Russian troops are massing on
Ukraine's borders, but it is not
only Ukrainians who worry about what President Vladimir Putin may have in store
for them. The Kazakhs are too.
اضافة اعلان
For now, Kazakhs do not have to be immediately concerned about
Russian troop movements. What unsettles them is years of Russian rhetoric,
spearheaded by Putin’s repeated comments, stressing the ideological rather than
the security aspect of the build-up against Ukraine and verbal assaults on
Kazakhstan.
In his annual news conference, Putin used an unrelated question
posed by Kazakhstan TV last month to remind his audience that “Kazakhstan is a Russian-speaking
country in the full sense of the word".
His said that in response to some Kazakh activists pushing for Russian,
inherited from Soviet days, to take second place to Kazakh as
the country's primary language.
Russian nationalists responded vehemently to any suggestion to
change the status of Russian in this Central Asian republic.
“Unfortunately, in
Asia, only the
language of power is well understood. (Russia) does
not have to demonstrate its power, but it has to show its ability to apply it.
The weak are not respected. As Alexander III said, Russia's allies are its army
and navy; unfortunately, we have no other natural allies," said Alexander
Boroday, a former separatist leader in Ukraine’s Donetsk-turned-member of the
Russian parliament.
Boroday’s remarks were part of an evolving war of words. Russian
Foreign Minister
Sergei Lavrov charged that xenophobia had sparked several
attacks on Russian speakers in Kazakhstan.
Kazakhstan shares a 6,846km long border with Russia, the
world's second-longest frontier. The country hosts a Russian minority that
accounts for 20 percent of the population. Ethnic Russians carry their empathy
for the motherland on their sleeves.
Dariga Nazarbayeva, a member of the Kazakh parliament and
daughter of former president Nursultan Nazarbayev, who has a close relationship
with Putin, shot back that “cases of xenophobia sometimes
occur in Russia too”.
Putin demonstrated his friendship with Nazarbayev when he sent
doctors to treat the former Kazakh leader after being infected with
COVID-19.
Boroday’s was the latest comment in recent years by far-right,
ultra-nationalist ideologues calling alternatively for the return of Russian
rule to Central Asia and the carving up of Kazakhstan. The comments constitute
the background music to Putin’s statements.
"One can label calling ethnic Russians in Kazakhstan a diaspora
as a political mistake for these are our lands which
have been temporarily torn away from Russia," said Pavel Shperov, a former
ultra-nationalist member of the Russian parliament while he was still a deputy.
"Borders are not eternal. We will return to the borders of
the Russian state," he added.
An informal poll in
Ridder, a predominantly ethnic Russian coal-mining town on eastern Kazakhstan's
border with
Russia, suggested several years ago that up to three-quarters of
the city's mostly ethnic Russian population favored becoming part of Russia.
Putin first sent a chill down Kazakh spines seven years ago when
a student asked him at a news conference nine months after the annexation of
Crimea whether Kazakhstan risked a fate similar to that of Ukraine.
Echoing a widespread perception among ethnic Russians that
Russia had civilized central Asia’s nomadic steppes, Putin noted that
then-president Nazarbayev, Kazakhstan's Soviet-era Communist party boss, had
"performed a unique feat: he has created a state on a territory where
there has never been a state. The Kazakhs never had a state of their own, and
he created it".
Putin went on to say that Kazakh membership in the five-nation,
post-Soviet Eurasian Economic Union “helps them stay within the so-called 'greater
Russian world', which is part of world civilization".
By invoking the notion of a Russian world, an updated version of
a concept embraced by ancient sources who saw the
Greek, Roman, and Byzantine
worlds as spaces not defined by borders but by cultural and economic influence,
Putin articulated his view of Russia as a civilizational rather than a national
state.
Putin first embraced the concept telling a Russian diaspora
conference in 2001 that “the notion of the Russian World extends far from
Russia’s geographical borders and ever far from the borders of Russian
ethnicity”.
Kazakh leaders have walked a fine line when responding to Putin
and his far-right nationalist choir. In an article, President
Kassym-Jomart Tokayev
called for an investigation into who was
responsible for the famine in the early 1930s, sparked by forced Soviet
collectivization and settlement of nomads. Up to a third of the Kazakh population
died in the famine.
Tokayev's response was in line with his predecessor Nazarbayev’s,
when he reacted to Putin’s dismissal of Kazakh history.
Nazarbayev was quick to announce plans to celebrate the 550th
anniversary of the Kazakh Khanate that dates back
to 1465.
“Our state did not arise from scratch…. The statehood of the
Kazakhs dates to those times,” Nazarbayev said.
“It may not have been a state in the modern understanding of
this term, in the current borders. … (But) it is important that the foundation
was laid then, and we are the people continuing the great deeds of our
ancestors.”
The former president drove the point home two months later,
declaring at celebrations of Kazakh Independence Day that “independence was hard won by many
generations of our ancestors, who defended our sacred
land with blood and sweat. Independence is the steadfast resolution of each
citizen to defend Kazakhstan, their own home, and the motherland to the last
drop of blood, as our heroic ancestors have bequeathed us".
Some analysts suggest that 81-year-old Nazarbayev may be the
last barricade blocking a Russian-Kazakh confrontation.
Noting that Russians as a percentage of the Kazakh population
were diminishing, independent newspaper Novaya Gazeta pointed out that
"Russia understands this but is not in the mood to easily concede
to its former colony the right to live as citizens
in the country they want".
Novaya Gazeta’s editor Dmitry Muratov was awarded the 2021 Nobel
Peace Prize, with Filipina journalist Maria Ressa.
The newspaper quoted Kazakh scholar Dosym Satpayev describing
the Russian-Kazakh relationship as that of a "husband and wife before a
divorce. They are still trying to live together, but black cats are already
circling. In the future, someone will probably want to start the divorce
process, possibly peacefully or maybe confrontationally".
The writer is an award-winning journalist and
scholar, and a senior fellow at the National University of Singapore’s Middle
East Institute.
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