Cold War-style power grab plays out with deadly consequences on the streets of Kazakhstan

The politics of Kazakhstan are notoriously opaque and bureaucratic, but in the past few days President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev has shed his image as a compliant, colorless placeholder. With a little help from Moscow, Tokayev has ruthlessly turned the tables on his mentor, Nursultan Nazarbaev, the man who ruled Kazakhstan from independence in 1991 to 2019 and was still known as Leader of the Nation,