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.
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.