Bhavna Dave. Kazakhstan: Ethnicity, Language and Power

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deliberately planned by the Bolsheviks.

Estimates of deaths and destruction

vary. According to demographer Tatimov and historians Manash Kozybaev and

Zhuldyzbek Abylkhozhin, then members of the Academy of Sciences who were

entrusted with writing a history of the settlement of the Kazakh nomads by the

post-Soviet Kazakhstan state, the 1929–33 period marked a tragedy bordering on

‘genocide’, claiming 2.3 million Kazakh lives.

Other historians estimate the

number of Kazakhs who perished at about 1.7 to 1.8 million, contending that the

official data of Tatimov and others has consistently exaggerated both the number

of Kazakhs at the turn of the twentieth century, as well as the extent of their

demographic loss.

They also maintain that the high loss of Kazakh population

was an inevitable consequence of the ‘crisis of nomadism’, which was only

precipitated, but not caused, by the socio-economic policies of the Bolsheviks.

The Soviet census of 1937 offered a preview of the demographic havoc

wreaked by the forced settlement of nomads in the 1920s. It showed that the

Kazakh population had dropped sharply from 3.6 million (3,637,612) in 1926 to 2.1

million (2,181,520), a loss of 39.8 per cent.

This included about 653,000

Kazakhs, roughly one out of six, who had fled to neighbouring countries, and

some settled in other parts of the Soviet Union. The alarming drop in the number

of Kazakhs, Ukrainians (about 5 million Ukrainians died or ‘disappeared’ as a

consequence of collectivization), and other peoples of the USSR as revealed in

the census led Stalin to annul its results.

Arguably the most devastating effect of collectivization was not the sheer

demographic loss but an abrupt and violent uprooting of the nomadic community

and culture that were anchored in the aul. One of my informants, 69-year-old

Aziza Zhunispeisova, who hailed from the Ural’sk town in western Kazakhstan,

expressed it this way:

The Kazakhs, descendants of Genghis Khan, were great warriors. All the

Turkic tribes have their origins in the steppes. Eventually many of them

migrated to faraway lands and settled down. But the Kazakhs remained here,

surviving in these harsh conditions against all odds, resisting the frequent

invasions by Jungars and other unruly tribes from China. Then came a steady

wave of bandits, criminals and thieves [references to Cossacks, and some

convicts sent to the steppes during the Tsarist period] who plundered our

lands, took away our livelihood, made us drink vodka and weakened our

genes. Collectivization, Zhut and the purges struck the final blow by taking

away the best among us. The sufferings and hardships of all these years have

now made the people very fearful and quiescent. The Kazakhs today aren’t

who they used to be.

Typical of many of her generation, Aziza Zhunispeisova was attempting to find

continuities between the historical reputation of the Kazakhs as fierce warriors

and descendants of Genghis Khan, and the contemporary Kazakhs, a tamed,

Russified, small nation. Although such perceptions were part of the quotidian

discourse in the 1990s, virtually no Kazakhstani scholar has yet attempted

56 Becoming mankurts? The hegemony of Russian

an analysis of the physiological, sociocultural and psychological effects of forced

settlement and collectivization on subsequent generations of Kazakhs.

Overpowered by the zeal to promote a profound economic transformation

through massive social and ideological engineering, the Stalinist high modernist

ideology completely severed the Kazakhs’ links with their nomadic tradition, life

in the aul, knowledge of genealogy and oral folklore. By seeing literacy, the

printed word, and a literary tradition as essential indicators of progress and

civilization, the Soviet rulers totally devalued the tradition of nomadic epics, oral

folklore and the centrality of memory in the nomadic communities. The

Bolsheviks introduced new standardized expressions of national cultures, such as

‘national’ forms of opera, ballet, plays and poetry, by pushing out the tradition of

akyn (bards) and aitys (improvised poetry competitions), though some of the

pre-existing cultural elements were appropriated in the Bolshevik-led folklorization

of national cultures.

Urbanization and Russification

The disintegration of the nomadic aul unleashed a movement of the Kazakhs to

new industrial and urban areas dominated by Russians, and also placed pressure

on them to learn Russian. Urbanization among the Kazakhs became tantamount

to their Russification. Overall, the Kazakh and Kyrgyz nomadic communities had

no experience of a settled mode of life or town-dwelling. Cities such as Orenburg,

Omsk, Astrakhan (all part of the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic

(RSFSR) contained an extremely small number of educated Kazakhs. In the

nomadic world-view, the oasis-dwellers, settled communities and town merchants

all represented the other, and by implication, inferior cultures.

Russian settler towns

The few ‘settled’ spaces in Kazakhstan from the late eighteenth century onwards

were tsarist military outposts, fortresses (ukreplennye punkty) or administrative

centres. Major towns such as Uralsk, Gur’ev (Atyrau), Petropavlovsk,

Semipalatinsk (Semei), Ust-Kamenogorsk (Oskemen), Vernyi (Alma-Ata, and

later Almaty) were populated almost entirely by Cossack military battalions,

traders and some civilians. Among the total inhabitants listed below in Table 3.1,

barely 2–3 per cent of the population of these exclusively Russian towns consisted

of Kazakhs. Almost all of these town-dwelling Kazakhs came from the privileged

stratum that served in the Tsarist colonial administration.

Table 3.1 shows the sparsely populated nature of urban settlement on the

Kazakh steppe at the turn of the twentieth century. In 1920, there were a total of

22 cities and 29 workers’ settlements (rabochie poselki) in the steppe, where

about 7 per cent of the entire population of the steppes lived. When the Kirgiz

[Kazakh] ASSR was formed in 1924, the Kazakhs found themselves without

a proper city that could be designated as the capital. Orenburg, which had a

significant share of educated Kazakhs and served as the capital of the Kirgiz

Becoming mankurts? The hegemony of Russian 57

[Kazakh] autonomous republic formed by the Bolsheviks in 1920, was transferred

to the Russian Federation during the national delimitation (natsional’noe

razmezhevanie) in Central Asia in 1924. Some Kazakh communists lobbied to get

Tashkent, located along the southern borders of Kazakhstan, by evoking the

principle of equity. They argued that the Uzbeks had already been given a

disproportionate number of cities with the acquisition of the historical

(and Persian-dominated) towns of Samarkand and Bukhara, whereas the Kazakhs

had lost their major city, Orenburg. Eventually, Qyzylorda in south-central

Kazakhstan, located in the middle of the nomadic heartland, was made the capital

of the Kazakh ASSR in 1925. The determining factor was its location on the

Orenburg–Tashkent railroad, the only road link between Turkestan and the Kazakh

steppes with Russia at that time. It was only after the completion of the

Turkestan–Siberian railroad (Turksib) under the First Five-Year Plan in 1927 that

Vernyi, a former tsarist fortress, was made the capital of the republic, as it then

linked the southern stretch of arable territories of the Kazakh steppe with Russia.

Vernyi, renamed Alma-Ata

in 1927 (Alma-Ata was renamed Almaty in 1993),

had only 4,008 Kazakhs in 1920. When it became the capital of the reconstituted

Kazakh ASSR in 1927, roughly 3 per cent of its population was Kazakh. Most

Kazakhs lived in yurts in the mountains in and around the city, which made it

difficult to determine their number or permanent abode.

The Stalin-era industrialization in Kazakhstan led to the emergence of new

mining and industrial towns such as Temirtau, Karaganda, Shevchenko (now Aktau),

Mangishlak (now Mangistau). Being rich in mineral resources, the northern and

58 Becoming mankurts? The hegemony of Russian

Table 3.1 Major towns in Kazakhstan and population, 1897

Town Population

Uralsk 36,446

Vernyi (Alma-Ata, Almaty) 22,744

Semipalatinsk (Semei) 20,216

Petropavlovsk (Petropavl) 19,688

Zharkent 16,094

Kustanai (Qostanai) 14,275

Aulie-Ata (Zhambyl, Taras) 11,722

Akmolinsk (Tselinograd, Aqmola, Astana) 9,688

Gur’ev (Atyrau) 9,322

Ust-Kamenogorsk 8,721

Pavlodar 7,738

Kokchetav (Kokshetau) 4,962

Karkalinsk 4,451

Zaisan 4,402

Atbasar 3,038

Turgai (Torgai) 896

Source: A. N. Nusupbekov, Istoriia Kazakhskoi SSR s drevneishikh

vremen do nashikh dnei, Vol. 2, Alma-Ata: Nauka Kaz. SSR, 1979, p. 302.

Note

The names in the parenthesis refer to Soviet and then post-Soviet era names.

eastern regions of Kazakhstan profited extensively from the industrialization

launched in the 1930s. Kazakhstan also became home to wartime resettlement of

factories and gulags, where convicts were sent to hard labour, which accelerated

industrial and urban growth. By the late 1940s, Kazakhstan had already become

the third largest industrial republic in the Union, boasting a significant industrial

and urban growth.

A small number of Kazakhs were able to successfully engage

in trade and commercial opportunities, but most others were too impoverished

and were willing to adapt to any subsistence options that were available. Many

began work in the makeshift urban areas, composed of factories, railroad

construction sites such as the Turksib, and various mining settlements. Yurts were

set up on the outskirts of the cities where many Kazakh workers lived and worked

as temporary labourers, only to return to a semi-nomadic existence after the

construction was over. The completion of the gigantic Turksib railroad in 1928,

hailed as a key achievement of the first Five-Year Plan, was aided by the labour

of the Kazakhs who had been uprooted from their nomadic structure.

Several

Kazakhs lived in yurts in the city of Karaganda in the 1930s and worked in mines,

thus contributing to the city’s industrial growth. It was estimated that about

40 per cent of mining and industrial workers in Kazakhstan were Kazakhs, denoting

a considerably high share as industrial workers among all Central Asians.

Adapting to the Russophone urban milieu

Of all Soviet republics, Kazakhstan experienced the most dramatic changes in its

ethnic composition throughout the Soviet years. Khrushchev’s programme of

cultivation of ‘virgin lands’ launched in 1954 brought in over a million workers

from the European regions of the Soviet Union, transforming Kazakhstan,

particularly its northern and eastern oblasts, into multi-ethnic regions. The

deportation of various ethnic groups, such as the Chechens, Germans, Chuvash

and Koreans by Stalin during the Second World War to the ‘remote and sparsely

populated Kazakh lands’ mirrored the central officials’ perception of Kazakhstan

as a ‘settler region’(pereselencheskii raion). ‘International’ was another celebrated

euphemism used by the Soviet leadership to legitimize a large Slavic presence in

the republics. The new settlers were imbued with a ‘pioneering’ mission to plough

land, build factories and set up collective and state farms (kolkhoz and sovkhoz)

in order to develop what the leadership in Moscow saw as ‘remote, uninhabited

expanses’.

By 1959, about 60 per cent of Kazakhstan’s population consisted of Russian-

speaking nationalities. Of these, 43 per cent were Russians and the remaining

were Ukrainians, Belarusians and Germans. Only 30 per cent were Kazakhs

(see Table 3.2). The newly formed kolkhoz and sovkhoz bore the names of various

Slavic cities, such as ‘Moskovskii’, ‘Leningradskii’, ‘Kievskii’, ‘Minskii’,

‘Simferopolskii’, ‘Voronezhskii’, ‘Dnepropetrovskii’, ‘Yaroslavskii’,

celebrating

the spirit of ‘internationalism’ guiding Kazakhstan’s development. None were

named after places within the republic. European settlers became the most

conspicuous and were widely depicted as ploughing land, building factories and

Becoming mankurts? The hegemony of Russian 59

setting up new mining towns and urban settlements. Local Kazakhs, as ‘gracious

hosts, remained in the background’, reminisced Anatoly Fyodorovich, during a

conversation with me. He had worked as a party official in the 1950s in the

Pavlodar and Kustanai oblasts in the north. By the end of the 1950s, the northern

and eastern regions of Kazakhstan had come to resemble the RSFSR in their

ethno-cultural profile.

These new Russophone urban clusters in the dispersed Kazakh territories had

few, if any, direct sociocultural or ethnic ties with the indigenous population of

the surrounding aul. Almaty was virtually a Russian city in 1959. Three-fourths

of its population was comprised of European nationalities, notably Slavs and

Germans. The titular Kazakhs formed under 10 per cent of its total inhabitants.

The old residents of Almaty described it as completely ‘European’ in its

architectural layout, ethnic composition, dress code and in language repertoire, at

least up to mid-1990s. For the former nomads who had had no exposure to urban

life, the Russophone capital of their ‘own’ republic appeared distant and alien.

One informant conveyed the alienation felt by the Kazakhs, citing the following

verses: ‘Almaty is the capital of the Kazakhs, home to the Russians, and a

guesthouse for the Uighurs’ [Almaty – aazaqtardyng astanasy, orystardyng

baspanasy, uigurlardyng askhanasy].

All major towns in Central Asia were Russian-dominated and Russified. But

rising levels of urbanization among the Central Asians also brought to the

forefront the differences in their adaptation to urban life and in patterns of ethnic

intermixing. In major towns in Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, the new native settlements

tended to be concentrated initially in the mahallas. These were residential

quarters that housed members of extended families in the same vicinity, and

60 Becoming mankurts? The hegemony of Russian

Table 3.2 Major nationalities in Kazakhstan, 1959–99 (in percentages)

Nationality 1959 1970 1979 1989 1999

Kazakh 30.0 32.6 36.0 40.1* 53.4

Russian 42.7 42.4 40.8 37.4* 29.9

Ukrainian 8.2 7.2 6.1 5.4 3.7

Belorusian 1.2 1.5 1.2 1.1 0.8

German 7.1 6.6 6.1 5.8 2.4

Tatar 2.1 2.2 2.1 2.0 1.7

Uzbek 1.5 1.7 1.8 2.0 2.5

Uighur 0.6 0.9 1.0 1.1 1.4

Korean 0.8 0.6 0.6 0.6 0.7

Source: 1959 and 1970 data are from Table 2, Itogi vsesoiuznoi perepisi naseleniia 1970 goda. Vol. IV,

Natsional’nyi sostav naseleniia SSSR, Moscow: Statistika, 1973, p. 13; the 1979 data are from Table 10

in Itogi vsesoiuznoi perepisi naseleniia 1970 goda, Vol. IV, Part I, Book 2, Moscow: Goskomstat, 1989,

p. 179; the 1989 and 1999 data are from Itogi perepisi naseleniia 1999 goda v Respublike Kazakhstan,

Vol. I, Natsional’nyi sostav naseleniia RK, Almaty: Agentstvo RK po statistike, 2000, pp. 21–2.

Note

* The original 1989 census data showed the Kazakh share to be 39.7 per cent and the Russian share

to be 37.8. The 1999 census amended the proportion of Kazakhs and Slavs represented in the

1989 census.

promoted close communal interactions among the residents. Elizabeth Bacon,

who conducted research among Central Asians in Afghanistan in the 1930s, drew

attention to the emergence of colonial patterns of segregated settlements of

natives and settlers, where the Russians ‘established their own cultural islands

within the sea of the native population’, and set up separate residential enclaves

on the outskirts of native cities.

The avowed egalitarianism and internationalism

of Soviet ideology did create ethnically mixed residences, but Bacon notes that

‘even in these mixed quarters, there seems to have been little mixed social life

beyond the requirements of employment’.

In Almaty, the migrants from the aul

tended to congregate initially in the suburbs (mikroraiony), rather than in the city

centre. Life in the city, which often meant living with a ‘relative’ in a cramped

apartment at first, was no doubt more constricted and rule-bound compared to the

expanses of the steppes and the freedom of mobility symbolized by the yurt.

Maintaining traditional Kazakh hospitality and commemorating various life-cycle

rituals, which often required the sacrifice of the sheep, was almost impossible in the

urban settings.

As latecomers in the dominant Russophone urban milieu within their own

republic, the small but fast growing number of Kazakh migrants from the aul

strove hard to integrate into the ‘internationalist’ setting of their cities by self-

consciously refraining from speaking Kazakh, or wearing Kazakh clothing in

public. Unlike the Uzbeks, who could turn to the mahallas, the Kazakhs did not

have any established native enclaves. Although they did forge clan and personal

networks in the cities, they experienced far greater impetus to integrate and adapt

to the urban, Russophone culture. The following letter written by a newly arrived

Kazakh migrant to Almaty to the Party officials in the 1950s describes the sense

of helplessness and alienation upon arrival in the city:

Russian doctors refuse to take Kazakh-speaking patients, even require that

[we] bring along interpreters. The sales personnel in cities speak only

Russian, and refuse to serve Kazakh-speaking customers. Similarly, no one

speaks Kazakh in the spheres of trade, industrial enterprises and government

offices. It is impossible for Kazakhs from the aul to find any jobs here.

The knowledge of Russian was absolutely crucial for the titular groups seeking to

migrate to their ‘own’ capital city.

Urban life meant living among Russians.

According to Maira Sharipova, a pensioner and a native of Zhambyl, Russian was

the only language one ever needed in Almaty: it was indispensable for buying

products, using public transportation, socializing with one’s kollektiv, and

ironically, pronouncing a toast to ‘international friendship’.

Few Europeans living

in Kazakhstan had any facility in Kazakh: Only 0.9 per cent of Russians living in

Kazakhstan claimed proficiency in Kazakh in 1989 (1.0 in 1979), and just 0.5 per

cent of Russian inhabitants of Almaty had a proficiency in Kazakh.

Although

popular accounts suggest that the Germans who had been deported to Kazakhstan

during the Second World War had a better knowledge of Kazakh, we do not have

data confirming this.

Becoming mankurts? The hegemony of Russian 61

Traumatic as it was, urbanization also heralded unprecedented opportunities

for education, material well-being and social advancement. Deplorable conditions

in the aul, including poor sanitation, scarcity of water and of a diverse range of

goods and products, and lower educational standards created compelling incentives

to move to the cities. Better amenities in urban areas began to alter the view of

city life as alien. From the 1960s onwards, a high population growth among the

Kazakhs and their rising educational levels were driving them to the cities in

search of better conditions and options.

Mira, then a 35-year-old biologist, described how she lost facility in her native

Kazakh and inadvertently found herself turned into a mankurt:

I came to Almaty with my mother in 1957 from our native aul in Zhambul. I

was six and knew not a word of Russian. My mother was a single parent.

Relatives helped us to move to Almaty, found a place for us to stay, and used

their connections to find her a job in order to get a propiska (a residence

permit). I was sent to a Russian school – there were no Kazakh schools in

Almaty. I was the only Kazakh in a class of all Russians. I used to cry upon

coming home, because everyone in the class made fun of me. My mother told

me to stop crying, and instead study hard to master Russian, ‘else you’ll be

crying all your life,’ she said. Today I speak as good Russian as any, in fact

better than they speak themselves. But in the process I was forced to forget

my own language...and hide the fact that I am a Kazakh. Such was the

politics those days. They closed down all national schools, wanted us to forget

our culture and traditions, turn us into a Soviet person, into a mankurt.

Mira’s story illustrates the emerging nexus between urban living, Russian

education and a gradual ‘forgetting’ of Kazakh that resonates in the experience of

a majority of urban Kazakhs in those days. What Mira chose not to mention at

that particular juncture was that few, if any, Kazakhs came to the cities hoping to

find Kazakh schools: The promise of a superior education in Russian schools, a

stronger chance of admission to university and better living conditions in cities

were the overriding motivations to migrate from the aul. Another vital aspect of

her experience that she downplays here is the pride in speaking Russian so well,

in having obtained a degree in chemistry in Leningrad, now St Petersburg, and

having survived and succeeded in settings she found very alienating. Tom Nairn

speaks of the ‘fearful undertow of modernity’ that ‘pushes rural emigrants to look

backward as much as forward’.

The vision of a ‘bright future’ (svetloe

budushchee) promised by Soviet socialism meant that there was no looking back

for the Kazakh nomads.

The rise and decline of Kazakh language schools

The policy of korenizatsiia (indigenization) executed by the Bolsheviks from the

mid-1920s to the early 1930s reflected the strategic importance of establishing an

educational infrastructure in the national languages. Though they were no altruistic

62 Becoming mankurts? The hegemony of Russian

champions of local languages and cultures, the Bolsheviks were keenly aware of

the centrality of the native language in the dissemination of literacy, and in building

their support base. They were also determined to show their adversaries in the

West that the non-Russian nationalities within the Soviet state enjoyed the right

to education in their native language and opportunities for an unhampered

flourishing of a cultural and educational infrastructure in the national languages,

and were fully protected from ethnic or linguistic assimilation – guarantees that,

in their opinion, did not exist in Western capitalist nation-states.

Korenizatsiia institutionalized the right to seek education in one’s native

language and made it mandatory for the non-Russians to study in their ‘own’

national schools. By committing themselves to aiding a ‘flowering’ (rastsvet) of

the national languages and cultures, which was to be a transitory phase leading to

the forging of a Soviet community of nations, the Bolsheviks inadvertently forged

a natural or primordial linkage between a nationality and its language.

Non-Russian parents had to obtain special permission from the local party

authorities to allow their child to attend a different school (often in Russian),

although influential and determined parents did succeed in attaining the

permission.

The termination of korenizatsiia in 1933–34 lifted the ideological

and strategic constraints that the Bolsheviks had placed upon themselves in order

to dispel accusations of being Russian imperialists or chauvinists. During the

1920s, the Soviet state undertook a Latinization of the various Turkic languages

(together with Tajik, and several languages of Muslim groups in the Caucasus)

that used Arabic or Cyrillic scripts. A decade later in the late 1930s, these

Latinized alphabets were re-written in Cyrillic, as the priorities for the Soviet state

shifted to promoting language rationalization and alphabet standardization. These

changes paved the way for the promotion of Russian as the de facto state language

and as the lingua franca (the ‘language of inter-ethnic communication’).

Very few Kazakhs who had previously learnt to use Arabic and Latin orthography

were able to effectively master the new Cyrillic alphabet for writing Kazakh.

Karlygash, a schoolteacher, in her thirties, revealed that her father, a highly placed

communist functionary with a rich knowledge of Kazakh epics, never properly

learnt to write Kazakh in Latin or Cyrillic: ‘Since all the official business in

Almaty was in Russian, where was the need to learn the new alphabets?’ He wrote

to friends and family using the Arabic script, while using Russian for all formal

correspondence. A number of other Kazakhs who first acquired literacy in the

1920s corroborate the experience of Karlygash’s father. Few government offices

and educational–cultural establishments in the major cities had typewriters with

Kazakh keys, a scarcity that came to light more noticeably in the early 1990s

when a state-sponsored revival of the Kazakh language was launched. Academic

and administrative offices routinely adapted the available Russian keyboard

for Kazakh letters and inserted Kazakh diacritical marks by hand. The few

documents written in Kazakh in the 1950s and 1960s that I came across in the

republic archives were mostly hand-written as most correspondence was in

Russian. The typed ones had various hand-written adjustments for Kazakh letters,

(e.g. the letter ‘h’ was inserted by hand and y, y and ng were added on to Cyrillic

Becoming mankurts? The hegemony of Russian 63

letters). The switch to the Cyrillic alphabet denied the new Soviet-educated

generation the ability to read all Kazakh literary works written in Arabic and

Latin scripts. The knowledge of Kazakh literary and cultural traditions among the

Soviet-educated generation of Kazakhs was derived entirely from the small body

of pre-Soviet works that were approved by Soviet ideologues and were re-written

in Cyrillic.

Although several of my Kazakh informants referred to a systematic ‘closure’

of Kazakh schools from the 1930s onwards, there are no archival data or policy

statements that offer details on how the measure was executed. This suggests that

the closure of national schools, or conversion into ‘bilingual’ or ‘mixed’ ones,

was a gradual process, the momentum for which came from local Kazakh

officials, rather than from Moscow. Kazakhs living in Almaty and other Russian-

dominated cities knew very well that ‘you couldn’t get anywhere in life without

a sound command of Russian’. The 1959 Soviet Education Law granted parents

the freedom to choose the language of instruction of their children. This meant

that it was no longer obligatory for parents to send their children to native

language schools and they could ‘choose’ to send them to Russian schools.

Soviet citizens sardonically refer to how the socialist system granted them the

‘choice’ of selecting what was often the recommended or only available option,

although they were expected to exercise this choice with great fanfare, ceremony

and enthusiasm.

Many in the Baltic Republics, Georgia and the western parts of Ukraine,

which had a well-developed infrastructure of national schools, saw this law as

a propagandist tool for luring children to Russian schools, and voiced their

protests.

The protesters were reacting to the law’s implication that parents

were expected to send their children to Russian schools, just as they had been

expected to educate their children in the native language schools in the 1920s.

There is no evidence of similar protests or resentment in Kazakhstan. By 1959,

a quarter of all Kazakh children were already attending Russian schools.

1966–67, the proportion of Kazakh children attending Russian schools had

risen to 32 per cent.

In contrast, a mere 1 per cent of Uzbek children were

enrolled in Russian schools in the early 1960s.

Other non-Russian groups

(Ukrainians, Belarusians, Germans, Tatars, Koreans), who formed about one-

sixth of Kazakhstan’s population in the 1950s, also turned to Russian schools, as

instruction in their native language was limited.

Very few Kazakh schools

existed in the 1970s and 1980s in the urban areas and in the northern and

eastern oblasts that had an overwhelming Russian majority. Although Kazakh

was still taught as a subject in Russian schools, language lessons were assigned

the minimum number of hours as a subject and were often held at the end of the

day. Proper textbooks and qualified teachers were generally unavailable. The

Soviet rulers were formally committed to preserving bilingualism, which, in

reality, meant an enhanced proficiency in Russian as the ‘second language’.

Russian enjoyed a de facto supremacy in all domains in the republic, ranging

from industries, administration and educational institutions to public spheres in

urban areas.

64 Becoming mankurts? The hegemony of Russian

Russian language schools: ‘progress’ and mobility

In the early years following the 1917 revolution, national elites in the more

‘advanced’ republics (Ukraine, Georgia) zealously began implementing education

in national languages at the level of schools and universities, which formed the

basis for a ‘new nationalism’ during the initial decades of Soviet rule.

During

the implementation of korenizatsiia, Stalin had mandated that all Russians

(‘settlers’) learn the national language of the republic. But as the next chapter

shows, Russian officials in Central Asia resisted such orders and few attained any

degree of proficiency in them. Kazakh was no longer a mandatory subject in

schools in the ethnically mixed Russophone urban areas after the revocation of

korenizatsiia in the mid-1930s. Higher education in Kazakhstan was completely

in Russian and no emphasis was placed upon learning Kazakh.

Aleksandr Zhovtis, of Ukrainian Jewish descent, a writer and professor of

linguistics, conveyed his disbelief at not being able to find proper Kazakh

language instruction in the university in Almaty:

When my family moved from L’viv to Almaty in 1941 to escape the

Holocaust, I was struck by how completely Russian the city was. Upon

getting admission at the university, I immediately enrolled into a Kazakh

language class, only to realize that there was absolutely no need to know

this language. Language exams were a mere formality, my fellow Kazakh

students were more interested in practicing Russian. They did not want to use

Kazakh, not even among themselves, even though many of them did not

speak good Russian. I could not help noticing the underlying hostility

between recent Kazakh migrants from aul and the better educated Russian-

speaking Kazakhs.

The limited availability and poor quality of higher education in Kazakh was the

single most important factor that led Kazakhs to opt for schooling in Russian.

Most institutions of higher learning (vuzy)

were located in Almaty and in other

Russian-dominated regions.

Over half of the 25 republic-wide vuzy were

concentrated in Almaty alone until 1956.

By the mid-1950s, Russian had

become a mandatory subject in the entrance examinations for universities and all

dissertations had to be written and defended in Russian. As a result, Kazakh-language

schooling was increasingly perceived as a dead-end formula.

By 1955, several departments of Kazakh Language and Literature in the

universities had either been reduced in size or closed down.

Even those

specializing in linguistics, or Kazakh or Turkic languages, were increasingly

using Russian. In a letter to the party authorities, a Kazakh academic expressed

his horror that ‘the director of the Institute of Kazakh Language and Literature at

the Kazakh Academy of Sciences considers Kazakh to be irrelevant for his needs,

and believes that Russian is perfectly adequate to study Kazakh literature.’

This

academic was later reprimanded for his disregard for internationalism and the

friendship of peoples. Abduali Kaidarov, the chairman of Qazaq tili mentioned to

Becoming mankurts? The hegemony of Russian 65