In this chapter, I dwell on regime–society – rather than classical state–society – relations and argue that the state and political power (vlast’ in Russian) is represented for many citizens by the authoritarian regime and its main dictator. I contend that to analyse these relations, we need to study how they are understood and practised in a given case. Thus, the chapter represents an in–depth analysis of activists’ and citizens’ perceptions of their positions vis–à–vis the regime, the lack of the rule of law, and conditions of socio–political insecurity. In these conditions, the ‘stability’ of everyday life and the established system of values – economic capital, incentives to normalize corruption, and so on – represent a crucial backbone to regime stability, where coercion is not the prime mechanism available to the elites. The logic of Kazakh Spring and Oyan, Qazaqstan activists is to fight against institutionalized authoritarianism and this system of authoritarian values and perceptions of ‘power’ as something embodied in the figures of autocrats. This shift is a new feature of the protest waves of the Kazakh Spring, and it potentially makes it more viable and sustained.

In January 2022, mass protests spread quickly across the whole of Kazakhstan, becoming the largest mass mobilization in the country’s modern history. Prior to these events, Kazakhstan was considered a stable authoritarian regime: President Nursultan Nazarbayev’s thirty-year rule established a system of patronal networks, institutionalized corruption, and authoritarianism that crushed any form of dissent and opposition. What, then, led to this unprecedented mass mobilization, which unified the country’s fourteen regions and three major cities in protest against the regime? This chapter analyses the mass protests through the framework of regime–society relations, arguing that a key failure of the regime built by Nazarbayev is its inability to reconcile the regime’s neoliberal prosperity rhetoric with citizens’ calls for a welfare state. It then explores how a tradition of protests has been developing since 2011 and addresses the structural components of regime (in)stability and how they contributed to violence in the protests.