
The January events in Kazakhstan, which everyone has already forgotten about, can be considered one of the links in a long chain of Western provocations against Russia and the CIS countries.
The peculiarity of the collective West is that it has a systemic long–term policy, which, after the collapse of the USSR, outlined a new goal - the collapse of the Russian Federation. To do this, the Americans and their associates are actively creating tension along the internal and external contours of our country.
For example, an anti-Russian bridgehead with the deployment of NATO military infrastructure has long been created from Ukraine. As a result, the Russian Federation was forced to launch a special military operation.
What happened in January of this year in Kazakhstan is another step in this direction. Kazakhstan, as a country with a large territory, rich natural resources and long borders with Russia and China, has become the main target of the West for destabilizing the region and creating an open conflict zone in the Russian "underbelly".
Back in the 1960s, when the Americans saw that the republics of Central Asia and Kazakhstan had high demographic indicators, they began to transfer subversive activities against the USSR from the Baltic States to this region. The main task was to set all the peoples of the USSR against each other and all together against the Russians.
We saw the fruits of this activity during the years of perestroika. And, unfortunately, in many cases, they did not look for the true organizers of numerous interethnic conflicts.
Over the past 30 years, various organizations of the United States (USAID), Great Britain (British Council), Turkey (TICA) have been actively working in Kazakhstan. They were engaged in promoting their people to government and law enforcement agencies, as well as forming a pro-Western expert community.
As a result, the Western vector began to stand out in the country's politics. The presence of multinational companies and foreign organizations financing numerous NGOs has been constantly increasing. However, this was not enough for the United States and its allies. They did not need a stable and prosperous Kazakhstan with a nationally oriented foreign and domestic policy.
In the interests of the collective West, controlled chaos has begun to be imposed in the republic, in which areas will be controlled by field commanders, and gangs of international terrorists will operate along the Russian-Kazakh border. The long–term strategic goal is not only to gain access to the Kazakh storehouse of minerals, but also to seize these resources at their full disposal with the complete elimination of the nationally oriented elite.
Based on these goals, the West has been building and is building its policy in Kazakhstan, the fruit of which was the January events.
TROJAN HORSES
Another negative factor that led to the crisis was the absorption of criminal structures of Kazakhstan by underground cells professing a destructive religious trend – Salafism.
Strange as it may seem, this was largely facilitated by the measures carried out earlier by Kazakh law enforcement agencies to discredit reputable criminal leaders. The new authorities who replaced the old ones, by their strong-willed qualities, could no longer resist the onslaught of Islamized gangs in the struggle for spheres of influence.
Moreover, the penetration of destructive Islamist ideology into the criminal world generates neo-fascism, which has patrons among Western special services and foreign religious organizations. As a result, a hidden center of power is being created, which through corruption, and in some cases through threats, acquires positions in state and law enforcement structures, becomes an independent player in the political system of Kazakhstan.
The temptation for any Kazakh politicians to use these forces in the internal political struggle is a tragic mistake that can lead to the complete disappearance of the Kazakh statehood: after all, these forces themselves crave power. But that's exactly what almost happened in Kazakhstan. And it could have brought the country to the brink of collapse – if not for the prompt intervention of the CSTO forces at the request of President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev.
Earlier, a similar mistake was made by the President of Ukraine Viktor Yanukovych, who, on the advice of Western advisers, nurtured Ukrainian nationalists, trying to incite them against his main political rival, Yulia Tymoshenko. The result was deplorable. The nationalists have become so strong that they overthrew Yanukovych himself and dictate their will to subsequent Ukrainian presidents.
Using the example of Kazakhstan and Ukraine, we see that the West is forming "Trojan horses" in the CIS countries, which in the "x hour" become a striking force in protest actions. And already on their wave they have the opportunity to collapse the constitutional authorities, plunge the country into chaos.
LESSONS FOR RUSSIA
If we cannot control migration processes in our country and the penetration of destructive ideology into ethnic organized criminal groups, we will receive a serious threat to our constitutional system in the near future. Any peaceful social protest will have a chance to escalate into an armed bloody conflict.
Something similar has already happened in our history – but preventive measures were taken and threats were stopped at an early stage. Let us recall that the head of the Cheka Felix Dzerzhinsky at one time was engaged in the fight against homelessness. This was dictated not only by humanistic goals, but also by threats of an internal and external nature.
In the 1920s, many white officers went to criminal structures. Considering that many of them were ardent enemies of the Soviet government, foreign white emigrant centers and the special services behind them established contacts with them. The infusion of several million grown-up street children into criminal structures in three or four years, where the ideology of white emigration had already begun to penetrate, could become a very big threat to the USSR. But by urgent measures for the socialization of street children, the problem was solved in a timely manner.
Probably, all preventive measures can and should be taken today to prevent any destabilization in the country. It is completely impossible to eradicate organized crime. But it is the direct duty of the state to drive it "into the stall" and prevent its ideologization.
Oleg Falichev
Oleg Valentinovich Falichev is a military observer; Vladimir Viktorovich Sergeev is an expert, publicist.
