Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, Kazakhstan emerged into the post-Cold War environment as a new but equally subordinate state, sharply limited in its capacity for independent strategic decision-making. Almost overnight, the ninth largest country on the planet became a sovereign state, without a history of independent governance, functioning national institutions, no indigenous military command structure and an economy thoroughly integrated into the Soviet system which had just ceased to exist. Recognizing the vulnerabilities facing the new state in a volatile neighborhood, then-President Nursultan Nazarbayev initiated a strategic opening in the mid-1990s anchored by a "multivector" foreign policy. Nazarbayev, himself a former Soviet bureaucrat, found himself in 1991 tasked with leading a country whose productive capacity was essentially meaningless without the supply chains, markets and infrastructure that Moscow had controlled.