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"The author provides a comparative analysis of Central Asian leadership with a special focus on power, nation-building and the legacy of authoritarian rulers. The article deals with their roles, images, status and personal characteristics, their accession to and retaining of power, how they rule their respective countries and the expected effects of their soon-to-be ending presidencies. The author poses questions such as: 'What are the power resources of presidents and their political regimes? What types of leadership exist? Who are those leaders who share a common background that dates back to the Soviet period? Do they shape the common future of Central Asia?' One of his main arguments is that all five leaders are authoritarian rulers, whose apparatus often plays the role of real, albeit informal, state power and keeps control of the other power branches." (author's abstract)

A so-called Eurasian trend of foreign political thought born in Kazakhstan is gaining increasingly wider support in this country, the main argument of its proponents being "Kazakhstan borders on Central Asia, but it is not a Central Asian country. Ours is a Eurasian state strongly influenced by Europe and Western values. Contrary to what certain politicians and journalists assert, we are not another stan. Saudi Arabia is not our historical landmark: we look to Norway, South Korea, and Singapore." This is what these people think about their country's place and role in the world after 15 years of independent development. They loathe the very name of their country, which ends in stan. The Eurasian trend of "antistan " rhetoric merits serious attention and profound analysis.

A specter is haunting Central Asia-the specter of democracy. This is how the opening phrase of Marx and Engels' Communist Manifesto should read in a region soon probably to be engulfed by a wave of "democratic revolutions." We have already seen the Rose Revolution in Georgia, the Orange Revolution in Ukraine, and the Tulip Revolution in Kyrgyzstan. Journalists and political analysts readily agreed to treat the power changes in post-Soviet states as revolutions inspired by certain foreign funds and organizations or even by Western states. We should bear in mind, however, that the epoch of post-Soviet leaders the newly independent states inherited from Soviet power, who are going on with the old policies, is drawing to an end.