Last summer, I went on a month-long return visit to the Caucasus and Central Asia, the oil-soaked former Soviet regions where I lived and worked for 11 years as a foreign correspondent in the 1990s and early 2000s. What did I find in Almaty, in Tbilisi, Baku and Bishkek, cities that were so animated, mystified and not a little bit proud by their new nationhood, produced by the Soviet dissolution Dec. 26, 1991, but also variously rent with war, falsified elections and trouble with Russia? I observed Georgians, Kazakhs, Azeris and Kyrgyz who are vital and generally better off -- some of them ostentatiously so -- but who are also still living under the yoke. When the trip ended, I went home with the familiar sense of eternity that saturates this part of the world -- what always has been, it seemed, always will be.

But now I wonder. When I arrived two decades ago, I observed the continuity of the region's main historical thread -- a stretch of central Eurasia ruled for several hundred years by a succession of strongmen united by a single belief set: We know what is best. Yet for the last couple of weeks, competing narratives have stared us in the face.

Kazakhstan is moving fast to pacify its restive west as a new video circulates in which police shoot and beat retreating oil workers protesting labor conditions. Two reasons: With parliamentary elections three weeks away, President Nursultan Nazarbayev (pictured above) wants to stamp out any political narrative conflicting with his long-time assertion of keeping Kazakhstan stable. Abroad, the jittery global oil market is already starting to factor in a possible disruption of Kazakhstan's 1.5 million barrels a day of oil exports, half of which is an extremely high-quality light variety.

The Kazakhstan unrest -- violence in the western city of Zhanaozen in which some 14 workers were killed -- caps an extraordinarily turbulent year in the world's oil patch. The distribution of power has been shaken up in the Magreb countries of Egypt, Libya and Tunisia, and violence continues to threaten the rulers of Syria and Yemen. Saudi Arabia is spending some $130 billion to stave off its own public dissatisfaction. In Russia, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin's seemingly unassailable hold on power has been challenged by a botched decision to return to the Kremlin, and a rigged parliamentary election. All in all, the uprisings have helped to push annual average oil prices to their highest level in history, exceeding $100 a barrel.

The trouble on the eastern Caspian Sea is the climax of a six-month-long labor strike by some 1,500 oil workers over wages and other grievances. These workers appear to have mounted their strike against two oil companies -- the state oil company, which goes by the acronym KMG, and a Chinese-Kazakh oil company called Karazhanbasmunai (here is a good explanation by Alisher Khamidov at eurasianet.org.). Last weekend, as the country prepared to celebrate the 20^th anniversary of its independence, workers protested city plans to turn their strike camp -- the Zhanaozen public square -- into a festive place for dancing and public dining. It turned into a riot, with vehicles and buildings set aflame.

Russian election clues?   A couple of weeks ago, I ventured a bet that, contrary to the conventional wisdom, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev will run and win re-election in next year's elections; his mentor, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, will opt to keep his protégé in place, I wrote. While for a variety of reasons I still think that is the case, it's understandable why many think otherwise: Putin is throwing up a lot of conflicting signals. Take his decision to eradicate much-hated and bribe-laden car inspections for the remainder of the year, worth up to $300, writes Will Englund at the Washington Post. And what about Putin's announcement of a $285 billion program to rebuild Russia's ramshackle roads, another bane of the country (that's Moscow traffic pictured above)? Is Putin announcing such programs from a simple sense of good governance? According to Robert Coalson of RFE-RL, the way Russia's strongman is presiding over the affairs of the ruling United Russia party, he is sending "the strongest signals yet that he intends to return to the presidency in 2012."

This is entertaining -- and convincing -- to be sure. But that's the point. Putin doesn't need to convince anyone -- all of Russia and the rest of the world know that the job of president is his for the taking. So why the show? Because he wants the accolades, the hero-worship, the pleading crowds and so on, but while pushing matters to the brink, in the end he will, for the good of the nation of course, step aside (technically, that is) and maintain the status quo. The system works the way it is. Ask yourself this question: why in the last month (as the Moscow Times rounds up in an editorial) have the killers of Stanislav Markelov been imprisoned; has imprisoned oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky, while not released, been permitted a fair hearing on state-run NTV television while announcing a decision to appeal; and has the alleged triggerman of murdered journalist Anna Politkovskaya been captured and charged? Is it because Medvedev is acting against Putin's wishes?

This is where it's possible to lose one's way. What seems dissonant in the tandem in fact isn't. It happens because Putin wants the balance that Medvedev provides. Not incidentally, Medvedev is content with this state of affairs as well. One way to understand Medvedev is as simply another expression of Putin -- that is, even if Putin stepped completely out of the picture, Medvedev would not turn Russia into bastion of liberalness. Rather, when Medvedev's Russia undoes some of the injustices in the country, "what might appear to be the dismantling of Putin's legacy is not a dismantling at all," the Moscow Times editorial board writes. It said:

Khodorkovsky, even if given parole for good behavior, will not be acquitted. Investigators might have found Politkovskaya's killer, but we are unlikely to ever know who ordered the murder. Ultra-nationalism is still not being fought outside the courtroom. And thousands of other murky cases -- such as the death of lawyer Sergei Magnitsky or the beating of Kommersant reporter Oleg Kashin -- have not been properly investigated. Most important, the power vertical, along with its creator, is as strong as ever. Medvedev may stay in the Kremlin without tackling these issues. But if a handful of high-profile cases is all that he has to offer in terms of political reforms, his second term in office will differ little from Putin's policy of status quo. A second Medvedev term might then be best described as 'modernized stagnation.'

While the petro-states of the Middle East are roiled by the Arab Spring, the Islamic countries of the former Soviet Union are mostly quiescent. The richest of them is Kazakhstan, which today is holding the latest in a two-decade string of rigged presidential elections. President Nursultan Nazarbayev, who will be swept into a new five-year term, isn't talking publicly, but his prime minister, Karim Masimov, has weighed in on how the Kazakhs view Cairo, Tunis, Damascus and so on. "What is the biggest difference between them and us? People in Kazakhstan, the young generation in Kazakhstan, have hope and they have an opportunity to go forward," Masimov told Reuters.

One can quibble with that observation -- it's not possible, for example, to follow one's aspirations freely in the oil industry, where the president's son-in-law, Timur Kulibayev, doesn't appreciate interlopers. Still, Masimov's is a fairly enlightened remark when one considers the lesson that some of the Arab states have learned from Cairo and Tunis, which is to shoot first and not negotiate. On the other side of the Caspian, for example, forces of Azerbaijan President Ilham Aliyev yesterday arrested some 200 protestors seeking his ouster, Eurasianet.org reports.

A limited number of U.S. diplomats in the region are leveraging the Arab Spring to drive home long-expressed U.S. agenda items on democracy. "The Arab Spring is a huge gift to anyone in his region who seeks democratic liberalization," one U.S. diplomat in the region told me. Other U.S. envoys disagree that anything is to be gained, and aren't alluding to the Spring in contacts with the autocrats of the countries in which they work. But I personally think the first envoy makes the most sense.

Kazakhstan is not the one-dimensional portrait that it depicts. In the New York Times, Ellen Barry reports that "there is no restless young elite that wants to take over the government," but perhaps she should interview the millionaire Bulat Abilov or the intellectual Oraz Jandosov. They and other members of the political, business and intellectual elite would like to see genuinely competitive politics, and broader political representation, and are proof that, unlike the popular narrative, there are obvious alternative examples of stable rule in Kazakhstan. One of the most common remarks about Kazakhstan is the crisis to come because there is no obvious successor to Nazarbayev, but I think that is wrong -- because Nazarbayev himself hasn't anointed one does not mean that there are not many, many legitimate successors out there. There will be a struggle when Nazarbayev goes, but I do not expect a dangerous crisis, and certainly not violence. Read on for more on this increasingly important petro-state