Former Kazakhstani President Nursultan Nazarbayev reportedly reveals second family in new memoir

Nursultan Nazarbayev, who served as Kazakhstan’s first president from 1991 until 2019, has reportedly revealed in a new memoir that he has a second wife and that they have two sons together. An excerpt from the book, which has not yet been released in its entirety, was published by the Kazakhstani outlet Orda.kz.

In the passage, Nazarbayev says he met his previously-unacknowledged wife, Asel Isabayeva, during a trip to the town of Taldykorgan.

During the head of state’s official trips to the regions, he would be met with flowers when he got off the plane. It’s well known that the prettiest local girls would be chosen to participate in this ceremony. A beautiful ritual that we’d long since gotten accustomed to. From the moment you arrive in a new place, your eyes are pleased and your soul becomes warm. But this time I was especially impressed. The young woman who presented me flowers at the airport was strikingly beautiful. She stayed in my memory for a long time — a fair-faced beauty with a fiery gaze and an elegant, chiseled figure.

The former president goes on to recount how he managed to learn the woman’s identity in 1999, when he saw her in the news after she won that year’s Miss Kazakhstan pageant.

Our friendship grew into mutual sympathy, and that sympathy into intimacy. We gradually began seeing each other. And in Asel’s appearance and thoughts, I found many qualities that I’d been searching for. And most importantly, I freed myself from my long years of spiritual loneliness.

According to Nazarbayev, he married Isabayeva in a religious ceremony. The couple’s first son, Tauman, was born in 2005, and their second son came in 2008.

The joy of fatherhood, the happiness of kissing one’s baby came back to me when I was already over 65 years old. My babies’ first steps, their first words and babbling speech, holding them in my arms, the magical world of their toys, their first day of school, the joys of them learning to read and write, their noisy run to come greet me when I came home after work — all of this seemed to lighten my burdens during the period when the capital was being built.

Nazarbayev writes that his first wife, Sara, and his three daughters, Dariga, Dinara, and Alia, understood and forgave his decision to get married for a second time.

“There you have it, friends. I’ve laid out the whole truth. What you have to say about it is your business. This is life. There’s one irrefutable truth: the heart wants what it wants,” he concludes.