Nursultan Nazarbayev
Nursultan Nazarbayev gave up the fourth largest nuclear arsenal in the world and ruled Kazakhstan for twenty-eight years. He was a steelworker at the Karaganda combine who rose through the party to run the Kazakh republic in 1989. He opposed the dissolution of the Soviet Union to the end - Kazakhstan was the last republic to declare independence, in December 1991, days before the union ceased to exist - and then had to build a state out of a territory the size of western Europe with a population that was more Russian than Kazakh in its northern half. The arsenal was the first problem. Some fourteen hundred warheads and the Semipalatinsk test site, where four hundred and fifty devices had been detonated over forty years with the surrounding population unwarned, were on Kazakh soil. He closed the site in 1991 and gave up every warhead by 1995 in exchange for security guarantees and investment. He moved the capital from Almaty to a small northern town in 1997, rebuilt it at enormous expense, and renamed it after himself in 2019. Oil made the country the richest in Central Asia and the wealth concentrated around his family. There was no succession mechanism and no opposition to speak of: elections returned him with margins above ninety per cent, and journalists and opponents were prosecuted or worse. He resigned in 2019 into a role designed to keep the power without the office, and in 2022 that arrangement collapsed in a week of riots over fuel prices, after which his successor removed the family, the title and the city's new name.
- Lived: 1940 CE – ?
- Nationality: Kazakh
- Roles: head_of_state, politician
