History of Civilizations of Central Asia
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Contents
The tsarist period . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 241
The Alash movement . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 247 Soviet history . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 250
Prior to independence . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 255 Independence . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 257
The tsarist period By the mid-nineteenth century, Kazakhstan’s annexation to Russia, which began officially in the 1730s and ultimately transformed the region into a colony of tsarist Russia, was virtually complete. This process was complex and contradictory, for it lasted more than 130 years and took place under a variety of foreign-policy and domestic political conditions. At the same time, it should be pointed out that a large part of the territory of the Little or Younger Zhuz (Horde) and certain areas of the Middle Zhuz (the western, central and north- eastern regions of Kazakhstan) were annexed to Russia by peaceful means between the mid-eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and the southern and south-eastern regions (primarily the territory of the Great or Elder Zhuz) were seized by tsarist Russia in the 1850s and 1860s by military force. Over the many years while Kazakhstan was being annexed to Russia, the Kazakh people’s traditional statehood, which took the form of the khanate, was wiped out. The completion of Kazakhstan’s annexation to Russia coincided with the emancipation of the * See Maps
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2 . 241 Contents ISBN 92-3-103985-7 The tsarist period serfs in Russia (1861) and the implementation of several reforms aimed at developing capitalistic social relations. All this could not help but affect Kazakhstan. The quickly developing industry of the mother country had an increasing need for cheap sources of raw materials and for markets. Fabulously wealthy in natural and agricultural (primarily livestock) resources, Kazakhstan had long attracted Russian business interests. In order to finalize Kazakhstan’s status as a colony and make its further development purposeful and systematic, tsarist Russia decided to create a new system of administrative- political and judicial administration here. To prepare this reform, a Steppe Commission drawn from the Ministry of Internal Affairs and the Ministry of War was created in 1865. Included in the commission’s work were officials of the local colonial administration and individual representatives of the Kazakh people who were on the whole loyally inclined towards the government transformations. The commission spent two years working on a plan for the administration of Kazakhstan, a plan which took the form of two ‘temporary provisions’: ‘On the Administration of Syr Darya and Semirechye Oblast’s [provinces]’ and ‘On the Administration of Ural, Torghay, Akmola and Semipalatinsk Oblast’s’. On 11 July 1867 Tsar Alexander II (1855–81) signed the first, and on 21 October of the same year he approved the second provision. In the administrative-territorial reform carried out under these provisions, nearly the entire ethnic territory of the Kazakhs was divided into three governor-generalships: Turkistan, Orenburg and Western Siberia (later, Steppe governor-generalship). Full military and civil power was concentrated in the governorgeneral’s hands, and the system of administration was military in nature. The governor-generalship consisted in turn of oblast’s. Turkistan governor-generalship included Semirechye and Syr Darya oblast’s; Orenburg governor-generalship consisted of Ural and Torghay oblast’s; and Western Siberia (Steppe) governor-generalship of Akmola and Semi- palatinsk oblast’s. The oblast’s consisted of uezds (districts), the uezds of volost’s (juris- dictions of several parishes), and the volost’s of auls (villages). Governors-general were appointed by the tsar, and oblast’ administrations were subordinated to military governors. The uezds were headed by chief uezd officers, who had two aides, one senior and one junior. In this entire hierarchy, representatives of the local clan and sultan elite could occupy only the post of junior aide to the uezd chief (not counting the post of local volost’ administrator or aul elder). Undivided military and civil power was the fundamental prin- ciple of Kazakhstan’s administrative organization under the new reform. The new system of administration shattered the nomads’ customary way of life and restricted the power of the sultans, beys (dignitaries) and elders. In addition to administrative-territorial reform, tsarist Russia carried out social, eco- nomic and judicial reforms. The essence of social reform was that henceforth the entire 242 Contents
Copyrights ISBN 92-3-103985-7 The tsarist period Kazakh population was to be considered peasants, and a Kazakh could acquire a title of nobility only by entering the tsar’s service. The essence of the economic reform was defined by the fact that all Kazakh lands acquired the status of state lands, and the per
(nomadic household) levy and other taxes increased in favour of the state. Under the judicial reform, uezd and military courts in Kazakhstan henceforth functioned under empire-wide laws and tried cases such as state treason, opposition to the authorities, assas- sination of officials and damage to state property. The traditional courts of the beys and
s (Islamic judges) that followed the customary law of the Kazakhs and the shar¯ı‘a (Islamic law) were preserved only at aul level. As a result of the reforms carried out in the years 1867–8, Kazakhstan became a full- fledged colony of Russia. The ethnic territory that had served as the foundation for the Kazakh nation-state was divided up, the judicial system was transformed in accordance with Russia-wide laws, and all Kazakh lands were declared to be state property. All this was an expression of the fundamental principle of Russia’s colonizing policy: divide and rule. The gravest consequence of the reform was the declaration that all the land of Kaza- khstan was the state property of the Russian empire, a declaration which served as the basis for the wide-scale resettlement here of hundreds of thousands of peasants from the central provinces of the mother country. These innovations led to protests among the masses and were the reason behind the uprising by the Kazakhs of Torghay and Ural oblast’s in the years 1868–9, the uprising in 1870 on the Mangystau (ex-Mangishlaq) peninsula, and other forms of popular resistance, which were all quashed by the punitive forces of tsarist Russia. Between the mid-1880s and the early 1890s, the above-mentioned ‘temporary provi- sions’ were replaced by two ‘permanent provisions’. On 2 June 1886 the ‘Provision on the Administration of the Territory of Turkistan’ was approved; and on 25 March 1891 the ‘Provision on the Administration of Akmola, Semipalatinsk, Semirechye, Ural and Torghay Oblast’s’. Under these provisions, there were to be two governor-generalships on the territory of Kazakhstan: Turkistan governor-generalship, with its centre in Tashkent and consisting of Ferghana, Samarkand and Syr Darya oblast’s; and Steppe governor- generalship, with its centre in Omsk and consisting of Akmola, Semipalatinsk, Ural, Torghay and Semirechye oblast’s. In 1897 Semirechye oblast’ was transferred toTurkistan. Under the new provisions, the power of the governors-general increased significantly. Police administrations were created in the oblast’ centres (in the towns of Verny [later renamed Alma-Ata, then Almaty], Uralsk, Petropavlovsk and Semipalatinsk) and police officer positions were instituted in uezd towns (Akmolinsk [later Akmola, now Astana], Kokshetau, Zaysan, Pavlodar, Ust-Kamenogorsk, Kapala, Leninsk and Kostanay). All the 243 Contents
Copyrights ISBN 92-3-103985-7 The tsarist period basic principles of the ‘temporary provisions’ of the 1860s for Kazakhstan’s administration were retained virtually unchanged. All that did change was that the per kibitka assessment of other taxes and obligations increased, the power of judicial and police organs increased significantly and the lowest judicial link – the courts of the beys and q¯az¯ıs – lost all inde- pendence. More and more, the land, which the reforms of the 1860s had declared to be state property, became the object of plunder for the mother country’s state structures. Once Kazakhstan had been completely transformed into a colony, Russia put its resett lement policy in motion. Stepping up the resettlement of peasants from Russia’s central provinces to Kazakhstan helped achieve two aims: first, it eased somewhat the social tension in the mother country over the shortage of land and, second, it facilitated the territory’s further colonization, which was part and parcel of its economic development, and the creation here of a new social bulwark for tsarist Russia in the person of the reset- tled peasantry. Peasant colonization took the place of the military-Cossack colonizing that had gone on at the very beginning and later on when Kazakhstan was being transformed into a colony of Russia. Gradually, tsarism made the process of resettling Russian and Ukrainian peasants increasingly purposeful and organized. The systematic resettlement of peasants in Kaza- khstan began in the 1870s and reached massive proportions in the last quarter of the nine- teenth century and especially in the early twentieth century, when the chairman of Russia’s Council of Ministers was P. A. Stolypin, who tried to create an agrarian stratum of the bour- geoisie – kulaks – in the countryside. Under his agrarian reforms, peasants were permitted to secede from their community with their allotment and create private farms. Stolypin paid special attention to the empire’s periphery, including Kazakhstan – a favourable region for growing wheat. Through a system of benefits, he encouraged both resettlement here by peasants from Russia and the creation of kulak farms. If, according to the data for the years 1893–1905, the Kazakhs had 4 million desi- atina s (4.4 million ha) (1 desiatina = 1.09 ha) of their best lands confiscated, then during Stolypin’s premiership (1906–11), more than 17 million desiatinas (18.5 million ha) were confiscated. By 1917, a total of about 45 million desiatinas (49 million ha) of Kazakh lands had been confiscated for Cossack colonization, for the resettlement fund, and for building forts, towns, railroads and so on. During the colonial period of Kazakhstan’s history, the ‘civilizing initiative’ belonged in general to the Russian state and representatives of the Russian people. This affected nearly every aspect of the territory’s public-political, socio-economic and cult ural life. On the whole, it was a harsh, and in some cases cruel, kind of ‘civilizing’. Nonetheless, it brought some positive changes in Kazakhstan’s public-political and cultural life. 244
Contents Copyrights ISBN 92-3-103985-7 The tsarist period THE ECONOMY The colonizing orientation of tsarist Russia’s economic policy, especially its agrarian pol- icy, led to a gradual change in the ratio of nomads to settled Kazakhs, the appearance of new economic forms, and a change in the structure of the Kazakhs’ herd. The penetration, beginning in the latter half of the nineteenth century, of Russian and later foreign capital into Kazakhstan led to the appearance of a number of enterprises in the metallurgical industry (primarily in Akmola and Semipalatinsk oblast’s and Kazakhstan’s Altai), for refining agricultural raw materials, and in the salt industry (primarily in the western region), as well as the development of transportation and towns and the spread of trading at fairs, all of which greatly altered the economic situation in the territory. Fishing became an important branch of Kazakhstan’s economy in the basins of the rivers Syr Darya, Ural, Irtysh, Emba and others, reaching a significant scale. In several cities of Kazakhstan ( Uralsk, Petropavlovsk, Semipalatinsk and others), branches of the state bank and various credit institutions began to function. The development of industry and transportation brought with it the creation of a local working class. Engineers, technicians – indeed, most of the skilled workers – came from Russia. Kazakh workers were employed primarily in the heaviest and lowest-paying jobs. Wide use was made of cheap female and child labour. EDUCATION As a result of all this, there were profound changes in the traditional foundations of Kazakh society, which in turn gave rise to previously unknown or weakly developed forms of human activity, primarily in the culture and spiritual life of the territory and its native inhabitants. As Kazakhstan was transformed into a colony, and especially in the latter half of the nineteenth century, secular educational institutions opened in addition to the already functioning maktabs and madrasas, which had operated as a rule under the mosques and offered mainly a religious education. The first of these secular schools taught children – including Kazakh children – the professions of translator and clerk. The cadet corps in Orenburg (opened in 1825) and Omsk (founded in 1846) trained military specialists and administrative officials. Thanks to Ibray Altynsarin (1841–89), inspector of public schools for Torghay oblast’ and an outstanding pedagogue, two-class Russo-Kazakh schools were opened in each of the oblast’s uezd centres (Irgiz, Torghay, Nikolaevsk-Kostanay, Iletsk), which were supplied with teachers and textbooks. In the last third of the nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries, an entire network of Russo-Kazakh and Russo-indigenous grammar 245 Contents
Copyrights ISBN 92-3-103985-7 The tsarist period schools (shkolas), secondary educational institutions (srednie uchebnye zavedeniyas), non- classical secondary schools (real’nye uchilishchas) and men’s and women’s high schools (gimnaziyas) was created. One progressive phenomenon was the development of women’s education. Thanks once again to the efforts of Altynsarin, a college for women was opened in Irgiz in 1887. In the years 1890–6 Russo-Kazakh colleges for women were opened in Torghay, Kostanay, Aktyubinsk and the settlement of Karabutak. CULTURE Beginning in the latter half of the nineteenth century, the scholarly study of Kazakhstan became an important direction for the central state structures of the mother country and its various research centres, as well as for individual private scholars. In the nineteenth cen- tury, a substantial contribution was made to the study of the geography, flora and fauna, economy, territorial history, literature, language, folklore, and daily life and customs of the Kazakh people by P. P. Semenov-Tyan’-Shanskiy, N. A. Severtsov, I. V. Mushketov, V. V. Radlov, A. I. Dobromyslov, N. N. Aristov and others. The leading Russian intelligentsia had a major influence on the development of education, culture and social thought in Kaza- khstan. Representatives of that intelligentsia, who found themselves in Kazakhstan for various reasons, frequently acted as initiators in the organization of libraries, museums and other cultural-educational and scholarly institutions, sections and subsec- tions of the Russian Geographical Society, and statistical committees. Sections of the Russian Geographical Society in Orenburg and Tashkent, and a subsection of its West- ern Siberian section in Semipalatinsk, published their works, in which they printed diverse research materials on the history, ethnography and geography of the territory. Individual representatives of the Kazakh people ( I. Altynsarin, Ch. Valikhanov, A. Kunanbaev, M.-S. Babazhanov, M. Chormanov and others) also collaborated with some of the above-named cultural-educational and scholarly institutions. Chokan Valikhanov (1835–65) was an outstanding, multifaceted scholar who wrote his main studies in the 1850s and the first half of the 1860s. He left a vast scholarly legacy that enriched Russian oriental studies and, through it, world oriental studies. Abay Kunan- baev (1845–1904) was a great poet and an outstanding thinker. Kunanbaev studied ways to improve the life of the working masses, given the conditions of the second half of the nine- teenth and early twentieth centuries, above all in changing society’s economic foundations and transforming the Kazakhs’ centuries-old economic structures. He linked his people’s progress with the development of agriculture, trade and commerce and the achievement of a high level of culture and education. 246 Contents
Copyrights ISBN 92-3-103985-7 The Alash movement In the second half of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the scientific life of Kazakh society was enriched by the works of M.-S. Babazhanov (on problems in the ethnography and religious conceptions of the Kazakhs), Sh. Kudayberdiev (on issues in the history, philosophy, music and annals of the Kazakhs), A. Baytursynov (on issues in pedagogy, education, literary studies and linguistics) and others. Vivid representatives of the poetry of the ‘Era of Grief’ (Zar Zaman) were Dulat Bay- batayula (1812–71), Shortanbay Kanayula (1818–81) and Murat Monkeula (1846–1906), whose art was marked by harsh criticism of the colonizers and their abettors and by profound grief over their people’s lost independence. Kazakh music also developed, with the work of K. Sygyrbaeva, D. Shigaev, T. Kazangapov, B. Kozhagulov and others gaining universal recognition. The Alash movement The early twentieth century was marked by an exacerbation of the social contradictions in the Russian empire and by a stricter colonial policy in Kazakhstan, especially agrar- ian policy. The resettlement movement grew every year, especially in connection with the implementation of the so-called Stolypin reforms mentioned above. Kazakhstan was not only a region where hundreds of thousands of peasants were reset- tled from Russia, but also a place of exile for hundreds of political and revolutionary fig- ures. In the early twentieth century, under their influence and with their active participation, various political circles and organizations arose, including social democratic and Marxist ones, as well as a few trade unions (for example, the railroad workers’ trade union in Uralsk) and so on. The revolutionary events of the years 1905–7 and their consequences focused great attention on all social strata of Kazakh society, especially the national intel- ligentsia. In addition, in the early twentieth century, Russian society itself, weary of despotic and inefficient governance, was thirsting for change and profound reforms. The country’s archaic and cumbersome administration in the form of a tsarist autocracy was coming into increasing contradiction with the current problems and development of Russian society. Naturally, Kazakhstan’s economic and social backwardness alarmed the educated segment of the Kazakh people, leading it to the aspiration of restoring a nation-state and creating a political party. The idea of defending the illiterate and for the most part downtrodden Kazakh population against the tyranny and oppression of the tsarist authorities gradually took hold of many educated Kazakhs who had studied at and graduated from educational 247
Contents Copyrights ISBN 92-3-103985-7 The Alash movement institutions, primarily in Russia and Europe (Moscow, St Petersburg, Tomsk, Omsk, Kazan, Warsaw).
In the years 1910–13, on the initiative of M. Seralin, A. Baytursynov, A. Bukeykhanov (a member of Russia’s Constitutional Democratic Party) and E. Burin, several Kazakh journals and newspapers – Kazakh, Kazakhstan, Aykap – were created. They reflected popular discontent with the authorities’ social, ethnic and financial policy (requisitions, corruption, confiscation of lands) and also castigated and ridiculed negative features of the steppe-dwellers: their laziness, disorderliness and lack of education. The materials pub- lished in the pages of these periodicals, especially the newspaper Kazakh, gradually led to the creation of an anti-colonial political climate among the population. They were devel- oping the ideas of national awakening, as stated in the pamphlet collections of M. Dula- tov,Oyan, Kazakh! [Wake up, Kazakh!], published in 1909, and in A. Baytursynov’s Masa [Nightmare], which came out in 1911. The idea of nationalism was replaced by ideas of justice, of awakening and defending the people, and of modernizing Kazakh society – these were the core activities among prominent representatives of the Kazakh national-democratic intelligentsia around the turn of the twentieth century. One of the people who came to the fore in the years 1905–17 was Alikh an Bukeykhanov, a first-class economist, legal scholar, essayist, and deputy to the first and second congresses of the Russian State Duma. Gathered around him were like-minded men such as A. Baytursynov, Kh. Dosmukhamedov, Zh. Dosmukhamedov, M. Dulatov, Kh. Gabbasov, S. Amanzholov, M. Tynyshbaev, B. Kulmanov, M. Zhumabaev, M. Chokaev, G. Karashev, A. Ermekov and other prominent representatives of the Kazakh intelligentsia. Thanks to their efforts, during the years 1905–17, the Alash movement was born and grew in strength, setting itself three main tasks: ridding the Kazakh people of the colonial yoke, resurrecting statehood, and adding Kazakh society to the ranks of civilized nations.
The members of the Alash movement spent the years from 1905 to 1917 working out the theoretical, political, socio-economic and organizational aspects of this problem. They saw the name ‘Alash’ (which is synonymous with ‘Kazakh’) as the embodiment of the idea of uniting the entire ethnic territory of the people divided by tsarist Russia as well as of restoring independent statehood as the main instrument in a system for defending national hopes and interests. The leaders of Kazakh society greeted the tsar’s abdication and the victory of the February 1917 bourgeois-democratic revolution with enthusiasm, since they linked their hopes for emancipation from oppression with the coming to power of the Russian lib- erals (Milyukov, Chkheidze and Kerensky). As if in confirmation of these hopes, 248 Contents
Copyrights ISBN 92-3-103985-7 The Alash movement A. Bukeykhanov was appointed as the Provisional Government’s commissar for Torghay
, and M. Tynyshbaev and M. Chokaev became members of the Provisional Govern- ment’s Turkistan Committee. The public-political situation that took shape in the country after the February revolution made it possible to complete the creation of a Kazakh National Democratic Party, which was officially launched at the first All-Kazakh Congress, held from 2 to 28 July 1917 in Orenburg. The party was given the name ‘Alash’. In all of Central Asia at that moment there was probably not another such organization that could compare with the Alash Party in its stated goals, political significance and sweep (democracy, secularism). Testament to this is its draft programme, published in the newspaper Kazakh on 21 November 1917, which reads, in part: Russia must become a democratic, federative republic. Each separate state in the Federa- tive Republic must be autonomous and govern itself with identical rights and interests . . . Every one must have the right to vote, without distinction of origin, confession or gender . . . In the Russian Federation there must be equality of rights, inviolability of the individual, freedom of speech, freedom of the press and freedom of assembly . . . Religion must be kept separate from the state . . . All peoples must enjoy equal rights in a court of law . . . Taxation must be based on the degree of wealth and property status in general: a rich man pays more; a poor man less . . . Education must belong to everyone. Study in all educational institutions must be free . . . In elaborating a land law . . . at its base must lie the allocation of land to native inhabitants first of all. Allocation to peasant resettlers must not take place until the completion of full allocation for native inhabitants . . . The sale of land is categorically for- bidden. All the earth’s wealth – large forests, rivers – must belong to the state and must be administered by the zemstvo [district council]. At its base, the Alash movement’s platform generally meshed with the political pro- grammes of Russia’s liberal democrats and Socialist Revolutionaries; nor did the move- ment attempt to conceal these connections. The merit of its leaders consisted in the fact that they introduced new ideas and principles to the largely apolitical masses and roused the slumbering peoples of the empire’s Asiatic regions. In Russia, meanwhile, events took an unexpected turn. In October 1917 the Bolsheviks seized power. The Alash movement’s leaders had to speed up events as well. The second All-Kazakh Congress, where Alash autonomy was declared and its government, the Alash- Orda, was elected, was held from 5 to 13 December 1917. By decision of the congress, this autonomous entity was supposed to include Akmola, Ural, Torghay, Semirechye and Syr Darya oblast’s, the Kazakh uezds of Ferghana, Samarkand and Zakaspiisk oblast’s, as well as the adjacent volost’s of Altai oblast’ inhabited by Kazakhs. The congress’s resolution, which was passed unanimously, emphasized that everyone who lived among the Kazakhs 249
Contents Copyrights ISBN 92-3-103985-7 Soviet history must ‘be guaranteed the rights of a minority, and representatives of all ethnic groups be represented proportionally in all institutions of the autonomous entity’. It was determined that the Alash-Orda would consist of 25 seats, 10 of which were set aside for Russians and representatives of other peoples residing in Kazakhstan. The movement’s leaders were very methodical. Step by step they moved towards implementing the congress’s decisions on creating the autonomous entity. During this period, however, there was essentially a multiple authority in Kazakhstan. Soviets (Bolshevik councils) started to appear alongside the remnants of the Provisional Government’s rule here and there. The Orenburg, Siberian and Semirechye Kazakhs created militarized organs of self-government, and peasants and soldiers returning from the fronts of the First World War created their own. Beginning in October 1917, the soviets, which were run by the Bol- sheviks, began seizing power locally. Bolshevik violence provoked a fierce reaction. Late in the spring of 1918, a bloody civil war began in the country that pulled Kazakhstan into its orbit as well. Located at the epicentre of the civil war, Alash-Orda detachments took part in military operations against the Bolsheviks. The Alash autonomous entity lasted only about two years; Soviet power wiped it out by force in 1919. The same fate befell the Turkistan (Kokand) autonomous entity, which had been organized by a decision of the fourth All- Turkistan Special Islamic Congress (November) and which included historically Kazakh lands – Syr Darya and Semirechye oblast’s. Thus an end was put to attempts by the indigenous peoples of Kazakhstan and Turkistan (as well as the Tatars and Bashkirs in the Volga region) to create their own nation-states on a unified ethnic territory that had been destroyed by tsarist Russia. Soviet history After this a second stage began in the restoration of Kazakh statehood (though not a nation- state) on the basis of Soviet power and the class principles declared by the party of the Bolsheviks led by Lenin and his close associates. On 26 August 1920, towards the end of the civil war (1918–20), Kalinin and Lenin signed the Soviet Government’s decree, ‘On the Formation of the Autonomous Kyrgyz (Kazakh Autonomous) Soviet Socialist Republic within the RSFSR (Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic)’. This stated that the new entity included the territory of Akmola, Semipalatinsk, Torghay and Ural oblast’s, while Syr Darya and Semirechye oblast’s remained in the Turkistan Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic (TurkASSR), created under the Bolsheviks’ leadership and by decision of the fifth Turkistan Congress of Soviets in the spring of 1918. The two above-named oblast’s joined 250 Contents
Copyrights ISBN 92-3-103985-7 Soviet history the Kazakh ASSR in late 1924 as a result of a national-territorial demarcation of Central Asia.
In the second half of the 1920s, the administrative-command system that had taken hold in the USSR, and whose embodiment was Stalinism, conducted tragic experiments that affected the entire Soviet Union, including Kazakhstan, and were aimed at making changes in every aspect of public life, including the following: • the forced collectivization of agriculture, the elimination of the beys and wealthy peas- ants ‘as a class’, and the forced permanent settlement of nomadic and semi-nomadic households; • unreasonably high, ‘shock-worker’ rates of industrialization; • Russification of the local native population, demographic policy, and the nationalities issue;
• establishment of a unified communist ideology in all spheres of the life of society. The totalitarian regime established in the USSR brought grave misfortune to the coun- try’s peoples, including the Kazakhs. About half the Kazakh population perished or were forced to leave their native land to wander through other countries. The people lost their national traditions, religion was eradicated, the Kazakhs became a national minority in their own land, and their native language became essentially a means of communication for daily life only. The most disastrous phenomenon in Kazakh history after 1917 was Stalinism, the sinister handiwork of which was the mass political repressions and genocide against its own people that were carried out with just a few breaks from the 1920s to the 1950s, and again in the 1980s. In connection with the ratification of the USSR constitution on 5 December 1936, the Kazakh ASSR was transformed into a Union Republic – the Kazakh Soviet Social- ist Republic (KazSSR). The pressure of the Stalinist system and the totalitarian regime provoked massive protests among the population in many regions of the USSR, including Kazakhstan. In the years 1918–19 the Alash-Orda waged a struggle against Soviet power; in the years 1929–31 there were 372 uprisings against forced collectivization; in the 1920s represen- tatives of the national-democratic intelligentsia (mainly the former leaders and ideologues of the Alash movement), through their scholarly research and artistic endeavours, offered powerful resistance to the totalitarian system’s line in science, literature and art; and in 1986 Kazakh youth openly demonstrated against the tyranny of the totalitarian regime and presented their political demands to the authorities. 251 Contents
Copyrights ISBN 92-3-103985-7 Soviet history The twentieth century, however, especially the 74 years after the October 1917 revolu- tion, should not be considered a lost period for Kazakhstan and its people. On this subject, the president of the Republic of Kazakhstan, N. Nazarbaev, wrote in his work ‘Preserve Memory, Strengthen Accord’: My personal experience has led me to the deep conviction that the post-October years did not count for naught. The native system of material production, the people’s greatly improved educational level, the harmonization of relations between society’s various social groups . . . the breakthrough to outer space – this and much else can be listed among the assets on our historical balance-sheet. 1 During the Second World War, Kazakhstan was the front’s arsenal. About 1.2 million Kazakhs took direct part in military action against Nazi Germany. On the eve of and during the war, 102,000 Poles from the western regions of the USSR, more than 360,000 Germans from the Volga regions, hundreds of thousands of Koreans from the Far East, Chechens, Ingush, Karachays and Balkaretses from the Caucasus, Crimean Tatars and Meskhetian Turks were all deported to Kazakhstan. THE ECONOMY In Kazakhstan, during the years of the pre-war five-year plans, the Turkistan–Siberian Rail- road was built, linking Central Asia to regions of Siberia and leading to a boom in the econ- omy and culture not only of Kazakhstan but of all the eastern regions of the USSR. The mines of Karaganda, the oil refineries of Emba, the Chimkent lead factories, the Balkhash and Zhezkazghan mining and metallurgical combines, the polymetal enterprises in the Rudnyi Altai, food and light industrial enterprises – all these were built. As before the 1917 revolution, preferential treatment was given to the traditional branches of the extraction industry during the years of industrialization. Kazakhstan, along with Siberia and the Urals, was the USSR’s leading producer of zinc, copper, lead and other strategic materials. There were also machine-building, metallurgy and defence-industry enterprises, but the energy base and the construction materials industry lagged far behind and Kazakhstan remained a supplier of raw materials for the industry of the central USSR. Industrialization was accompanied by forced urbanization. Dozens of towns and urban settlements sprang up. Nonetheless, the proportion of Kazakhs in the working class and among the urban population rose slowly. On the eve of the Second World War, only 16 per cent of Kazakhs lived in towns and urban settlements. Kazakhstan’s urban population rose due to the workers, both engineers and technicians, who came from Moscow, Leningrad (St Petersburg), Kiev, Kharkov, Sverdlovsk (Yekaterinburg) and other cities. 1 See Kazakhstanskaya Pravda, 16 Jan. 1998. 252 Contents
Copyrights ISBN 92-3-103985-7 Soviet history By the mid-1930s, the administrative-command system had taken final shape in the country; Stalin’s barracks socialism had won out. The land, factories and plants, and kolkhoz s (collective farms) and sovkhozs (state farms) became state property. On the one hand, public ownership of the means of production was asserted; on the other, the peasantry was alienated from the land. Workers remained a proletariat without rights, divorced from centralized state property. The Kazakh ASSR, which became a Union Republic in 1936, enjoyed no sovereignty and was deprived of the legislative initiative, a condition facilitated by the dictates of the centre. The years 1937–8 saw the peak of the mass political repression. During these years not only opponents of Soviet power were subjected to repression, but also those who fought for communist ideas and those who had actively participated in establishing and strengthening Soviet power. New branches of the sinister Gulag (State Camps Administration) appeared and spread on the map of Kazakhstan, including the Karaganda special regime corrective labour camp (Karlag) and the Akmola camp for the wives of traitors to the homeland (Alzhir). During the post-war years in Kazakhstan, as before, it was mainly the extraction indus- try that was developed. The republic’s economy specialized increasingly in the production of raw materials. The period from the 1960s through the 1980s was a time of major changes in Kazakhstan’s economy: fuel and energy complexes were created in Pavlodar’s Priir- tysh, the Karaganda GRES-2 (regional hydroelectric power plant) and Bukhtarminsk GES (hydroelectric power plant) went on line, new industrial zones were created and developed, there was intensive construction of railroads, and oil deposits on the Mangystau peninsula were developed at accelerated rates. Despite all this, the economy retained its raw materials orientation. Machine-building in Kazakhstan was given the opportunity to produce only simple metal-consuming machines and was used primarily for assembly purposes. ECOLOGY In the 1950s Kazakhstan started turning into a zone of total ecological disaster. The nuclear test ground in Semipalatinsk oblast’ was one of the largest sites of its kind in the world. From 1949 to 1963, 113 nuclear explosions of various magnitudes were carried out above ground; and between 1964 and 19 October 1989, there were 343 underground explosions with a magnitude of up to 150 kilotons. The number of nuclear waste burial sites in the Kazakhstan earth exceeds 300. The drying up of the Aral Sea is an ecological disaster not only for Kazakhstan but for all of Central Asia as well. The ecological situation was exacerbated in Almaty, Ust-Kamenogorsk, Temirtau and several other cities. 253
Contents Copyrights ISBN 92-3-103985-7 Soviet history TABLE 1. Populations in Kazakhstan (1926–89) 2 1926 1959 1989
T ot al no . % T ot al no . % T ot al no . % All population 6229
.9 100
.0 9294
.7 100
.0 16464
.5 100
.0 Kazakhs
3627 .6 58 .2 2787
.3 30 .0 6534 .6 39 .7 Russians
1274 .0 20 .5 3972
.0 42 .7 6227 .5 37 .8 Ukrainians 860 .2
.8 761
.4 8 .2 957 .5 5 .8 Germans
58 .7 0 .9 659
.7 7 .1 957 .5 5 .8 Others
408 .5 6 .6 1114
.3 12 .0 1848 .7 11 .2 AGRICULTURE The situation in agriculture remained difficult. In the 1950s and 1960s, a large-scale effort was made to open up virgin lands in Kazakhstan and also in a few other eastern regions of the USSR. Developing the virgin soil had both positive and negative consequences. The land immediately yielded the quantity of grain needed to solve the problem of supplying the population with bread. Even today, ‘virgin soil grain’ is a very important hard currency, allowing Kazakhstan to resolve specific problems within the framework of the CIS (Com- monwealth of Independent States) and even with countries further afield. However, there are other factors that should be mentioned in connection with developing the virgin land: these relate to the ecology and the linguistic and demographic situation in Kazakhstan. POPULATION The migration of people from Russia made Kazakhs a minority in their own land. The percentage of Russians had increased by as much as 40 per cent in the 1950s–60s. In the late 1950s Kazakhs made up only one third of the total population, whereas Russians and Ukrainians constituted more than half (see Table 1 ). Slavic peoples lived predomi- nantly in the northern and eastern parts of Kazakhstan and in the capital Alma-Ata. In the 1970s–80s, however, the non-Kazakh population started decreasing steadily because of the outmigration of Russians, Ukrainians and Germans and their low birth rate. EDUCATION AND CULTURE The 1920s and 1930s were marked by complex and highly contradictory processes in Kazakhstan’s culture. Culture was being created and destroyed at the same time as its most prominent representatives were being exterminated. On the one hand, illiteracy was 2 Masanov, Abylkhozhin et al. (eds.), 2001 , pp. 380, 403. 254 Contents
Copyrights ISBN 92-3-103985-7 Prior to independence rapidly being eliminated, universal compulsory elementary education was being intro- duced, institutions of higher and specialized secondary education were being created, and more and more new detachments of the intelligentsia were being formed. On the other, the terror spared no one, and there was an attempt literally to wipe out the national intelli- gentsia. Culture suffered a tremendous loss from the total ideologization of art, science and education. The development of culture was difficult and contradictory. On the one hand, the repub- lic achieved substantive results in secondary and higher education in the sciences and in culture as a whole. The republic’s Academy of Sciences, established in 1946, became one of the foremost centres of scientific thought in the USSR, an entire multi-branch network of higher and specialized secondary educational institutions was created, and literature and art achieved definite successes. On the other hand, obvious signs of crisis were observed in Kazakhstan’s science. Polit- ical and social science reached a dead end. Language study came to mean the Russian language, and little research was published on the Kazakh language. The dictates of com- munist ideology and the presence of censorship limited creative opportunities for the intel- lectual elite. Prior to independence By the early 1980s a gloomy socio-economic situation prevailed in virtually all the republics of the USSR. Society’s political organization and system of economic relations had failed dismally and the country was facing a grave crisis. The pre-crisis condition had manifested itself in the former leadership’s inability not only to do anything about existing problems but even to admit that anything needed to be done. Together with his team, Mikhail Gorbachev, who took over the leadership of the CPSU (Communist Party of the Soviet Union) and the Soviet state in the spring of 1985, pro- claimed a course to improve the country’s socioeconomic development and public-political life. From the very beginning, this effort to revive the country, later dubbed perestroika (restructuring), was thwarted, and ultimately it failed. The root cause of this failure lay in the old administrative-command system, the inefficient political institutions, which were so alienated from the people, and the economic structure’s lack of vitality, which basically made it disadvantageous to work. In addition, the country’s leaders, under Gorbachev, were not consistent about implementing perestroika and could not put democratic processes into practice as they should have done. Acting within the usual framework of communist dogma, they created 255 Contents
Copyrights ISBN 92-3-103985-7 Prior to independence favourable conditions for violations of human rights and the breakdown of law and order, as was demonstrated during the December 1986 events in Almaty and several other cities of Kazakhstan. The negative phenomena that had been building up over dozens of years – the serious shortcomings in the public-social and cultural spheres, the exacerbation of the nationality issue – led to anger and indignation among the young people of the republic, the most dynamic segment of the population, and forced them to resort to decisive methods of struggle. The removal of D. A. Kunaev, the republic’s first secretary for many years, on 16 December 1986 and his replacement by a native Russian, G. Kolbin, triggered the open expression of mounting mass dissatisfaction that took place on 17–19 December 1986. The protest was expressed in a peaceful demonstration that did become political but was not aimed at overthrowing the existing state power. The leadership of the republic and the USSR did not believe it necessary to take the young people’s opinion into account and con- sidered the political protest to be a threat to the state. The young people’s demonstration was mercilessly suppressed by MVD (Internal Affairs Ministry) troops and special units using clubs, small digging tools and dogs; 8,500 people were arrested. Numerous and extremely crude violations of the law were committed during the legal investigation into the criminal cases opened against the participants in the events. Ninety-nine people were sentenced to various terms; over a short period of time more than 1,000 people were fined various sums for their participation in the December events; 271 people were expelled from their educational institutions; and hundreds of people were forced to resign from their jobs. A July 1987 resolution of the CPSU Central Committee called the December events ‘a manifestation of Kazakh nationalism’. On the threshold of the 1980s and 1990s, the historical process of the USSR’s col- lapse became irreversible. The national republics proclaimed their demands for economic independence with increasing persistence, inasmuch as it had become disadvantageous to remain in the Union and subject to the tyranny of the mother country. Circumstances developed such that the doctrine of sovereignty increasingly began to give way to the concept of ethnicity. The first public-political associations and movements appeared (Nevada- Semipalatinsk, Azat, Kazak Tili, Zheltoksan and others), some of which later became political parties, and the issue of Kazakhstan’s independence was raised from various positions. The institution of the presidency that had been established in Kazakhstan in April 1990 (when federal rule from Moscow still essentially existed) shifted the burden of power to Almaty, where a fairly independent political centre had already taken shape under the leadership of N. A. Nazarbaev. 256
Contents Copyrights ISBN 92-3-103985-7 Independence Independence By October 1991, the August 1991 putsch in Moscow, which hastened the collapse of the USSR, had encouraged the majority of the former Union Republics to declare indepen- dence. The final stage in the transformation of Kazakh statehood in the twentieth century was connected with the collapse of the Soviet empire and the formation of post-Soviet states on the former territory of the USSR. On 16 December 1991 the Constitutional Law on the Independent Statehood of the Republic of Kazakhstan was passed, and on that basis state independence was declared. Independent Kazakhstan was founded as a democratic, secular and rule-of-law state. Political parties and public associations could now be formed. The media were freed from ideological control and censorship. ‘Gaps in history’ were filled in, victims of political repression were rehabilitated, and the scientific and artistic heritage of cultural figures who had perished for no reason was restored to the people. For the Kazakh people and for all citizens of Kazakhstan, the twentieth century was an important historical period of hopes and doubts, full of struggle at various levels and with very diverse consequences. 257
Contents Copyrights ISBN 92-3-103985-7 The Kyrgyz under Russian colonial rule . . . 11 KYRGYZSTAN * A. Tabyshalieva Download 8.99 Mb. Do'stlaringiz bilan baham: 
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