Astana Letter: One year ago the government of a former Soviet republic rigged an election and the West erupted in fury. With protesters filling the streets, American and European leaders issued strong condemnations.
The weekend before last it happened again, but the West raised not a whisper.
The difference is oil: Ukraine, of Orange Revolution fame, has none, whereas Kazakhstan is awash with the stuff.
Hence the stony silence from the outside world when president Nursultan Nazarbayev romped home with an improbable 91 per cent of the vote in a presidential election teeming with irregularities.
So much for a neutral election press centre - it was run by the president's daughter in a snowbound hotel in Kazakhstan's capital, Astana.
And the T-shirted handmaidens, who served me free coffee, cake, nuts and chocolate, did not happen to have the phone numbers of opposition parties.
Downstairs, election monitors spent a lonely press conference recording fraud, intimidation, censorship, ballot-rigging and media manipulation. They might as well have been talking to the wall.
"Nobody wants to rock the boat," says a western oilman, sitting with me in an Italian-style restaurant in one of the glitzy shopping centres in Almaty, Kazakhstan's former capital and still its commercial hub.
With American, Chinese, Anglo-Dutch, French and Russian oil companies salivating over Kazakhstan's riches, nobody wanted to upset the president.
Admittedly there are other differences with Ukraine, the first being the lack of much of an opposition. Deference, inherited from the time when three tribal chieftains ran this country, is deeply ingrained and protesters are noticeable by their absence.
For another thing, Kazakhstan's president is a nice guy. Not so nice that he investigates how a key opponent managed to shoot himself no fewer than three times while committing suicide - the police verdict - last month, but nicer than most other rulers in this neck of the woods.
He did not drop poison into the soup of his opponent, as happened in Ukraine, or shoot dead 200 protesters, as in Uzbekistan, or stage a Tiananmen Square massacre as did China.
"If you look around the neighbourhood, it doesn't get any better than this," says my oilman, and it is hard to disagree.
Although Transparency International rates this as one of the world's most corrupt states, it is also, in the Muslim world, one of the most tolerant. The best place to see this tolerance is not in its new, antiseptic capital but in Almaty, the country's beating business heart.
Nestling at the spot where the great steppe that runs north to Russia collides with the mountains that run south to the Himalayas, it was for centuries a crossroads for travellers and home to a rough-and-ready tolerance.
Mosques jostle with churches, pubs with shrines; and bazaars dating from the time of the great Silk Road sell spices from India, perfumes from the Orient, and pirate CDs from China.
Bumper-to-bumper SUVs and German saloons bought with oil cash fill the boulevards, and the first snows of winter provide great entertainment as speeding drivers reared on Ladas lose control of their powerful new machines.
There are no political prisoners and police on the streets do not ritualistically check your ID as they do in neighbouring Russia.
Rather, the culture is so attuned to following orders that it is hard to see how democracy can get a foothold. At a hotel gym, the receptionist told me that if I took my sheepskin coat inside, rather than leaving it as required in the cloakroom upstairs "we will get into trouble".
Finally, the president, while seriously dodgy - witness the billion dollars of state cash he was forced to admit stashing away in Swiss banks - is at least a shrewd operator.
He has used considerable skill in keeping rapacious foreign companies from gobbling up his country.
This does not mean Kazakhstan is a jolly old place. Outside busy Almata and gleaming Astana, poverty is appalling and, for the world's 10th richest oil state, frankly inexcusable.
"The richest people in my family village are the pensioners, and the state pension is tiny," a young Kazakh human resources manager told me.
Meanwhile, rampant corruption stifles enterprise, cripples the middle class and rewards parasites.
This corruption and lack of democracy will remain in place as long as the oil companies - and, to be fair, their customers, you and me - impose no ethical standards on the people from whom they buy their oil.
My oilman concedes these points, but he is the exception. Most oilmen prefer corrupt regimes to straight ones because, with no tiresome social programmes to attend to, the profits are bigger. But ask an oilman where he banks, or plans to retire, and he says "in a democracy".