Joanna Lillis/CPJ Guest Blogger

Joanna Lillis is a journalist who has been reporting from Kazakhstan since 2005. She is the author of the recently-published book Dark Shadows: Inside the Secret World of Kazakhstan.

Features & Analysis
The front page of a March 20 newspaper shows President Nursultan Nazarbayev, who resigned the previous day. Kazakhstan's press was restricted and censored under his long rule. (Reuters/Pavel Mikheyev)

Nazarbayev’s long rule leaves toxic legacy for Kazakhstan’s media

In 2011, I observed an astonishing spectacle in the Respublika newspaper offices in Almaty, Kazakhstan’s financial capital. Journalists were putting a modern-day twist on samizdat, a practice in the Soviet Union whereby dissidents laboriously copied illicit material to circumvent censorship.

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