Two statues toppled, two worlds apart. In Bristol, a jury acquits protesters who vandalised a monument to Edward Colston, an 18th-century philanthropist whose fortune was built on the slave trade. In Kazakhstan, a huge effigy of the dictator Nursan Nazabayev is torn down by demonstrators engaged in a fight to the death between people power and a police state.

Here in Britain, arguments over statues are about who owns the past. In this oil-rich yet dirt-poor Central Asian republic, the battles are very much about the present. This is a popular uprising against the brutal, corrupt and authoritarian elite that has ruled Kazakhstan since the fall of the Soviet Union. They fled to Moscow by private jet as protesters died in the streets.

As if to underline the geopolitical significance of the Kazak revolution, Russian airborne forces poured in to support the regime, now led by President Tokayev. He appealed for help to crush “international terrorists”, although it seems clear that protests in the capital, Almaty, and elsewhere were sparked by a dramatic rise in petrol prices. 

In Kazakhstan, even more than in the West, the politics of energy are explosive. In this vast land of just 19 million people that stretches from the Caspian Sea to China, transport is crucial and average monthly wages are just £400. Clashes have been reported all over the country, as simmering resentment of the Communist Party and its 81-year-old leader, Nazabayev, boiled over this week.

All indications are that the revolution caught Vladimir Putin off guard, but he has been quick to order military intervention by the Collective Security Treaty Organisation (CTSO), a bloc of six post-Soviet states led by Moscow. It is unclear how large this “peacekeeping” operation will be, but it comes at a time when the Kremlin has been engaged in a poker game with the West over Ukraine. 

With a large Russian army massed on the Ukrainian border, Putin issued an ultimatum last month, demanding that the United States not only keep out of any conflict but also withdraw its forces from other Nato members such as Poland and the Baltic states. While the crisis in Kazakhstan may delay any Russian invasion of Ukraine, it also exposes the weakness of the West. It looks very much as if we will be forced to watch helplessly as a democratic uprising is crushed by military force. 

Unlike Ukraine, Kazakhstan has hitherto been very much within the Russian sphere of influence. There are no limits on the harsh measures that may now be deployed. Putin has form in dealing with Muslim rebels. Up to 250,000 civilians may have died in the long war he fought in Chechnya from 1999 to 2009, which left the Caucasian republic in ruins.

On the other side of the border, the world’s other leading authoritarian power, China, is watching anxiously to secure its oil supplies. Beijing is, like Moscow, hypersensitive to any potential Islamist threat. The Kazak population is overwhelmingly Muslim, as is China’s Xinjiang province, where mass incarceration and sterilisation have brought accusations of genocide. President Xi Jinping has recently replaced Xinjiang’s governor, but events in Kazakhstan will almost certainly prompt him to ignore foreign protests and instead reinforce China’s repressive policies against its own Muslims.

Kazakhstan’s may be only the first authoritarian regime to collapse under the impact of the global energy crisis. Hence Putin will be at pains to send an unambiguous message to Washington and London: don’t even think about getting involved. After the humiliation of Afghanistan, President Biden will not dare to offer more than verbal support for the Kazak revolutionaries.

As for Ukraine: the images of toppled statues in Kazakhstan may evoke memories of the 2004 Orange Revolution and the 2014 uprising in Kyiv’s Maidan Square. If, however, these images are soon succeeded by reports of Kazak protesters imprisoned, tortured or shot, Ukrainians will be in no doubt of the fate that awaits them in the event of a successful Russian invasion. 

Kazakhstan may seem to us to be a far away country of which we know even less than we did when Neville Chamberlain used that notorious phrase about Czechoslovakia. But this week’s political earthquake there will reverberate around our interconnected world, as heads and hearts are broken in the increasingly desperate struggle between democracy and despotism. Those who cheer on Black Lives Matter activists protesting about centuries-old grievances might ask themselves: do Kazak lives matter too?

Daniel Johnson is the editor of TheArticle.com.