Zhanaozen: Where Almaty feels like a galaxy away

Perhaps informed by official media which has discredited the protests, the other half a dozen or so people that The Telegraph interviewed in Zhanaozen also expressed a careworn indifference to the unrest. Theirs was an accidental trigger for an ultimately failed popular revolution.

Zhanaozen is part of Kazakhstan’s Mangistau region. The main city, Aktau, was built on the Caspian Sea by the Soviet Union in 1963 to house workers sent there to mine uranium. There is no fresh drinking water, a nuclear-powered desalination plant recycles water for its 200,000 residents, and there are no street names. Each street, tower block and microregion is numbered instead.

To reach Zhanaozen from Aktau, it is another two hours’ drive through the frozen washed-out grey, white and yellow steppe which shimmers with a timeless promise and stretches out into the horizon. Semi-wild horses and double-humped camels break the skyline as they graze on clumps of grass poking through the patchy snow.

East of Zhanaozen lie acres of nodding donkeys, those monotonous instruments of the energy industry that dutifully pump oil out of the ground.

For people living in Zhanaozen, the charms of central Almaty with its middle-class focus on fashion, fine food and democracy, feel like a galaxy away.

People here may also despise the Kazakh elite, who are accused of corruption, but their struggle is daily and crude. Despite being at the centre of Kazakhstan’s wealth production, locals feel cheated.

“It’s our gas. We pump it out of the ground,” said Zhannagul, who was leaving an office in Zhanaozen for her lunch break. “Why does it cost so much money?”

On the first day of 2022, residents of Zhanaozen woke up to find that a litre of liquefied natural gas, or LNG, which is used by people to fuel their cars, had doubled in price to 120 tenge (20p) per litre.