This is Popular Front, a podcast focused on the niche details of Modern Warfare and underreported

conflict with me Jake Hanrahan. Today we're speaking to writer and researcher

Colleen Wood. She's been all over Kazakhstan due to her work on her PhD and she's going to be talking to us about the

recent uprising or the clashes or the large-scale protests whatever you want to call

it that occurred in Kazakhstan last week. The internet has been cut off there for several

days so we're not really sure what's going on on the ground, but we do know that over

a hundred people have died, thousands have been arrested. So

Kaleen is going to explain to us how this happens and where it came from.

If you like what we're doing, please consider supporting us at patreon.com slash popular front.

All right cool.

So Colleen maybe before we go into what led up to this, maybe you can just kind of take us back to the uprising or the clashes, whatever you want to call it, and explain how, like what actually happened during the during the situation why did it

get so violent so quickly? Yeah so I mean I'll preface all of this by saying that yeah like since Tuesday's almost a full week there hasn't been internet access to

Amathay Kuzakzan's biggest city the hub for journalism hub for activism and so a a lot of the voices that we would normally trust

to be putting out pictures, videos, updates on like what exactly happened have been offline

since things got really bad. So it's been super hard to piece together the story, but I think that we've got a solidly fact-checked version that hopefully in the next few days we'll be able to add details to, but my understanding of it is that on January 2nd was the first protest in this cycle that started in the city of Janauzen, so it's an oil town in far western Kazakhstan,

pretty close to the Caspian Sea.

And people there gathered to protest the price hike in the liquid petroleum fuel that it wasn't like the government didn't announce oh we're just going to randomly

boost the price it was the end of a kind of three-year gradual subsidy that had the

end of a three-year subsidy that have been gradually taken away.

But the effects of the like removing the subsidy were suddenly felt and I think it's important to put in context that like,

you know, we're all two plus years into a pandemic and people in Kazakhstan,

especially people in this Western province, have really struggled economically in the

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