Toward Nationalizing Regimes: Conceptualizing Power and Identity in the Post-Soviet Realm compares the ideas of national identity infused into state projects across post-Soviet Latvia and Kazakhstan. Using hundreds of elite interviews and content analysis of newspapers, the book traces how political elites shaped ideas of who belongs to the nation beginning with the political transition of the 1990s. Kazakhstan and Latvia’s nationalizing regimes had a major impact on the policy sphere, especially in the areas of citizenship and language. Whereas Kazakhstan extended citizenship rights to all people living in the country at the fall of the Soviet Union, Latvia restricted citizenship to ethnic Latvians, excluding the many Russians living there at the time. While ethnic Russians in Kazakhstan have experienced marginalization in the sphere of government work and other areas that require knowledge of the Kazakh language, the Russian language has remained important in education, communication, and exchange. Russians in Latvia, on the other hand, are excluded from the most basic citizenship rights unless they learn Latvian, the only recognized official language.

One of the initial puzzles of the book is that Latvia, a democracy in the EU, produced a much less inclusive system than a more authoritarian Kazakhstan. Latvia worked through its ideas of national identity within a democratic party system, albeit one that systematically excluded Russian-speaking minorities and was persistently resistant to the liberalizing norms that are assumed of EU member states. Kudaibergenova tells of the centrist party Harmony that supports the rights of the Russian-speaking population and does relatively well in popular elections but is unable to get any seats in the cabinet of Ministers, which is dominated by right-leaning Latvian loyalists. Kazakhstan’s production of a national discourse allowed for citizenship and inclusion of minority groups, but it was the product of a loyalty-based system. Important decisions were made non-deliberatively by political insiders. Ethnic harmony is credited directly to the first president Nursultan Nazarbayev, who established what Kudaibergenova calls a personalized nationalist regime.

Kudaibergenova uses this puzzle to point out implicit bias in the ways scholars and other experts classify states into democratic and authoritarian, as though political systems could easily fit into one or the other category. Whereas many scholars focus on the presence of competitive elections to distinguish between political systems, if anything, this analysis demonstrates how social and political systems of modern states are complex and difficult to categorize. She settles on the term “hybrid” for both regimes, hybrid democracy for Latvia and hybrid authoritarian system for Kazakhstan. Nevertheless, Kudaibergenova concludes her analysis with the observation that the momentum of elite views on national ideas and their isolation from public discourse was more powerful than the “democratic and nondemocratic development of these states.” In other words, democratic ideas were not able to rescue Latvian citizenship from excluding Russians any more than Kazakhstan’s authoritarianism prevented the inclusion of Russians or other ethnic minorities. Indeed, this suggests that scholars, experts, and mass medias should move beyond the assumption that democratic or authoritarian politics will unfold in predictable ways, or that these labels are readily comparable across states.

I found two discussions in the book particularly thought provoking. First, on the topic of migration. Kudaibergenova convincingly draws the picture of what life is like when one becomes a migrant in their own country. This was the situation for ethnic Russians in Latvia when after the fall of the Soviet Union, Latvia did not extend citizenship rights beyond ethnic/linguistic Latvians. While many of these current-EU residents live with diminished rights (e.g. they are unable to work freely throughout the EU), they remain in Latvia. By contrast, despite a more inclusive citizenship regime for ethnic Russians in Kazakhstan, people of all ethnicities have left Kazakhstan seeking work, education, and life abroad, in far larger numbers than those leaving Latvia. In the book, this is posed as a question that is not answered or a puzzle that remains mysterious: Is living as a resident of Latvia, without citizenship rights and limited access to the EU, a more powerful status than citizenship of Kazakhstan? Could it be that there is enduring value, even symbolically, of proximity to Europe and the West, or of living in a democracy? Are there economic or life-satisfaction goals that are more easily met as a non-citizen of Latvia than as a citizen of Kazakhstan? These questions are implied but not explored.

Second, on the issue of political messaging. In Kazakhstan, one of the strategies used to build a national identity that balanced ethnic orientation and inclusivity for minorities (such as Russian speakers) was dual-lingual messaging. For example, in presidential addresses Nazarbayev would deliver different content to different audiences in different languages. From the elite perspective, this type of strategy makes sense. Kudaibergenova calls this a “mild decolonization.” But does the public accept this differentiation? Kudaibergenova argues these sometimes contrasting messages are at once puzzling and stabilizing, thought the explicit reaction they garner from the public (if any) remains less clear.

Understandably, these two themes take us beyond the nationalizing regimes that are the subject of Kudaibergenova’s analysis. These issues take us into the much more fraught territory of how the public interact with regime-formulated discourses, how they make sense of their own identities within their political systems, and how they see their responsibilities as citizens.

In the end, while Kudaibergenova’s account is a convincingly assembled mosaic of ethnographic findings from Kazakhstan and Latvia, I would have liked to see a more personal account of the author’s intellectual journey. The author’s presence in the text is quite strong, but the account craves more details about her relationship with her informants and how it impacted the research and analysis. I also would have liked a fuller explanation of how the author negotiated access to her elite respondents, which types of elites were willing to be interviewed and which weren’t, whether certain types of elites were seemingly more candid, and the potential limitations for how this elite interviewing process developed.

Kudaibergenova’s account of nationalizing regimes shows the centrality and agency of elites in creating and institutionalizing national ideas in newly established states. It differs from other agency or elite-oriented accounts by taking aspects of nationalism that bring people to the streets out of the limelight and focusing in on the origins of ideas.