Dissident Spotlight: Aron Atabek
Aron Atabek was arrested for protesting a housing demolition in Kazakhstan. He spent all but the final days of his life in prison.

Aron Atabek was a poet born in Kazakhstan when it was still part of the Soviet Union. He was involved in several political movements protesting for Kazakhstan’s independence.
He founded the Alash National Freedom Party in 1991, which advocated for a constitutional democratic system. In political exile — even after Kazakhstan’s independence — Atabek moved between Azerbaijan, Russia, and finally back to Kazakhstan.
Atabek’s political party was dissolved in 2003. After that, Atabek worked at a literary magazine until he formed a new party in 2005. One of the issues the Kazak Memleketi advocated for was protection for homeless Kazakhs living in shanty towns outside of large cities.
A 2006 protest protecting one of these shanty towns would become a turning point in Atabek’s life.
Protest, Imprisonment, Secret Book
In July 2006, the Kazakh government tore down a shanty town that protests had briefly protected. Residents of the Shanyrak District were next, and when police tried to clear the area, the residents rioted. Atabek participated in these riots.
Days later, Atabek was arrested and charged with organizing the riot and charged for the death of a policeman who was killed after protestors lit him on fire. Atabek neither organized the protests nor killed the police officer. In 2007, he was sentenced to 18 years in prison.
In 2012, six years into his sentence, Atabek smuggled a book he’d written out of prison. The book, The Heart of Eurasia, criticized Kazakhstan’s president, Nursultan Nazarbayev, who’d been in power since Kazakhstan’s independence. Under Nazarbayev, Kazakhstan ranked among the lowest countries in the world on the World Press Freedom Index.
After The Heart of Eurasia was smuggled out of prison and published online, Atabek was sent to solitary confinement.
After years of torture, solidarity confinement, and stolen life, Atabek was released from prison in October 2021. His health had begun to fail, and he died on November 24, only a month after his release.
Kazakhstan’s Future After Atabek
Atabek sacrificed what little well-being he had to continue speaking out against his country’s corrupt leader. Kazakhstan’s second president, Kassym-Jomart Tokayev, rose to office after his predecessor’s resignation in 2019. Tokayev was a member of the last Nazarbayev’s party and won a fake election shortly after his ascension to the presidency. Functionally, Nazarbayev was still in charge of the country.
Tokayev instituted some limited reforms which raised workers’ salaries and reduced Nazarbayev’s policy-making powers. Still, Kazakhstan remains an autocratic country. Its press freedom remains strictly limited, and Tokayev only ended Atabek’s sentence as he approached death.
In a poem called RE-ZONA-NCE which was published in English in 2017, Atabek began:
My father was a slave of the Soviet State,
In the gold mines of Kolyma.
And my destiny, too, is repeating this pattern –
Of the Kolyma’s brutality.The father was tired in court as an ‘ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE’,
So, it turns out that I am a ‘SON OF THE ENEMY’,
I break rocks with a pickaxe, together with him –
Not different from him.
Atabek’s life was taken from him long before he died. He’d long since accepted his fate. It’s up to the rest of us to protect the right to criticize our leaders through protest and in writing. The more secure those rights are for us, the more we use our voices to speak up for people around the world who’ve been silenced.