In recent years, every autumn Kazakhstan’s politics pauses for an hour: the President delivers his address to the people. Ministers and deputies listen, newspapers quote it, plans are drawn up from it. The habit looks modern, almost a creature of television. In fact its pedigree runs back four and a half thousand years, and it includes a Sumerian ruler, a Persian king, an Indian Buddhist emperor, a Turkic khagan and an Aztec lord. Let us walk that line from the beginning to the present day, keeping only to what the primary sources confirm.
A word that is sent
Start with the name. The Russian poslanie is a noun formed from “poslat” (“to send”), and “slat” goes back to Old Russian “sъlati” and Proto-Slavic sъlati. In the bookish tradition the word is bound up with the apostolic epistles, the letters of the apostles to their communities; hence its note of instruction, which a dry “report” lacks [1].
The Kazakh zholdau is built differently but says the same thing. It has three parts: “zhol”, meaning road, the verbal suffix -da-, which turns a noun into an action, and the ending -u, which turns the action back into a noun. Literally it means “setting on the road, dispatch”. That is how the word lives in official Kazakh today: “khat zholdau” is to send a letter, “sotqa zholdau” is to refer a case to court. One sometimes hears that “zholdau” means “showing the way”. That is folk etymology: explaining a word by the apparent sense of its parts instead of its real history. There is indeed a road in the word, but it is the road of something sent, not of something shown [2].
The English message comes from the Latin mittere, “to send”. So the three languages agree: the genre is named after the act of sending, not after spoken speech. It is a trace of the age when an address was a written dispatch carried by messengers.
Four thousand years of reports
The oldest ruler’s report we know of is addressed not to people but to a god. Around 2350 BC Uruinimgina, ruler of the Sumerian city of Lagash, recorded his reforms on clay cones: he abolished the levies of former rulers, protected the widow and the orphan from “the powerful man” and returned what had been seized. Here the word ama-gi appears for the first time; literally “return to the mother”, it is usually translated as “freedom”. But the cones were laid in the foundations of a temple: this is a report upward, a covenant with the god Ningirsu [3].
Six centuries later the Babylonian king Hammurabi brought the text out to people. His law stele stood in the open, and in its epilogue the king explains its purpose himself: let the wronged man who has a case come to the king’s image, read the inscription and understand his case. And at the start of the stele the king lists his deeds: to which city he returned its protecting god, which inhabitants he cared for in their need. This is already a report addressed to people as well [4].
Egypt supplied the model of a new ruler’s programme. Around 1320 BC the pharaoh Horemheb, who had not come to power by direct succession, set up a stele at Karnak with a decree against abuses by officials and soldiers in collecting taxes. The text addresses its hearers: “Hear ye these commands which my majesty has made”, made “when my majesty remembered these cases of oppression”. A list of old wrongs and a promise to right them: a genre still recognisable today [5].
If Hammurabi and Horemheb brought the word out to people, the Assyrians brought time into it: their kings were the first to write reports by regnal year. Scholars call such texts annals, from the Latin annus, “year”. The Persian king Darius I brought the genre to a remarkable finish. The Behistun inscription (around 520 BC) reads as a speech in the first person: every paragraph opens with “Thus says King Darius”. The king lists what he did “in one and the same year”, swears that he does not lie, admits that he did more but did not record it “lest the reader think it exaggerated”, and orders the text sent “everywhere among the provinces” [6][7].
The Indian king Ashoka went furthest, in the III century BC. His edicts were carved on rocks and pillars across the empire, and in them a procedure is set down for the first time: the text is to be read to the people every four months, on the special day of Tisa; reporters on the people’s affairs must reach the king at any hour, “while eating, in the chambers, in the chariot”; officials tour the country every five years to check how the royal will is carried out. Rules for reading aloud, feedback and control are gathered in one text; among the ancient models examined in the study there is no other like it [8].
In China the ruler’s address became a genre of its own, gao (“announcement”). The “Great Announcement” in the Book of Documents opens with “Thus spoke the king” and sets out not only the decision but the officials’ objections. And around 89 BC the Han emperor Wu issued an edict admitting “formerly I was unwise”, gave up a new campaign and turned policy towards farming [9][10].
Rome added the annual term. A praetor taking office announced the rules by which he would judge for the whole year, and Cicero records the saying of his day: the praetor’s edict is called “the annual law”. The emperor Augustus left his “Deeds”, a report to the people with a summary of expenses in denarii; at Ankara the text is carved in Latin with a Greek translation, so that the province could understand it [11][12].
For us the steppe line matters most. The monument to Kül Tegin (732) in the Orkhon valley carries Bilge Khagan’s address to “the begs and the people”: the khagan demands that his words be “clearly heard”, gives an account (“I made the poor people rich”) and asks: “is there any falsehood in my words?” The Old Turkic bodun here means “people”, and this is the oldest written address of a ruler to the people on the land of the steppe. The west side of the same monument carries a Chinese text by the Tang emperor Xuanzong: the stele speaks to two addressees in two languages [13][14].
Finally, among the Aztecs, the friar Bernardino de Sahagún recorded in the XVI century a whole order of speeches. A new ruler speaks for the first time to all the inhabitants of the city, and then an elder “skilled in speech” answers him on the city’s behalf. It is a rare ancient example of two-way conversation [15].
What the ancients lacked
Looking along this line, it is easy to see that each ruler invented his own part of the future genre. But none of these forms combined the three features without which today’s address is unthinkable: an obligation in law, a regular period and a fixed addressee. The combination came in modern times.
The British King’s Speech, read by the monarch at the opening of a parliamentary session but written by the government, supplied the link to the start of a session and a programme of laws for the year. The US Constitution of 1787 obliged the President “from time to time” to inform Congress of the state of the Union. The word “annually” is not there: annual delivery is a custom set by Washington on 8 January 1790. The familiar name “State of the Union” became official only in 1947. Franklin Roosevelt added, beside the address, a direct radio conversation with the people, the “fireside chats” [16][17][18].
Stone, bronze, airwaves
The medium changed along with the genre, and the medium decides who hears the word, how long it lives and whether the listener can answer. The Sumerian cone is addressed to a god and buried in the ground. Hammurabi’s stele stands in the square for centuries but speaks to the passer-by in one direction. Darius took the next step: besides the rock inscription he had the text composed on clay tablets and parchment and sent to the provinces. For the first time monument and circulation parted: the rock preserved, the copies travelled [6][7].
Rome added bronze and translation, Orkhon a bilingual stele, and the Aztecs reached us in a manuscript codex into which a friar wrote down their speeches. The constitutional age brought back the living voice: Washington in 1790 spoke before Congress, Jefferson from 1801 sent the text on paper, Wilson in 1913 returned to the rostrum. Radio in 1923 and television in 1947 turned an address to legislators into an address to the whole country at once [12][15][18].
Today’s Kazakh address, according to Akorda’s announcement, is broadcast by national television channels and Akorda’s social media pages. Each new medium widened the circle of listeners but almost never gave them a voice: stone and bronze are mute, broadcasting runs one way. The digital environment is the first to allow, technically, a movement back: verification and reply. Whether it will be provided for depends no longer on technology but on the design of the genre [19].
The Soviet root and the bridge of 1990
The closest relative of the Kazakh address is the Soviet Central Committee report: the report of the First, later General, Secretary to the party congress. The congress met once every five years, the report summed up the five-year plan in percentages, and the congress adopted Directives, the tasks of the next plan.
The kinship can be seen with one’s own eyes. According to the official chronicle, in June 1990 Nursultan Nazarbayev opened the XVII Congress of the Communist Party of Kazakhstan with the report “For the unity of the party and socialist choice, for the real sovereignty of Kazakhstan in a renewed USSR”, proposing “fundamental strategic directions”. Seven years later he delivered his first address to the people [20].
The figures of those reports are best read with a correction. According to official data, national income grew by 41% in the eighth five-year plan (1966–1970) and by 16.5% in the eleventh (1981–1985). The economist Grigory Khanin, recalculating the same years to account for hidden price growth, obtained 22% and 3%. Both sides agree there was no decline, only a fading of growth. The lesson for the genre is simple: a report checked by the speaker himself systematically diverges from independent measurement [21][22].
One change in the formula
Russia’s 1993 Constitution obliges the President to address the Federal Assembly with annual messages on the situation in the country. Kazakhstan’s 1995 Constitution repeated these words almost verbatim and changed one thing: the addressee became the people. Parliament became merely the place where the speech is heard [23][24].
The 2026 Constitution kept the address but removed the word “annual” from the norm. In the Kazakh text, “zhyl saiyn zholdau arnaidy” (“annually directs an address”) has become the neutral “zholdau zhasaidy” (“makes an address”). At the same time the Kurultai, as the unicameral parliament is now called, must hear the Constitutional Court’s messages every year. The court must speak every year; the head of state need not [25].
Thirty-one addresses
From 1997 to 2025 there were 31 addresses: 23 by Nursultan Nazarbayev and 8 by Kassym-Jomart Tokayev. They differ markedly. Nazarbayev’s early addresses are strategies with horizons of 2030 and 2050: the first, “Kazakhstan-2030”, runs to about 13.8 thousand words and never once uses the word “I instruct”. Tokayev’s addresses are more even in length (from 5.9 to 8.5 thousand words) and are built as a calendar of reforms: in 2020 “I instruct” occurs 28 times, and five of the eight addresses name none of the old distant milestones. After 2020 “I instruct” occurs 0 to 9 times per address, yet instructions have not vanished, they have changed form: in the 2021 address, where the word is absent altogether, “should” (sleduet) appears 31 times and “need to” (nuzhno) 35 times [26].
How a word becomes a deed
The address by itself binds no one. What makes it binding is a presidential decree on a nationwide action plan: a table in which each instruction has an executor, a deadline and a form of completion, that is, the document attesting that it has been carried out: a law, a decree, a resolution or “information to the Presidential Administration” [27].
We examined sixteen such decrees for 2011–2025. Laws are concentrated in the plans of political turning points: in March 2022 half of the items were completed by a law. In the 2025 plan, 87% of the items are completed by a note to the Administration. There are curious mismatches too: the Ministry of Artificial Intelligence was created by a decree of 18 September 2025, 25 days before the plan itself, where its creation still appears as a future item [28][27][29].
A report that faces upward
The most important finding concerns control. In 2011–2014 the government reported on the plan twice a year, by 25 January and 25 July. From 2018, once a year. In 2025 the deadline was moved to 5 February. The report always goes to the Presidential Administration, and not one such report has been found in the public domain. So the circle that began in Lagash closes: the address is directed to the people, while the report on it, like Uruinimgina’s clay cones, faces upward [30][31].
Today’s address
Today, 28 October 2026, at 11:00 the first address under the new Constitution, and the first before the unicameral Kurultai, is being delivered. When this article was finished it had not yet been given. Once the text is published, five things are worth checking: whether the address is called annual; to whom it is addressed; whether there are instructions in the form of a law; whether there is a report on the execution of the 2025 address; and what role artificial intelligence plays in it — goal, tool or subject of regulation [19].
What next
Version. The annual rhythm of the address has not grown obsolete because algorithms work faster: it exists so that once a year society can check goals against results. What has grown obsolete is the closedness of execution.
Expectation. If the address and the plan are published so that software can read them, if each item gains a result indicator visible to citizens, and if a summary report appears every six months, the genre will regain what Ashoka once devised: a procedure for checking, written into the text itself.
Where to read more
A popular-science version with historical photographs, videos of the addresses and interactive charts is in the VRK News longread “From clay cones to the address to the people”. The full analysis, with a matrix of the genre’s features, scenarios and recommendations, is in the study “An address to the people: the pedigree, mechanism and fate of a genre”. [32][33]
