Time & Perspective Quote by Nursultan Nazarbayev

Culture gets framed here not as a source of strength, but as a luxury item you buy after the bills are paid. Nazarbayev’s line is doing political work: it converts a messy historical record into a clean timeline of necessity. First survival, then refinement. It’s an argument for patience with shortages, censorship, and institutional thinness in the early post-Soviet years, and it doubles as a justification for the state’s later role as curator of “acceptable” culture.

The subtext is a familiar post-authoritarian bargain: stability over pluralism. By describing society as too busy surviving to “have anything to do with culture,” he narrows what counts as legitimate public life. Culture becomes optional, almost distracting - something that can be postponed without moral cost. That framing conveniently sidelines the fact that people make culture precisely under pressure: underground literature, songs, jokes, religious practice, kinship rituals. Those aren’t extras; they’re how communities metabolize fear and scarcity. To deny that is to deny agency.

Context matters. Nazarbayev led Kazakhstan through the Soviet collapse, hyperinflation, and the construction of a new national identity while consolidating power. In that environment, invoking “survival” functions as political anesthesia: it dulls questions about who defined the emergency, who benefited from privatization and patronage, and why certain cultural expressions were encouraged (nation-branding, heritage projects) while others were policed (dissent, independent media).

The sentence sounds pragmatic, but its real intent is to reorder accountability: don’t judge the leadership’s cultural constraints as choices; treat them as physics.