Nazarbayev was also forthright in showing his displeasure with what he interpreted as American support for the dissolution of the USSR. “Yeltsin told the whole world that he had called President Bush and that President Bush had immediately supported what he had done,” confided Nazarbayev to Baker. “If it’s true, I would say only that since President Bush is respected by the whole world, one has to consider the weight of his words very carefully. What did the president think of the legality of that move by them? What did he think of the constitutionality of this? In August, the reaction of the United States was very clear. And the US view is important to everybody. Now what we have is Yeltsin trying to legitimize his actions by getting President Bush to do so for him.”6
Baker assured Nazarbayev that Bush had remained neutral, giving no support to Yeltsin and his counterparts. The secretary of state recalled later that while Nazarbayev was clearly hurt by his initial exclusion from the Belavezha summit, he was prepared to make his peace with that. “They have all apologized, and it’s over,” he told his American visitor, referring to Yeltsin, Kravchuk, and Shushkevich. He was now all for the Commonwealth and was working hard to convince his fellow Central Asian presidents to join it. “Once again, I am going to have to get into being a firefighter,” he told Baker, referring to the political storm touched off by the Belavezha Agreement. “I am going to have to get them all together.”
There was one major condition on which the Central Asian leaders were ready to join the Commonwealth: they were to be treated as its founding members, and the whole treaty was to be signed anew with their participation. Nazarbayev also wanted a separate treaty between the four nuclear republics on the control of nuclear arms. Those words must have been music to Baker’s ears. “When I got to my room that night at 3:00 a.m., I felt that my three hours with Nazarbayev were among the best I had had thus far,” he recalled. Baker wanted Nazarbayev to succeed. As he explained the next day to Stanislaŭ Shushkevich in Minsk, “By an association of the Central Asian republics with the Slavic republics, the Central Asians could serve as a bridge between West and East and a secure buffer against the spread of radical Islamic fundamentalism.”7
WHILE THE AMERICANS were interested in extending the Slavic Commonwealth into Central Asia for reasons related to nuclear arms and militant Islam, the motivations of the Central Asian leaders for joining the Belavezha Agreement were much more diverse and complex. Nuclear arms were an issue only for Nazarbayev, and radical Islam was only one of the factors that influenced the Central Asian leaders, most of whom were former party bosses. At the center of their thinking was Russia. Traditionally, their relations with Moscow were ones of subordination and dependence, and while they were eager to end the former, they were not in a position to terminate the latter entirely.
On December 17, the day Baker arrived in Almaty, Nazarbayev presided over a mass downtown rally to mark two occasions: the declaration of the country’s independence by the republican parliament one day earlier and the fifth anniversary of the anti-government protests in Almaty on December 16 and 17, 1986. The protests had involved Kazakh youth and proceeded under national slogans—the very first indication of rising ethnic tensions in the Soviet Union. The young people, largely students of Almaty institutions of higher learning, went into the streets to protest Moscow’s appointment of an ethnic Russian as leader of the republic’s party and state apparatus, a post earlier occupied by a Kazakh. The appointment of Gennadii Kolbin was part of Gorbachev’s plan to remove from power party cadres closely associated with Leonid Brezhnev and his corrupt rule.
To establish his control over the republics and regional elites, Gorbachev relied on party cadres from Russia. A year earlier, Boris Yeltsin had been transferred from Sverdlovsk to Moscow to take over the capital from the Brezhnev loyalist Viktor Grishin. Now Kolbin, who had been Yeltsin’s boss in Sverdlovsk in the 1970s, was moved from the post of first party secretary in the city of Ulianovsk on the Volga to Kazakhstan. With Gorbachev’s blessing and assistance, the “Sverdlovsk mafia” was taking over with the goal of rooting out corruption and increasing the power of the new general secretary over a country badly in need of political and economic reform.8
But whereas Yeltsin’s appointment to the helm of the Moscow city administration was welcomed by the Moscow public, Kolbin’s “election” as first secretary of the Communist Party of Kazakhstan at Moscow’s insistence met with hostility on the part of the Kazakh populace and elite alike. The main reason was quite simple: in trying to clamp down on old party cadres and corruption, Gorbachev had violated the unwritten contract between the center and the republics that had existed since Stalin’s death—the leader of any republic was to be drawn from its titular nationality. Gorbachev was changing gears and proposing to run the Soviet Union directly from the Kremlin, bypassing local elites. But Almaty was not Moscow. Republics had more rights than cities, and republican party and cultural elites were not about to yield their hard-won local prerogatives to a starry-eyed upstart in the Kremlin.9
There were rumors that senior officials in the republican party apparatus and government, who had much to lose with the arrival of a Moscow appointee in their capital, encouraged ethnic Kazakh students to rebel. Nazarbayev, an ethnic Kazakh, was then head of the republic’s government and one of the obvious candidates for the post of first secretary of the Kazakh Communist Party. Some have argued that he was behind the student protests. If so, he managed to remain unnoticed in Moscow. At the height of the protests he spoke to the students, asking them to disperse. When diplomacy failed, he backed those who argued for harsh measures. The protest, which took place a few months before the start of Gorbachev’s glasnost, was crushed. There were casualties, and thousands of students were arrested, interrogated, and expelled from the universities.
Nazarbayev, a former metallurgical engineer who had begun his education in Leonid Brezhnev’s hometown, Dniprodzerzhynsk, in Ukraine—a fact that he mentioned with pride to underscore his internationalist bona fides—managed to maintain his position in the republican leadership. His time to claim the highest office would come in the summer of 1989, when he was elected first secretary of the Kazakh party with Gorbachev’s blessing. The contract between the center and the republican elite in Kazakhstan, violated by Gorbachev a few years earlier, was now restored. This occurred at a time when the republican elite was preparing not only to regain the status it had held under Brezhnev but also to claim new ground in competition with Gorbachev, now weakened by his own political reforms. In the spring of 1990, less than a year after becoming first secretary, Nazarbayev took over as president of Kazakhstan, receiving his mandate, like Gorbachev, not from the masses but from parliament.
President Nazarbayev had to be very careful in deciding how much sovereignty and independence to take under the circumstances. When it came to the political and ethnic balance in Kazakhstan, he was in a much harder spot than any of his republican counterparts. The republic, whose titular nationality and leaders were Kazakh, was largely non-Kazakh in ethnic composition. Of Kazakhstan’s 16.5 million inhabitants, Kazakhs constituted only 6.5 million. Russians were the next-largest ethnic group, with more than 6 million; Ukrainians, linguistically and ethnically close to them and often culturally Russified, constituted the third-largest ethnic group, numbering slightly less than 1 million. In the 1980s the Kazakhs were the fastest-growing ethnic group in the republic, but the Slavs remained a majority. The Slavs were generally better educated, formed a majority in urban centers, and flaunted their superiority as masters of the republic. “If you traveled around my country,” confided Nazarbayev to Baker during his visit to Almaty in September 1991, “you would see Russian kids beating up Kazakh kids. That’s how it was for me. It’s not easy to live with them.”10
The precarious ethnic composition of Kazakhstan was the result of Soviet ethnic engineering and economic policies. In the early 1930s, the ethnic composition of the republic was affected by Soviet agricultural policies and, in particular, by a brutal campaign
of forced collectivization. More than 1 million Kazakhs, or a quarter of their entire population, perished in the famine of 1930–1933. The 1950s brought an influx of hundreds of thousands of Slavs, who arrived as part of another agricultural campaign—the colonization of the “Virgin Lands” launched by Nikita Khrushchev and implemented with the help of a then rising star in Soviet politics, Leonid Brezhnev. They wanted to make the steppes of northern Kazakhstan arable in order to solve the problem of chronic food shortages in the USSR. While the food problem remained unsolved, the ethnic composition of Kazakhstan was further changed in favor of the Slavs.11
Upon assuming presidential office in 1990, Nazarbayev was caught between a rock and a hard place: on one hand, rising Kazakh self-awareness and nationalism; on the other, growing separatist tendencies among the Slavs, who were settled largely in northern Kazakhstan. While pushing for his republic’s legislative sovereignty and economic autonomy, he lent no open support to either Kazakh or Slavic nationalism. Balancing between the two groups, he managed to consolidate power in Almaty and become an influential power broker in Moscow. Nazarbayev gained the respect of Yeltsin and Gorbachev, Kravchuk, and Shushkevich, and his word counted for a good deal among the leaders of the Central Asian republics. The collapse of negotiations on the new union treaty and the formation of the Commonwealth of Independent States tested Nazarbayev’s ability to maneuver without appearing to waver.
Nazarbayev could not unilaterally declare the independence of Kazakhstan against the wishes of its Slavic majority, but neither could he embrace the Commonwealth as constituted in Belavezha: that would mean 6.5 million Kazakhs sharing the new political entity with more than 200 million Slavs. One could easily predict the consequences of that arrangement for the Kazakh elite’s influence in the Commonwealth, to say nothing of the Kazakh national and cultural identity. Even less attractive was the vision of Kazakhstan’s future offered by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the spiritual father of the Slavic Union, which many believed to have come into existence in Belavezha. Solzhenitsyn was a proponent of the “reunification” of northern Kazakhstan with Russia. As Nazarbayev affirmed later, even if he had come to Belavezha on December 8, he would not have signed the agreement in its existing form.12
Nazarbayev was not prepared to sign the Commonwealth treaty with the Slavic presidents alone, but he was happy to do so if joined by other Central Asian leaders. On December 12, he flew to Ashgabat, the capital of the neighboring Muslim republic of Turkmenistan, to take part in a meeting of the five presidents of the Central Asian republics. On the agenda of the meeting, hosted by President Saparmurat Niyazov of Turkmenistan, was the question of the Central Asian response to the creation of the Slavic Commonwealth. Niyazov proposed the formation of a Central Asian confederation as a counterbalance to the Slavic Union created in Belavezha. Nazarbayev was among those who argued against it. He wanted the Central Asian republics to join the Commonwealth created by the three Slavic leaders.
“We gathered at Niyazov’s quarters in Ashgabat,” recalled Nazarbayev, “and discussed the situation until 3:00 a.m.: whether we should refuse to accept the dissolution of the Union and recognize Gorbachev as president—but what kind of Union could there be without Russia? Or should we create a Central Asian confederation—that was what Niyazov proposed, but then, we have one economy, one army, one and the same ruble [[with Russia]], 1,150 nuclear warheads in Kazakhstan. . . . How could we engage in a confrontation with Russia?” The idea of a Central Asian confederation probably would have been advantageous to Niyazov’s own republic, which was rich in natural gas and had a population of only 3.5 million, the absolute majority of whom were Turkmen. But the prospect of complete separation from Russia and other Slavic republics could deepen the emerging division between Slavs and Kazakhs in Kazakhstan and might very well mean the end of Kazakhstan in its current borders, with the subsequent realization of some form of Solzhenitsyn’s scenario.13
Crucial to the outcome of the late-night debate in Ashgabat was the position taken by the fifty-three-year-old leader of Uzbekistan, Islam Karimov. Uzbekistan was Central Asia’s most populous republic. With close to 20 million inhabitants, it was third in the Soviet Union, after Russia and Ukraine. The Uzbeks, numbering more than 14 million, had a comfortable majority over non-Uzbeks: their largest ethnic minority, the Russians, came a distant second, with somewhat more than 1.6 million. While not threatened by Russians or Slavs at home, the Uzbek elite had had difficult relations with Moscow in the last years of Soviet rule. Moscow had never tried to send an ethnic Russian to rule non-Slavic Uzbekistan, as was attempted in Kazakhstan, but it did much to alienate the Uzbek elite with its relentless drive against corruption—a drive that, for a number of reasons, focused on Uzbekistan.14
The investigation of the “Cotton Case,” which soon became known as the “Uzbek Case,” began under Yurii Andropov and resumed with new vigor under Gorbachev. The facts uncovered by the Moscow investigators in Uzbekistan were staggering. The first secretary of the Uzbekistan Communist Party was accused of taking bribes from fourteen individuals in the total amount of 1.2 million rubles. Some of the bribes, claimed the prosecutors, had been handed over in St. George’s Hall of the Kremlin Grand Palace during sessions of the USSR Supreme Soviet. The system that generated millions of dollars in bribes in Uzbekistan was created by Shoraf Rashidov, the first secretary of the republic’s Central Committee and a nonvoting member of the Moscow Politburo, who ran the republic from 1961 to 1983.
In the mid-1970s, responding to increasing demands from Moscow for production quotas of cotton—Uzbekistan’s main export product—and encouraged by that year’s bumper crop, Rashidov made a public pledge to his patron, Leonid Brezhnev, that from then on his republic would produce 6 million tons of cotton per annum. At best, it could in fact produce only two-thirds of that amount, and in a bad year, no more than 3 million tons. Rashidov’s future and the careers of those around him were under threat. Rashidov ordered every available plot of land to be used for growing cotton and forced the entire population of the republic, including children and teenagers, to work in the fields, irrespective of their main occupation. The results were disappointing at best—the harvest never reached 6 million tons.15
Like European imperial powers in their overseas colonies, the Soviets in Uzbekistan wanted “white gold,” as cotton was then known in Soviet parlance. While cotton was grown and produced in Uzbekistan, the main textile facilities were in Russia. Thus Uzbekistan exported cotton and imported textiles, at a great loss to its economy. The leaders of Uzbekistan then found a colonial solution to the imperial problem. It was called bribery. If the missing 2 or 3 million tons per annum could not be produced in the republic, decided Uzbek officials, they could be “added” to the official reports.
The scheme involved tens of thousands of individuals at all levels, from collective farms to high offices in the government and the Central Committee. Money received from the center for allegedly produced cotton was redistributed in Uzbekistan in the form of bribes. Millions of rubles also went to directors of textile factories and state and party officials in Russia, who confirmed the receipt of cotton never produced or pretended not to know what was going on. Uzbekistan became the homeland of the first hundred Soviet-era millionaires and a breeding ground of organized crime. Andropov and then Gorbachev gave their consent to the arrests of those involved in the scheme. With thousands of people under investigation, many began to regard the criminal prosecution as an assault on the entire republic, whose leaders were considered by their defenders to be guilty of nothing more than trying to fulfill the wishes of their colonial masters.
Islam Karimov, who became the leader of Uzbekistan in 1990, shared the feelings of his countrymen. Like many in Uzbekistan, he regarded the “Cotton Case” as a form of political persecution. In September 1991, he convened a congress of the Communist Party of Uzbekistan, now renamed the Popular Democratic Party, which adopted a resolution exonerating the communist leaders of Uzbekistan of an
y wrongdoing. “They have labored honestly and with a clear conscience for the good of the Motherland and can look their people in the eye directly and openly,” read the resolution. In late December 1991, a few days before being elected to the newly created presidency of his country, Karimov pardoned every individual prosecuted as a result of the investigation. By that time it had become known as the “Uzbek Case” and served as a symbol of Uzbek suffering under the communist regime.16
Karimov showed much more independence than Nazarbayev during the Gorbachev-initiated talks on the new union treaty. He often sided with Yeltsin and Kravchuk in derailing Gorbachev’s efforts (generally supported by Nazarbayev) to tie the republics more closely to the center. After the August coup he moved swiftly to remove the veneer of communist ideology from Uzbek society, demolishing monuments to communist leaders and rechristening squares and streets originally named after them. He declared, however, that Uzbekistan was not ready for democracy, crushed nascent opposition, and proclaimed that his inspiration was the political and economic model of neighboring China. Despite this move away from Moscow, Karimov was unhappy with what had happened at Belavezha. He later would express his displeasure directly to Yeltsin concerning the separate agreement between the Slavic presidents. But during the lengthy discussion in Ashgabat on the night of December 12–13, 1991, Karimov supported Nazarbayev and others who were arguing against the creation of what Moscow journalists were already calling the “Muslim Charter.”
Karimov’s motives for joining the Commonwealth were different from Nazarbayev’s. Like the president of Kyrgyzstan, Askar Akaev, Karimov needed Russia and the Commonwealth as allies against Islamic fundamentalism and rising China. But even more, he needed Russian textile factories to process Uzbek cotton. Without them, the Uzbek economy would collapse in a matter of weeks. Talking to reporters after the end of the Ashgabat meeting, Karimov rejected suggestions of a second-class citizenship status awaiting the Muslim republics in the Slavic Commonwealth. He told reporters that “the only way to escape a secondary role [[for those republics]] is to turn Central Asia into a highly developed region with its own processing industry.”17
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