Leadership Quote by Nursultan Nazarbayev

A politician doesn’t invoke “centuries” lightly; it’s an audit of the past designed to authorize a new present. Nazarbayev’s line frames the Soviet and pre-Soviet legacy as a long, grim continuity: power as personality, rule as discretion, the state as a tool of whoever holds the lever. By claiming “not laws but people ruled,” he performs a double move. He condemns arbitrary authority while also implying that what’s coming next - his project - is the corrective: the birth of a “legal state,” a Kazakhstan disciplined by institutions rather than whims.

The subtext is less democratic than managerial. “No legal state” doesn’t necessarily mean “no rights”; it means no predictable rules, no stable procedures, no dependable constraints on governance. That language fits a post-Soviet moment when legitimacy had to be manufactured quickly: new constitutions, courts, and markets needed a moral story, and the story was modernization. The quote creates a clean before-and-after, turning a messy transition into a narrative of rescue.

It also quietly narrows the target. “People” in that sentence isn’t the public; it’s the informal networks, clans, apparatchiks, and strongmen who do politics as patronage. Yet the irony is unavoidable: it takes a powerful person to declare the end of rule by people. In Nazarbayev’s mouth, the rule of law becomes both aspiration and alibi - a promise of order that can justify concentrated authority, so long as it wears the costume of institutions.