Soviet heritage of Kazakhstan
Attitudes toward the Soviet legacy imply the existence of judgments on a very wide range of issues, especially if someone defines the USSR as something more than just the continuation of Tsarist colonial Russia. Such an understanding of the problem is not so rare. Those who share it are very wary of the policy of the Russian Federation to create “special” relations with Kazakhstan and implying the right of Russia to control certain processes in Kazakhstan and Central Asia as a whole. Very often, these people criticize the use of the Russian language in the media, public places and everyday life, because, they believe, this somewhat reduces the role and status of the Kazakh language as the state language of the Republic of Kazakhstan.
Meanwhile, many citizens of Kazakhstan, it is difficult to say what percentage of the total population of the country, remember the Soviet period with warmth, consciously separating the USSR from colonial Tsarist Russia. It would seem that such an attitude is more characteristic of representatives of non-Kazakh ethnicity, and not necessarily Russians. However, Kazakhs are also subject to nostalgia for the Soviet times, mostly from those state and collective farm workers who failed to switch to a market economy or entered pension or pre-pension age at the time of the collapse of the USSR. All of them were simply not ready for the collapse of a strong welfare state. Doctors, teachers and former military in some cases can also be assigned to this category. Many of them regret the loss of the opportunity to change their social status, which, in their opinion, was one of the features of the Soviet regime, as well as respect and relatively better remuneration, which they, as representatives of their professions, enjoyed in the USSR. Often, their opinions are shared by former members and activists of the CPSU, who believe that the modern political ideology of Kazakhstan should have more Soviet ideals, as well as some members of the national minorities of Kazakhstan who are nostalgic for Marxist internationalism.
The key issue that separates Kazakhstani society is whether the USSR was another embodiment of Russian imperialism, albeit with a new ideology, or was it an ideologically consolidated multinational state, in which the majority of peoples and ethnic groups had ample opportunities in political, economic and social life.
There is no simple answer to this question. The borders of the USSR after the Second World War largely corresponded to the borders of the Russian Empire, but the Soviet political system was completely different. It was a vertically integrated political structure, providing some ethno-territorial decentralization. Ethnic minorities living in the ethnoterritorial subjects of the USSR under their own names enjoyed some degree of ethno-linguistic autonomy. Of course, more in union than in autonomous associations, and more in large mono-ethnic than in multinational union republics. The Kazakh SSR was the most multinational of all the Soviet republics, and ethnic Kazakhs even constituted a minority in the territory that bore their name.
Nevertheless, the ethnic Kazakh Dinmukhammed Kunaev, who for a long time served as the first secretary of the Communist Party of Kazakhstan, for 20 years was a member of the Politburo of the CPSU Central Committee, the body that de facto ruled the USSR. Mr. Kunaev was the only Central Asian representative ever appointed member of the Politburo. In addition, only a limited number of figures spent such a long time at their posts in the post-Stalinist USSR.
The future historians will give an objective assessment of the pros and cons of the Kunaev rule. They will determine whether Moscow took away too much from the republic and how much it gave back. But it is indisputable that the foundations of the economic diversification of Kazakhstan were laid during the years of the rule of D. A. Kunaev. Almaty has acquired a modern cosmopolitan look with the preservation of vast green areas, a huge country has invested substantial funds in the development of education and the creation of new infrastructure in the republic. All this happened during the period, the last years of which will be called “stagnation”. It was then that the future president of Kazakhstan, Nursultan Nazarbayev, acquired the status of a significant figure in the political establishment of the Kazakh SSR.
But even in this period of relative well-being, the Kazakhs did not have the opportunity to turn to the “white spots” of their stories, especially the part that studied the repression of Stalinism. While the peoples of the USSR suffered from three decades of I. Stalin's rule, the pain and grief of the Kazakh people were especially acute due to the mass extinction of the rural population during the years of collectivization.
Like the Ukrainians, the Kazakhs can view Stalin’s agrarian policy as a form of genocide, implying that the collectivization goal was to destroy the Kazakhs and Ukrainians in order to liberate their territories in order to settle them in Russian and organize new, collective forms of agriculture. However, I have never found any evidence that the policy of collectivization in Kazakhstan, as well as in any other area of the USSR, was aimed at the destruction of ethnic groups. In turn, there is no doubt that this policy was aimed at eliminating the traditional Kazakh economy and with it the traditional way of life of the Kazakhs. And in the process of implementing collectivization plans, Soviet officials destroyed more than half of all Kazakh households and more than 80 percent. cattle, which served as the foundation for the economy and traditional culture of the Kazakhs.
Collectivization was carried out according to the principle “the end justifies the means”, regardless of human sacrifices. The main goal was the production of wheat - an export product - to provide funds for the Soviet industrialization. Therefore, even when it became clear that collective agriculture was worth millions of lives, Moscow continued to mercilessly speed up work in this direction.
Thus, despite the fact that collectivization did not pursue the goal of exterminating peoples, the consequences were just that. Collectivization was followed by political repression of the 1930s. In Kazakhstan, rare exceptions are families whose senior representatives did not die in the process of collectivization or repression. Countless families died out completely, leaving no one who could restore their names today. This explains the essence of collective grief - the Kazakhs had to wait several generations to reach the demographic potential corresponding to the end of the 1920s.
The historical study of this period is a difficult task, despite the availability of archives of that time. The policy of collectivization and repression was planned in Moscow, but was embodied locally by local personnel - representatives of all nationalities, both Kazakh and non-Kazakh. Their descendants - citizens of modern Kazakhstan - live and participate in many aspects of the life of the republic.
Thus, almost any issue of joint Russian-Kazakhstan history is controversial. One of the exceptions can be called the Second World War, or, otherwise, the Great Patriotic War, in which about half a million Kazakhstanis fought and thousands of them died. The recognition of this sacrifice united various views on history. Among other things, it was during the war years that the first serious industrialization campaign began in the republic, and it also contributed to the ethnic diversity of Kazakhstani society.
Undoubtedly, the results of the policy pursued by Nikita Khrushchev are still controversial. The campaign for the development of virgin lands led the Kazakh cattle breeders to the side of life and once again changed the ethnic balance in the republic. But after the first “bumpy” few years, rain-fed agriculture was firmly established in the economy of Kazakhstan and at the moment is an important sector of the economy of an independent state, ensuring its diversification.
Khrushchev's policy of reviving the communist ideology is also controversial. While the thaw begun at the 20th CPSU Congress led to the liberation and rehabilitation of many victims of Stalinist repression, many unsubstantiated national heroes remained. Khrushchev's appeal to the XXII Congress of the CPSU about the need for the movement of the USSR towards true internationalism through the “rapprochement and merging” of peoples or, in fact, mixing different ethnic groups was even more controversial. Along with the majority of other nations, the Kazakhs perceived this appeal as a call for “Russification”. At the same time, the Russians were also critical, considering such a policy to be the end of Russian culture and national identity.
In general, the objectives of the Soviet national policy, in terms of the ideological component and its implementation, are among the most difficult issues in the history of the Soviet regime. Consider, for example, language policy. In Soviet times, the Kazakhs and other peoples of the Soviet Union gained access to good education. In spite of the difficulties and distortions that existed at that time, which were allowed in presenting the history of the development of the culture of the USSR, there were also opportunities to receive world-class education in mathematics and other basic sciences, as well as in the humanitarian sphere. The Kazakhs, representing all social and economic sectors of the population, took advantage of the benefits and subsequently some of them achieved international recognition for their achievements. Literacy in Kazakhstan has been and remains polls, which is not even today in the former colonies of Great Britain, in the same India and Pakistan.
At the same time, not all Kazakhs were fluent in the Kazakh language and very few representatives of other ethnic groups inhabiting Kazakhstan could speak, read and write in Kazakh. The latter circumstance is the source of quite definite discontent among the Kazakhs. For example, in neighboring Uzbekistan, the Uzbek language has occupied a dominant position in public life as a means of written and oral communication. But, despite all the imbalances in language policy, the Kazakh language in its written expression was formed precisely in the Soviet period. While many Kazakh nationalists who advocated the development of the Kazakh language, died during the repression, others were able to continue and significantly expand the range of intellectual products produced in the Kazakh language, as well as expanded the technical component of the language.
The years of Gorbachev’s rule, with which many Soviet people pinned some hopes, became years of frustration for many Kazakhs, who believed that the policy of publicity and restructuring did not ensure justice. Many Kazakhs felt like the victims of the anti-corruption campaign of the Communist Party. The protest of youth against the displacement of D. Kunaev G. Kolbin, Russian not from Kazakhstan, was forever imprinted in the historical memory of Kazakhstan and is closely associated with December 16 - Independence Day. Popular among the people, Prime Minister N. Nazarbayev was not only circumvented by the appointment of Kolbin, but also deprived of the opportunity to stop the ousting of old party workers from the government bodies of the republic.
Those years nevertheless became an important period in the history of Kazakhstan. The first Kazakh informal, and then non-governmental organizations voiced a large number of social and political demands. The Nevada-Semipalatinsk movement drew attention to the glaring price paid by Kazakhstan and its population for the presence of nuclear and chemical military facilities on its territory, while other environmental organizations discussed the death of the Aral Sea and the predatory exploitation of natural resources, while completely ignoring the health of those involved in the process.
Gorbachev apparently revised his previous assessment of N. Nazarbayev, appointing him the head of the Communist Party of Kazakhstan 22 June 1989, just a few days after the riots in Uzen. In the last years of Soviet power, Nazarbayev acquired the status of an all-union figure, since he was looking for opportunities to preserve the USSR in a way in which he would meet the ethno-national, economic and political interests of the Union republics, and especially Kazakhstan. Nazarbayev’s policy from June 1989 to December 1991 demonstrates that he was aware of the complexity of the Soviet legacy and understood that the Soviet system was collapsing. But he also understood well and repeatedly repeated during all 20 years of his presidency that the specificity of the historical, cultural and geographical interrelations of Russia and Kazakhstan does not depend on whether they are politically a single entity, like the Soviet Union, or independent states.
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