An Ailing Mining Village Fights For Its Place In 'New Kazakhstan'

BESTOBE, Kazakhstan -- Nikolai Katchiev, a taxi-driving activist in the Kazakh mining village of Bestobe, has a theory as to why a settlement of some 6,000 people that has produced gold for decades is so starved of basic infrastructure.

“They don’t build things, so that people won’t want to live here,” Katchiev, 48, said as his Lada Niva romped over bumps in the village's unpaved roads. “They want us to leave so that the company that controls the gold can expand. No people? No problem!”

For the last two years, residents of Bestobe have been locked in a seemingly existential struggle with Altynalmas, a mining company with many projects across Kazakhstan.

In 2021, after protests caused the company to pause operations at an ore processing plant that villagers blamed for chronic dust pollution, Katchiev was placed under criminal investigation.

The raid on his home that saw police use a ladder to crawl through his teenage son’s bedroom window came shortly after he penned a 13-page appeal to Kazakhstan’s president, Qasym-Zhomart Toqaev, requesting a meeting.

Katchiev asked Toqaev to “[reconsider] the attitude of the state towards such companies and industries, so that the destruction that occurs within our village…does not spread throughout the country.”

Ahead of a snap leadership election called after unrest that left more than 230 people dead at the beginning of the year, Toqaev appears to be finally answering that request -- at least in words.

During a working trip to the Karaganda region earlier this month, the president singled out companies in the mining sector for criticism over capital flight and environmental violations, promising that the “era of oligarchic capitalism is ending.”

“If major industrial firms do not meet [our] demands, we will be forced to end our partnership. This is not a threat, but simple, fair rules, widely accepted in the civilized world,” Toqaev said.

'Nobody Paid Attention'

Not everyone is prepared to believe in Toqaev’s warnings to the super-rich companies and individuals that dominated the economy under his long-ruling predecessor, Nursultan Nazarbaev.

January’s violence exposed a split in the elite, precipitating the fall from grace of several members of the Nazarbaev clan.

Nazarbaev’s nephew, wealthy businessman Kairat Satybaldy, was sentenced on September 26 to six years in jail on embezzlement charges.

The octogenarian former president himself announced his full retirement from political life after the crisis, while speaking in support of Toqaev's reform efforts.

By contrast, Toqaev has moved out of the shadow of a man who handpicked him as a successor in 2019. But he faces a challenge to extend his writ over big business, where his relatives and oligarchs that owe their wealth to the old strongman are everywhere.

For Bestobe, this flux represents an opportunity to be heard.

In April, after more than a year of trying to get him to visit, residents hosted Ermek Marzhikpaev, governor of the northern Akmola region that includes the village, which is located some 250 kilometers northwest of the Kazakh capital, Astana.

Marzhikpaev expressed shock at the condition of Bestobe, those who attended the meeting with the governor told RFE/RL, and allocated funds for road paving and renovations on a local house of culture that began almost immediately.

Most importantly, Marzhikpaev promised to back the village in its opposition to a new open-pit mining development favored by Altynalmas that would leave the vast majority of the 1,200 people currently employed by the company out of work and swallow up scores of houses.

Marzhikpaev’s visit appeared to be directly linked to an edict issued by Toqaev the month before compelling governors and mayors to hold regular meetings with residents, as well as “out-of-schedule” meetings if a given community demands one.

This was a clear response to the January events, which began with peaceful demonstrations against a car-fuel price spike in a depressed provincial town. They later spread nationwide before deadly clashes and looting ensued, leaving hundreds of casualties.

Ever since the meeting, Marzhikpaev has become very popular in Bestobe.

Some residents told RFE/RL they would welcome him as a future president -- a suggestion the bureaucrat would be unlikely to welcome.

“He gave us his word, and so far he has kept it. Before, nobody paid any attention to us at all,” explained Akhmet Zhumabekov, a retired police captain who has lived in the village his whole life.

“In the past, we even joined political parties to try and raise our issues. They didn’t do anything for us,” he told RFE/RL.

Three Generations

For all the near-universal opposition to Altynalmas in the village, Bestobe wears its mining history proudly.

At its main entrance, a yellow model mine cart stands on blue rails, pointing to a tradition of underground gold mining that is already in its third generation in many of the village’s families.

It was the mine that formed the community in the 1930s, when it was part of the Soviet Union.

In the 1980s, Bestobe was a village of about 17,000 people with social infrastructure that included a three-floor hospital, a small power plant, and a sports stadium.

All of it was bankrolled by Kazzoloto, a state mining company.

But today the place where the hospital once stood is covered in weeds, the carcass of the disused power plant stares across the steppe, and a rock-strewn basketball court is the object of jokes.

The mining shafts, too, are empty, except for the intrusion by trespassers who risk their lives to try and chip away for gold.

Altynalmas miners are on paid leave until the future of the mine -- the subject of talks between Marzhikpaev and the company -- is decided.

When Kazakhstan gained independence, companies like Kazzoloto gave way to companies like Altynalmas, which was created on Nazarbaev’s orders in 1993 and later privatized.

For a time, the company was reportedly controlled by Nazarbaev’s son-in-law, Timur Kullibaev. But now its current majority beneficiary is a 32-year-old Dutch citizen of Russian birth, Anna Berezina, who owns a controlling stake in the company via a company registered in the Netherlands called Gouden Reserves.

With Berezina lacking any sort of public profile, Kazakhstan-focused opposition journalists often speculate as to who is really the power behind the company. Speculation inevitably points back to the former ruling family.

Altynalmas inherited the Bestobe gold mine -- along with the problematic ore processing plant that Nazarbaev inaugurated -- when it began buying out another mining company, Kazakhaltyn, in 2019.

Relations with the community swiftly worsened.

Along with pollution, Altynalmas’s plans to abandon the old mining shafts in favor of an open pit lay at the heart of the conflict. An open-cast mine would require far fewer employees and would enable the company to extract more gold in the short-term.

But two retired geologists in Bestobe who met with RFE/RL, Baltabai Muftahidenov and Lyubov Vegner, said the deposit’s structure is more suited to underground mining, and that an open pit could impair long-term access to deeper-lying gold in the future, shortening the life of the mine.

“Investing underground would require proper capital investment but would bring more gain over a longer period. They aren't willing to do that,” said Muftahidenov, whose son is a mine employee and who followed his late father, a disabled World War II veteran, into work there.

“Open pit is all this company knows how to do. If you can’t do something, hand it over to somebody else," added Vegner. "But they just want to scoop from the surface and make as much money as fast as possible.”

Altynalmas did not respond to a request for an in-person interview to discuss the future of the mine, but did send written responses to questions.

Describing itself as “socially oriented,” the company pointed out that it had decided to pay its some 1,200 idled workers wages that are three times the minimum stipulated by law.

The company also said it was “seeking alternatives” to the open-pit development, adding that further work in the mine as it was previously done was complicated by the fact that locals had not given their approval for the construction of a tailings pond.

The gold reserves obtainable by “old methods of mining” have “come to an end,” the company added, noting that Altynalmas had spent more than $150,000 on building and repairing social infrastructure in Bestobe thus far this year.

'Bestobe TV' And New Kazakhstan

Toqaev has promised a “Just Kazakhstan” as he beats a path to a November 22 poll in which he will face five opponents widely considered token candidates, with a seven-year presidential term at stake. He has sworn that, should he win, it will be his last term.

Earlier this year, he signaled a reform drive as part of a “New Kazakhstan" and in June oversaw a constitutional referendum that removed some of Nazarbaev’s exclusive political privileges.

But the continued lack of alternatives at the ballot box for the next vote and the authorities’ deeply conservative stance on freedom of assembly have tempered hopes for real change.

What is certain is that Kazakh society is no longer the same.

Several years ago, it would have been unimaginable for Bestobe and its nearest town, Stepnogorsk, to boast multiple citizen journalists with significant local audiences. But now, even regular interactions with local officials are beamed onto YouTube channels.

Katchiev, who blames his bushy beard on tireless activism, runs a channel that his son helped him set up.

Another citizen journalist, Artyom Sochnev from Stepnogorsk, calls his colleague's videos “Bestobe TV” due to their popularity.

“A lot of Katchiev’s videos get more than 1,000 views. There are provincial TV channels that would envy those numbers!” he joked.

Katchiev, in turn, credits people like Sochnev and, later, national media attention with helping him escape punishment in the case that saw him and a fellow activist accused of spreading false information about Altynalmas’s operations.

At one point, the pair was facing jail time, but the charges were lightened and the judge applied an amnesty to the sentences immediately, sparing them even conditional punishments.

“The case gained a lot of resonance, but they couldn’t acquit us completely because then the system would look weak,” Katchiev said of the June ruling.

But Katchiev’s co-defendant, Aleksandra Nazarenko, fell ill from stress during the trial and has stepped back from public life.

Like Bestobe, the activist argues that the future of civil society in Kazakhstan is on a knife's-edge.

“If just one or two of us speak out, they will use the old methods to punish us. But if we speak up as a community, they will have to listen,” Katchiev told RFE/RL.