50 Tenge Zheltoksan

Zheltoksan — meaning "December" in Kazakh — refers to the 1986 uprising in Alma-Ata, when Gorbachev's appointment of an ethnic Russian, Gennady Kolbin, to lead the Kazakh SSR triggered street protests that Soviet authorities suppressed with considerable violence. The casualties remain disputed; official Soviet figures were minimal, but later investigations pointed to dozens killed and hundreds imprisoned. This coin was struck twenty years after the event, by which point Zheltoksan had been officially reframed in Kazakhstan as an early assertion of national self-determination rather than a riot.