So, off the back of the most recent USSR posts, I can't help but notice the fact that Kazakhstan remained (at least one of) the last country(ies) in the USSR.
What ive been wondering is why they didn't choose to become part of the Russian Federation, aside from the USSR (if that was an option) - considering the less than 1st world state of Kazakhstan at the minute (excluding Cold War definitions of 1st 2nd and 3rd world).
Was Kazakhstan in itself still feeling "Russian"? Or was there a situation in which Kazakhstan citizens found themselves choosing to be separate? Or did they have that choice at all - to any extent?
Sorry for any errors in grammar etc, typing this on my phone, just genuinely interested as it goes
This is an educated guess, but it has to do with two factors.
Nursultan Nazarbayev, the president of Kazakhstan, was also the last First Secretary of the Kazakh SSR, and a supporter of Gorbachev. As his name suggests, he is an ethnic Kazakh, and since independence has really pushed the nationalist aspect in Kazakhstan, largely in part because there is such a high percentage of ethnic Russians (around 40% in 1989, now around 25-30%). It was in part because of these numbers he moved the capital from Alma-Ata (now Almaty) in the south to the newly built city of Astana (more north); it helped establish a more concrete Kazakh identity in the north of the country. And while this is getting too recent, one can see the nationalist sentiment growing even more with the Ukraine crisis, as this year Kazakhstan celebrated 550 years of the first Kazakh khanate (largely in response to Putin claiming there had never been a Kazakh state before 1991), but I'm not going to get into that here.
Secondly, I imagine the oil and natural gas reserves in Kazakhstan played a part. While it was known to exist in the state, it was not until the late 1980s and perestroika that Western groups were able to get in there with the means to properly extract it, and provide the money to do so, in the billions of dollars. Considering Nazarbayev actively worked to avoid using Russian pipelines when this was being set up, I think that he may have wanted to ensure the money stayed in Kazakhstan and not go to Russia.
As well the new Russian government had little desire to keep the Central Asian republics within their boundaries. All five were expensive to upkeep, costing the USSR billions per year and providing little in return. For a state who was going through an economic collapse as it transitioned to a market economy, that was one expense the Yeltsin government was not interested in maintaining.