‘There Can Be No Other Sun in the Sky’ : Political Myth, Spirituality and Legitimacy in Contemporary Kazakhstan

With the elimination of Soviet state communism in the early 1990s, the ideational foundation of politics in the five Central Asian former Soviet republics had to undergo fundamental rebuilding. Instead of the defunct basis of Soviet-style Marxism-Leninism, the rulers of the suddenly independent Central Asian states urgently had to identify other ways and means of legitimizing their hold on power. The following is an analysis of how this quest has fared in the case of Kazakhstan, a resource-rich state with regional great-power aspirations