Kazakhstan—Political System
Kazakhstan is a new nation, established as an independent, sovereign state only in 1991, when it emerged from the breakup of the Soviet Union. In its first decade of national independence, Kazakhstan's government demonstrated a strong commitment to establishing the foundation for an open, democratic form of government with a market-based economy. Kazakhstan won praise from the international community for this approach and for taking an unprecedented initiative in voluntarily relinquishing its status as a nuclear power. Kazakhstan's progress in the transition from a Communist-era system to a political system in accordance with international standards is significantly greater than that of its other Central Asian neighbors, which also became independent as a result of the breakup of the Soviet Union.
The political transition in Kazakhstan began as early as 1986, with the perestroika (restructuring) and glasnost (openness) reforms introduced under Mikhail Gorbachev (b. 1931), the last Communist Party leader of the USSR. True political reform in the Soviet Union began in 1988, when Gorbachev announced at the Nineteenth Conference of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union his intention to sponsor free elections. By December 1988, the Soviet government had adopted a new election law permitting national and republican multislate elections, the first free elections in the USSR since 1918.
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