Window on Eurasia

"Are There Any ‘Russians’ in the Near Abroad?" A Kazakh Asks

 

Paul Goble

Vienna, August 24, 2006 – With Moscow’s backing, the Russian community in Kazakhstan is stepping up its demands for special treatment, calls that have prompted one Kazakh analyst to question whether Russian speakers there now constitute a distinct ethnic community and whether Moscow has a right to pose as their defender.

In an article posted this week on the APN Kazakhstan website – and
one that the site’s editors specify is both “polemical” and not an
“expression” of their point of view – Dzhanibek Baytyrov argues
that “the moment has come” to examine these qeustions
dispassionately and “without the myths”
[http://www.apn.kz/publications/print5430.htm].

Baytyrov’s article represents a response to a conference of his
country’s Russian speakers that took place in Almaaty on August 11
and that demanded Kazakhstan provide a defense of “the official status of
the Russian language” on the basis of the special role of the Russian
community in that country.

The Kazakh writer begins his essay with the assertion that “the roots
of this current problem reach back into the distant past to the moment
of the founding of the Russian [rossiisky] Empire.”

At that time, he continues, “the official national identification was
Russian [rossiiskiy],” but he insists that this was “a completely
artificial identification dreamed up from beginning to end,” one
“imposed not only on the non-Slavic peoples but on the Slavs
themselves.”

“The self-consciousness of the representative of any people is built
on concrete manifestations of the culture of his motherland: the
language of his parents, his native settlement, valley, river, the
graves of his ancestors, thee stories of elders and so on,” Baytyrov
writes.

“An imperial identification has a different basis: abstract symbols,
territories, capitals, and mythology, of course, primarily of a
military-patriotic intention.” That means, he says, “a person with
an artificial ‘Russian’ [russkiy] identification ought to be called
‘imperial.’”

And the Kazakh polemicist goes on to assert that “the different
between the official ‘Russian’ of the Russian empire and the Soviet
Union consists only in political ideology and in no way the essence of
the phenomenon.

That essence, he assures his readers, can best be called “’cultural
terrorism’,” a continuing attempt to “destroy everything in the
culture and language of its subjects that is different than the
official identification.” Such policies, he continues, involve “the
deprivation of their motherlands, their mankurtization.”

“The insistent Russification of the non-Rusian peoples is only part
of what is involved,” Baytyrov says. “With not less insistence and
cruelty,” he suggests, the langauge and culture of the Slavic peoples
– including those typically called Russians – were distorted as
well.

The interest of the political leadership in such a policy is
“understandable,” the Kazakh commentator continues, “for the
products of mankurtization are the ideal subjects who can be thrown
into any meatgrinder in the name of imperial interests.” And this history
helps to explain why many peoples in the region dislike Russia now.

(Mankurtization refers to the process of depriving individuals of their
memories, the basis of any identity. The term comes from Chingiz
Aitmatov’s classic novel, “A Day Longer than an Age,” in which a
particularly brutal pre-modern form of this process was described at
length.)

What does all this have to do with the demands of Russian speakers in
the near abroad? Baytyrov asks. His answer is everything. The
“Russians” in Kazakhstan and other parts of the former empire, he
suggests, are imperial missionaries rather than a genuine ethnic
community.

They were dispatched by the imperial center to control the empire’s
periphery not to promote the development of the Russian community but
to hold the empire together. Indeed, he claims, the “’Russian
community’” of Kazakhstan consists overwhelmingly not of
self-conscious Russians but of ‘exiled kulaks.’”

In general, he continues, “Russians in an ethnic sense live in the
European part of Russia, and those who came to Kazakhstan did so in the
time of Baty and in the time of Stalin not of their own accord” but
because of the requirements of the empire and its rulers.

Such “an imperial policy, together with ‘cultural terror,’
continues today,” Baytyrov says. And as evidence of that, he points
to the fact that Moscow has declared at the UN that it “will never
recognize the right of small peoples [living within the borders of the
Russian Federation] to self-determination.”

Given that reality, Batyrov stresses, “Russia can demand from other
countries the observation of the rights of its compatriots only when in
Russia itself, the rights of indigenous peoples will be observed in a
model fashion,” something that is not now the case.

“’Russian communities’ abroad complain that they have few
schools, newspapers and organizations and demand support including from the
governments of their country. But in Russia do all the peoples have in
sufficient amount schools, organizations and newspapers?”

The answer, of course, is that they do not, Batyrov replies, noting
that if data about this issue are collected in an honest fashion, it is a
simple matter to show that “’Russians’ in Estonia live much
better than many indigenous peoples” of the Russian Federation.”

All this brings Baytyrov back to what he says is the fundamental
question: “do ‘Russian communities’ have the right to speak in
the name of Russians?” And he replies with a resounding “no,” giving
three reasons for arguing that Russians who have lived in independent
Kazakhstan for 15 years must now be considered Kazakhstanis.

First, he says, “the ‘Russians’ about the rights of whom so many
of our media outlets speak are not real Russians at all but rather a
collection of Russian-language people with an artificial imperial
identification. If they were real Russians,” Baytyrov insists, “
they would go back to their historical homeland.”

Second, the post-Soviet states have every right “to root out the
policy of mankurtization. Kazakhstan is reestablishing Kazakh
culture,” a necessity given the extent to which the Soviet and
Russian authorities distorted its national cultural traditions.

Third, and especially important, “Russia has no right to demand from
its neighbors anything in relation to ‘Russians’ while many
indigenous peoples living in Russia are de facto second-class citizens
there, with rights to their native culture and culture and now without
autonomy as well.”

Baytyrov’s comments are certain to be dismissed as a nationalist rant
by many in both the Russian Federation and Kazakhstan, but they are
nonetheless important. On the one hand, they are an indication that at
least some in that Central Asian country are outraged by Russian
pretensions.

And on the other, they suggest that Moscow may soon find that its
demands abroad are limited in this area at least by its behaviour at
home, a discovery that might put pressure on the Russian authorities to
reverse their own nationality policies or at least modify them to
regain
leverage in what they continue to call “the near abroad.”

 

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