Russification and its Consequences in Kazakhstan in Tsarist, Soviet and Post-Soviet Time

By Aida Tynystanova

The general purpose of this guide is to provide a popular interpretation of the principal provisions of the Partnership and Cooperation Agreement signed between the EU and the Kyrgyz Republic on February 9 1995 in Brussels by the President of Kyrgyzstan Askar Akaev and the President of the European Commission Jacques Santer (further referred to as the PCA or the Agreement). This publication is an attempt to describe the implications for cooperation under the PCA and familiarize the reader with the political, legal and economic context of the agreement. The layout of the guide is organised around the main clauses of the PCA to ensure thorough coverage of all titles of the Agreement. All references made to specific “Titles” or “Articles” in this guide correspond to the titles and articles in the PCA, unless otherwise indicated.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Libertas
• Release date: Jan 2, 2003
• ISBN: 9783946119593

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1. INTRODUCTION

The disintegration of the world's largest country, known as the USSR, encouraged the independent efforts of all former Soviet Republics to integrate more closely into the world community. Soviet Kazakhstan could have been regarded as a kind of pseudo-state, which had some of the trappings of true states but lacked essential elements such as control of its own territory, politics, and economy. Today, the state authorities in independent Kazakhstan are striving to transform these political contraptions into a real, modern state. This is a complex, multidimensional process, where the identity aspect of nation-building has become the most important dimension.

Historically in Kazakhstan, as a part of the Soviet Union, the concept of nation has not been identified with the total population of the country, that is, as a political unit. Rather, the nation has been regarded as a cultural and ethnic entity. While in most Western countries the two terms citizenship and nationality are interchangeable, in the Soviet Union they were sharply differentiated. Nationality was understood as ethnicity and was utilized, both on the individual level and on the macro level (Karklins R., 15). Every Soviet citizen had an official nationality ascribed to him or her and written into his/her passport. No wonder that for the period of eighty years people got used to having both identities. After they lost their Soviet identity, people began to identify themselves, first and foremost, with their ethnicity. Since citizens of new post-Soviet states never felt themselves either important elements of the Soviet nation or proud representatives of their ethnicities, today people of post-Soviet countries are experiencing a dangerous problem with national identity. For instance, in Kazakhstan people do not know whether should they identify themselves with Kazakhs, Russians, Kazakhstanis, or even Homo Soveticus, as Western writers ironically labeled Soviet people (Tishkov, 38).

In order to understand the identity challenges the post-Soviet people grapple with today, the reader needs to know about the traditional Soviet treatment of nationalism. According to the Soviet Encyclopedia, the nation is a historic entity of people with its territory, economic ties, literary language, and specific culture and character comprising the whole of nation's features (Bolshaya Sovetskaya Encyclopedia, Vol. 17, p.375). Stalin treated a nation as a historically evolved, stable community of language, territory, economic life and psychological make-up manifested in a community of culture (Tishkov, 25). Later Soviet scholars added as an important element the feeling of common identity or national self-consciousness (Tishkov, 25). In accordance with many Soviet texts, especially those of the 1970s period, the Soviet nation had achieved such a level of political, economic, and cultural integration that it was regarded as an ethno-social organism (Bromley, 42).

The notion of ethnic collectivism was the most authoritarian element of Soviet-style nationalism because it led an elite to interpret the national interest. According to Liah Greenfield, the reification of a community preserves fundamental inequality between those of its few members who are qualified to interpret the collective will and the many who have no such qualifications; the select few dictate to the masses who must obey (Greenfield, p. 11). In the Soviet Union ethnic affiliation became subject to mass manipulation, political control and even repression. Having changed names, histories, territories and languages of entire nations, Soviet ethnographers, historians, geographers and linguists created a hierarchy of ethnic groups with the Russian nation perched on the top. All these factors caused two varieties of conflict-generating nationalism in the Soviet Union - hegemonic, that is the nationalism of majority, and defensive, that is the nationalism of minorities (Tishkov, p 28).

On the one hand, post-Soviet nationalist movements strengthened concerns for cultural integrity and helped to mobilize citizens demanding democratic reform and self-governance. In its cultural and political forms, nationalism has also helped to build the states that have emerged from the collapse of the Soviet Union. On the other hand, regional ethno-nationalisms have caused destructive wars, ethnic cleansing, and forms of uncontrolled violence that have killed thousands of people, displaced millions more, and contributed to growing political instability in some of the Post-Communist states. Questions of nationalism and national identity, repressed for many decades, have arisen everywhere across the huge territory of the former Soviet Union, causing multiple