Transitional justice and memory agents: Confronting the soviet past in Kazakhstan

In non-democratic settings, ruling leaders often seek to manage historical narratives, while establishing rehabilitation commissions to signal responsiveness to public sentiment. Drawing on previously unused archival sources and 27 interviews, this article examines how diverse memory agents, including survivors, descendants of victims of Soviet repression, officials, historians, lawyers, and opposition figures, engaged with two such commissions in Kazakhstan, active from 1993 to 2006 and from 2020 to 2024. It argues that these commissions function as negotiated arenas in which ruling presidents pursue legitimacy-building, while incorporating memory actors whose bounded participation generates limited but consequential contestation. Some actors, whose interests diverge from those of the government, use these processes to insert alternative perspectives into the public record, albeit in marginal ways. The article demonstrates that even in non-democratic contexts, such commissions can produce limited yet meaningful outcomes, creating openings for memory agents to shape official narratives and challenge dominant historical interpretations.