Nursultan Nazarbayev

Nursultan Nazarbayev is presented less through direct scenes than through the political meanings other characters attach to his presidency. For Eduard Limonov and the National Bolshevik Party, Kazakhstan was both a proposed frontier for political agitation and a place whose government they accused of mistreating its opposition; a leaflet naming Nazarbayev brought that accusation into a public protest and its aftermath.

Kazakhstan as a Political Frontier

At a National Bolshevik Party convention, Limonov argued that Russians living in former Soviet republics had been abandoned after the Soviet Union dissolved. He described them as people who had once administered those territories on the Soviet Union’s behalf and were now, in his account, victimized, ostracized, or merely tolerated. He cited five million Russians in Kazakhstan, alongside eleven million in Ukraine and nine hundred thousand in Latvia, as people whom Boris Yeltsin would not help.

Limonov’s proposed response was to encourage insurgency and the creation of separatist republics on the periphery rather than to seize power in Russia immediately. He identified the Baltic countries and Central Asia as targets for this future activity and announced plans to canvass in Central Asia. Kazakhstan thus enters the narrative as part of a larger post-Soviet political map in which the party framed Russian minorities as an abandoned constituency. This is Limonov’s political account of the region, not an independent description of Nazarbayev’s policies.

The Leaflet and the Film Premiere

Nazarbayev becomes a more specific target when National Bolshevik activists distribute a leaflet titled Our Friend the Torturer at the end of the official premiere of Nikita Mikhalkov’s The Barber of Siberia. The account identifies Nazarbayev as the president of Kazakhstan and the film’s patron. The leaflet denounced what it called the opposition’s unenviable fate in his country; the narrator characterizes it as more humanitarian than fascist, while noting that humanitarian organizations might prudently avoid antagonizing a figure described as powerful and popular.

The protest sits at the intersection of cultural prestige and political criticism. Mikhalkov is portrayed as a dominant figure in Russian cinema, and Nazarbayev’s patronage gives the film premiere a connection to the political authority the activists are challenging. The account does not describe Nazarbayev speaking or intervening at the event; his presence in the episode is conveyed through his public office, his association with the film, and the leaflet directed against his government.

Reprisal and Narrative Significance

The consequences described are directed at the protesters and the party’s premises. After the leaflet action, a Molotov cocktail is thrown into the party’s bunker, and OMON riot police enter, confiscate property, beat activists, and imprison those present. Limonov is certain that Mikhalkov ordered the police response. The narrative does not attribute that response to Nazarbayev, distinguishing the accusation made against Kazakhstan’s president from the immediate reprisals that follow the Moscow protest.

At another screening, two National Bolshevik activists throw rotten eggs at Mikhalkov and receive six-month prison sentences. These episodes place Nazarbayev within the party’s broader struggle over who may publicly denounce powerful political figures and what punishment follows. He is not developed as a private personality in these passages; instead, he functions as a consequential political name, connecting Limonov’s projected activity in Central Asia to a concrete act of dissent and the coercive response surrounding it.