Método Propuesto

The federal structure of the USSR was the consequence of the Bolsheviks’ pragmatism during the period of the consolidation of the Soviet state in the 1920s. They believed that in the short to medium term the federal system would help to attract and mobilize the diverse population of the Russian empire and to destroy the tsarist rule, and in the long-term, with national and class antagonisms resolved and individuals socialized towards ‘international’ socialist community, the national identities would be voluntarily supplanted by the

‘international’ Soviet socialist identity (Chinn and Kaiser, 1996, Young and Light, 2001). In 1924-5 the formal National Delimitation of Central Asia was carried out during which the borders of Kazakhstan were marked out; it is these borders that have now become the international frontiers of post-Soviet Kazakhstan. Thus, by delimiting the boundaries of Kazakhstan and introducing a number of affirmative action programmes, the Bolsheviks in effect created the Soviet federal state and provided the guidelines for transforming the ‘oppressed’ peoples into ‘socialist’ nations (Cummings, 1998).

To win over the Kazakh population, the Soviet authorities introduced a far-reaching policy of social and political reforms. To give at least an impression of regional autonomy, Soviet Kazakhstan was granted regional statehood and the right to secede from the Soviet Union.

At the same time, the Soviet authorities expected to establish a trans-republican, all union Soviet identity. This, as we shall see later, would result in a dual policy and dual identity – identification with the Soviet state and encouragement of a national self-definition

(Brubaker, 1996, Smith, 1998, Cummings, 1998, 2005). In practice, however, although the Bolsheviks were theoretically committed to the policies of internationalism, most of their administrators in Kazakhstan were of Russian or Slavic origin and they had little or no experience outside the Russian Federation. As a result, the subsequent political and

economic changes for many Kazakhs strengthened the feeling that one colonial regime was merely supplanted by another (Sakwa, 1998, Anderson, 1997:27).

The famine and destruction resulting from the years of revolution and civil war had devastated the Kazakhs and effectively destroyed nomadic pastoralism (Olcott (1995:159) estimates 750,000 Kazakhs died, McCauley (1976:18) around a million). The Soviet state advocated sedentarisation, but it could not provide enough human and financial resources to aid this process. Sedentarisation of Kazakhs was in many ways a continuation of the process initiated under the tsarist rule, but now it had become a central element of the Soviet policy. The Soviet authorities exhibited no hesitation unlike their tsarist

predecessors and once they were in power they demanded rapid and radical change. In 1926-7 they started an intensive campaign of seizing arable land from tribal leaders and redistributing it among the poor. In 1928 the Soviets confiscated and redistributed 145,000 animals, marking the beginning of collectivization. In the first years 50,000 Kazakh families were settled in collective farms and by the end of the First Five-Year Plan, the sedentarisation of Kazakhs was considered officially complete.

In 1929 the Soviet authorities nationalized Kazakhs’ property and forced them into the new collective farms. This process was accompanied by the impoverishment, exile and loss of Kazakh tribal elites. The farms which Kazakh were forced to join were usually in the arid and inhospitable areas of the republic and the state usually did not provide them with adequate tools and seeds to function as farmers. Furthermore, many Kazakhs killed their animals rather than hand them over to the state and the result was famine. All in all, the cost

of sedentarisation and collectivization campaigns in terms of human and animal losses was catastrophic. Jasny, in his classic study of Soviet collectivisation, estimates that the Kazakh population dropped by about a million from 3,968,289 in 1926 to 3,098764 in 1939. He adds that Kazakhs by 1939 should have numbered 4.6 million and stated that as such collectivization caused a population drop of 1.5 million (Jasny, 1941: 323). Akiner, citing the Kazakh demographer Makash Tatimov, similarly notes that

out of a Kazakh population of approximately 4,120,000 in 1930, some 1,750,000 had died from starvation, epidemics and executions by 1939 – over forty percent of the entire population (this is in addition to deaths from natural causes). 200,000 fled into

neighbouring countries and remained there (another 400,000 fled, but later returned) and 453,000 took refuge in neighbouring Soviet republics, also to remain there permanently (Akiner, 1995:45).

However, despite the human and animal cost, 98% of the rural Kazakhs lived in collective farms by 1938 and collectivization was believed by Moscow to have been successfully completed.

In political terms, the period before and during the sedentarisation and collectivisation campaigns was marked by the efforts of the Soviet state to co-opt the Kazakh elites into the Soviet power structure and to Sovietise the region. The leaders of the Alash Orda national movement had recognized the Soviet power in 1919 and were already absorbed into the Soviet administrative structures. Most of them, however, did not lose their nationalist agendas and saw communism and socialism as a useful strategy to advance their political interests (Benningsen & Wimbush, 1979:27-30). The Soviet government had also tried to promote a policy of korenizatsiya in order to attract local national cadres and to establish a genuine loyalty among the Kazakh population. This involved the allocation of a percentage of the administrative posts which was proportional to the percentage of Kazakhs in the republic and the introduction of Kazakh as the official language in the republic (Olcott, 1995:211).

By the late 1920s it had become increasingly obvious that the Soviets’ commitment to the ideas of internationalism was hollow. Some observers have noted that the traditional feelings of superiority of Russians towards Kazakhs were easily combined with the new Soviet ideology and this led Kazakhs to believed that they just exchanged one Russian empire for the other (Bennigsen and Lemercier-Quelquejay, 1966:134). Indeed, the Russians did not want to renounce their dominant position in the Communist Party of Kazakhstan and to share the right to determine the course of the revolutionary process. The Moscow government and the local Russian communists, for example, were strongly

opposed to the creation of a parallel Turkic Communist Party in the region and to the return of lands seized by Russians during the tsarist period. Moreover, the very nature of the Bolshevik government, which was a government of and for the proletariat, was

instrumental in excluding a considerable number of Kazakhs from the Party who were still a predominantly rural population.

In 1927 korenizatsiya policies were officially ended on the grounds that indistrialisation of Soviet Kazakhstan required highly qualified personnel that Kazakhs could not readily provide. This was accompanied by the extensive purging of the Communist Party of Kazakhstan, mainly because their commitment to the ideological principles of communism was believed to be hollow and because they represented ‘nationalist’ and ‘bourgeois’ elements of the traditional Kazakh hierarchies. Naturally, the Great Terror Campaign of the late 1920s –early 1930s eliminated anyone with links to the Alash Orda movement, which effectively destroyed the nationalist aspirations among the Kazakh elites. The Communist Party of Kazakhstan, however, was soon repleshinsed by the new Kazakh members who were loyal to the Stalinist political system and largely untarnished by the ideas and events of the previous two decades (Edmunds, 1998:77, Olcott, 1995:220).

The Kazakh SSR also became strategically important as a ‘dumping ground’ for those groups that the Soviet regime considered disloyal or untrustworthy: Russian and Ukrainian kulaks at first, and before and during the Second World War Crimean Tatars, Volga

Germans and Koreans (Rashid, 1994:107). By 1939 Kazakhs had become a minority in their ‘own’ republic: if in 1926 they comprised 58.2% of the population, in 1938 that percentage had dropped to 36.4%. Only in 1989 did Kazakhs achieve a plurality again in the republic, when the Soviet census put the Kazakh percentage at 39.7% as opposed to 37.8% Russians. Lastly came the ‘Virgin Lands’ Campaign in 1954 designed by

Khrushchev to transform the remaining pastoral lands of northern Kazakhstan into a Soviet breadbasket. This brought in about 650,000 Russians and Slavs in the guise of

administrators, agitators, technicians, ‘fraternal helpers’ and ‘enthusiasts’, which profoundly altered the ethnic mix of the republic and helped form the basis of modern Kazakhstan’s diverse population (McCauley, 1976:177).

When Khrushchev was replaced by Brezhnev in 1964, who was seen within the republic as pro-Kazakhstan, the Virgin Lands Campaign was reassessed. He appointed the Kazakh, Dinmukhammed Kunaev, his protégé and close associate, as the 1st Secretary of

Kazakhstan who became responsible for reviving korenizatsiya policies and clan patronage networks leading eventually to Kazakh dominance of party and state administrative

structures (Olcott, 1995, Cummings, 2005). The political power of Kazakhs during this period of revival of Kazakh fortunes, however, was still largely dependent on the goodwill of the Moscow leadership and the constraints of the Soviet state structure. As Khazanov puts it:

The Kazakh political elite’s privileged position in the local power structures depended on their compliance with all of Moscow’s demands and goals…. In addition, they had to embrace the Russian language and – at least in public – some of Russian culture and lifestyle. In return, Moscow gave them the right to run internal affairs in Kazakhstan, and to distribute preferential treatment and high-level jobs. In order to secure their support, the Soviet regime reserved a significant

percentage of these jobs for Kazakhs (Khazanov, 1984:252). Rywkin similarly observed that

Specific controlling jobs are reserved for Europeans. These include positions of Second Party Secretaries, heads of special sections, heads of security, directors of factories of ‘all-union importance’… an even larger number of managerial jobs are reserved exclusively for Moslems: positions of First Secretaries, of Secretaries for Agitation and Propaganda, top governmental and Soviet positions, republic relations… and directorships of most of the non-essential enterprises (Rywkin, 1979:45).

With the death of Brezhnev in 1982, Kunaev’s power started to decline and he became increasingly sidelined under the brief incumbencies of Andropov and Chernenko. When Gorbachev came to power in 1986, Kunaev was dismissed from his position as the 1st secretary of the Communist Party of Kazakhstan and replaced by a Russian, Gennadii Kolbin, who had no previous links with the republic. It was against this backdrop that the December riots broke out. These were harshly suppressed with many deaths and injuries. The circumstances of these events still remain uncertain. What is clear, however, is that, firstly, they were the result of general unease amongst the Kazakhs that their political power was being downgraded, and, secondly, that this became a crucial ‘mythic moment’ for the development of the Kazakh national consciousness and aspirations for autonomy, now constantly referred to in the new Kazakh history (Akiner, 1995, Nazarbaev, 1999, Seidimbek, 2000, Gali, 2001, Masanov, 2002, Karin & Chebotarev, 2002), In the subsequent months many Kazakhs as well as Russians started to feel that the December demonstrations marked a crucial point in Kazakh-Russian relation and this understanding led to ‘a distinct divergence between the political interests of the two groups’ (Edmunds, 1998:88). In the Kazakhs’ case, ‘this merged with the growing awareness of ethnic political identity, providing the impetus for the emergence of a nationalist trend in public opinion’ (ibid.). In the Russians’ case, this similarly highlighted their precarious status as an ethno- national minority in the republic despite the fact that they were the dominant or state- bearing nation in the Soviet Union as a whole. These feelings and aspirations were shrewdly managed by N. Nazarbaev when he replaced Kolbin in 1989 and became a

colleague of Gorbachev in the Politbureau, soon to become in 1991 the first President of independent Kazakhstan.

3.5 Conclusion: The Development and Interaction of Kazakh and Russian Identities