А rare kind of state decision

On May 16, 2026, the President signed the Decree ‘On Measures for the Development of Reading Culture and the Formation of a Reading Nation.’ What time horizon is this decision designed for, and why can it not be evaluated by the standards of an electoral cycle? We will try to answer these questions.

Every state decision has its own term. A road is built in two years. A school is built in a year and a half. A government program is launched for a five-year plan. These terms fit within human attention. They can be started and finished. They can be verified. Finally, they can be reported on. The Decree on the development of reading and the formation of a reading nation operates in a different kind of time. Its term is a generation.

To understand what the Decree is about, we must answer one question. A literate nation and a reading nation. Are they the same thing or not? At first glance, it seems they are. In reality, these are two different states of society. Literacy means the ability to read a text, recognize letters, put words together, and understand the meaning of what is written on a package, in an instruction, or in a news headline. A reading nation is built differently. It is a community of people who think about themselves through reading. They encounter in literature words about their own lives. Then people use these words in their conversations about work, family, country, and choice. Between the two states lies a gulf. The Decree is addressed precisely to that gulf.

The presidential Decree takes on exactly such a horizon. This is visible in the design of the Decree. The Decree does not announce a ‘Year of the book’ or a ‘Month of reading’. It declares a long-term institutional program with libraries, school curricula, support for publishers and translators, and infrastructure for writers. The state in fact acknowledges that what must happen will not happen quickly. Therefore, it must begin now, without waiting for the moment when the result will be urgently needed.

But here an attentive reader will raise a fair question. We have already had so many programs supporting cultures, languages, and literature, he will say. Some of them ended with spent budgets and reports, after which little changed in real reading habits. So what? Why should this Decree work differently? The question is correct. The answer is not that the current decision is fundamentally better conceived. The answer is that it is differently visioned in terms of horizon.

Programs of the previous generation reported on results by the end of their term. Any program obliged to show a result within a year inevitably begins to imitate one. Coverage numbers grow. Events are held. Reports are submitted. And in actual reading practice, nothing changes. A program designed for a generation cannot imitate a result. It has no intermediate reporting point at which imitation would be profitable. It has a different contract with time.

But the most interesting thing lies elsewhere. It lies in the question. Why a reading nation in the first place?  Every society needs its own language for understanding itself. That language is born in literature. A writer finds the precise word for how his contemporary lives. Then the word leaves the book and enters daily speech, kitchen conversations, public debates, and the way a person thinks about his own life. Without its own literature, a country speaks about itself in someone else’s words. And so, it also makes decisions in someone else’s coordinate system.

The paradox is that this language is already being produced in Kazakhstan. Contemporary Kazakh literature has changed noticeably over the past twenty years. Our writers write about life in the city, about women’s experience, about the gap between aul and city, about anxiety, about choice, about what it means to be oneself in a country that is still searching for its own language. The hero of this prose is no longer the epic bearer of a ready-made truth. He is a person of transition, living between several worlds at once. In one expert report prepared for KazISS, the current state of literature is described by a paradoxical formula. Literature without a reader. Novels and novellas are being written. Writers are working. Important and necessary topics exist. But the connection between literature and society grows weaker. Literature in Kazakhstan continues to produce meanings. Yet the ways these meanings circulate among people have weakened. So, what is the issue?

This gap has a cause. For older generations, meanings and language came through family, school, and library. Today they come through the feed. A young Kazakhstani lives in a vast flow of notifications, videos, comments, likes, and algorithmic recommendations. The book does not disappear in this environment. But it stops reproducing itself on its own. Earlier, a long text was an unavoidable part of growing up, because there were almost no other channels of long meaning. Today, a long text competes with platforms built on high speeds, fragmentation, and constant switching. In this competition literature loses not because it is worse, but because it requires an effort that the environment no longer reproduces automatically. This is why the Decree speaks not of a return to the old library model. It speaks of libraries of a new format, digital platforms, and reading infrastructure in conditions of developing artificial intelligence. The state understands that reading in its former shape will not return. The question is how to embed long text into digital modernity, rather than to oppose one to the other.

The Decree on the development of reading, among other things, also invests in the production of a society’s own language of self-description. Not because the state will write books. The state does not write them and cannot. The investment is in building an environment in which Kazakhstani literature can be read, discussed, noticed, and supported.

A separate question is how timely such decisions are. The President’s Decree comes at a moment when society has passed the stage of basic arrangement. A new level of tasks is emerging. The quality of public debate. The quality of the decisions made. The capacity of society to discuss complex matters without oversimplification. All these tasks rest on a mass ability to read complex texts. Earlier it would have been premature. Later we would have had to catch up with losses.

Decisions about reading almost never look spectacular. They do not produce a quick picture. They do not generate loud headlines. They do not fit the format of a campaign promise. Their strength lies elsewhere. It lies in changing the language in which a society will think about its own life twenty and thirty years from now. And here lies the difficulty of the Decree. It is designed for people most of whom do not yet vote, and some of whom are not yet born. And it is being adopted by people who will not live to see the result. This is a rare kind of state decision. It is not for us. It is about us.