Postcards from Stanland

by David H. Mould

  One of Our Cows Is Missing

  In the Soviet era, many Kazakhs simply chose to ignore their troubled history and learned to live and work in a multiethnic society. Indeed, for the generations born after World War II, the past was literally a foreign country, absent from school textbooks, museums, monuments, media, and official histories. Although the Soviets recognized ethnicities and subsidized minority-language publications and cultural events, it was always within the safe and sanitized framework of official party activities and ideology. You could learn to play the dombyra, weave traditional rugs, and study the Kazakh language, but you might not learn about the batyrs and certainly not about Alash Orda or the Stalin-era writers, artists, and activists executed or sent to labor camps.

  Islam was a sensitive topic. Although Arab armies had introduced Islam to Central Asia in the seventh and eighth centuries, it was Sufi missionaries with their moderate, nondogmatic teachings who were most successful in spreading religion. Among the nomadic tribes of Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, Sufi mysticism and tolerance of other beliefs allowed their followers to easily mix Islam with animism and shamanism. The Bolsheviks feared religion as a force that could unite ethnic groups, as the spectacular but short-lived rebellion led by Enver Pasha in the early 1920s had shown. In the 1930s, Stalin systematically suppressed Islam, closing mosques and madrassas, dismantling Shari’a courts and arresting mullahs. In 1943, the Soviets established formal Muslim religious boards, each headed by a state-appointed mufti, to control and supervise religious activities. Nonofficial Islam went underground, preserved largely by the clandestine Sufi brotherhoods. Openly practicing religion outside the official state structures was dangerous. The journalist, blogger, and media educator Asqat Yerkimbay learned how his grandfather, Isaghazy, led secret prayers in a village near the copper-mining town of Karsakpay in central Kazakhstan in the 1930s:

  All the mosques had been ruined, destroyed. What they would do was tell others, “One of our cows is missing and we’re going to go out and find it.” And they would go far away from the village to pray so that no one could see them. During Ramadan, they prayed every day. They closed all the windows in the house, and they had all the women go out. My grandfather usually led the prayers.9

  Asqat, born in 1983, did not hear the story from his parents, who never discussed religion and said little about their ancestors. It was not until he was in his early twenties, after graduating from university, that a great aunt told him about Isaghazy. By that time, he had become a practicing Muslim:

  When I started praying one day, she gave me this prayer rug and told me it had belonged to my grandfather. Holding this prayer rug—it was a very emotional moment for me. It was just a piece of material without decoration. In one corner there was a red triangle to symbolically indicate the Qibla [the direction to Mecca]. She also showed me his prayer book. I started wondering why my parents were not talking to us [their children] about our grandfather, and she said they didn’t want people to know they prayed because it was a small village.

  Isaghazy’s name derives from Ishaq, the Arabic version of Isaac, the son of Abraham and father of the Israelites, revered in the Jewish and Christian traditions, and in Islam as a prophet. He is mentioned fifteen times by name in the Qur’an. Many Kazakhs in Isaghazy’s generation were given religious names, but most in the next generation had secular names; Asqat’s father and his brother were named for the day of the week when they were born.

  Asqat grew up in Zhezdy, a mining town hastily built by the Soviets in 1942 to extract manganese deposits for the manufacture of tanks and other military vehicles. In Kazakh, zhez means the “place of the miner.” The regional center, the copper-mining city of Zhezqazgan, means the “place where minerals are dug.” Asqat’s father was a miner, and his mother worked as an accountant for the mine. By the 1980s, after waves of migration and deportations, Zhezdy was a multiethnic community. At the Russian kindergarten, Asqat realized that other children “were different because they had blonde hair and names like Konin. There were German girls but they had Russian names like Sveta and Lena. That’s probably why we didn’t know there were different ethnicities.” The family lived in a three-story khrushchevka. At home, as at school, ethnic identities were blurred.

  In the central part of Kazakhstan, Kazakhs were in a minority because the Soviets had deported other ethnicities to the region. Our neighbors were Russian, Belarusian, Ukrainian, German, but we couldn’t distinguish them—we thought they were all Russian. Russian culture was very strong. We celebrated all the Russian holidays. Most of my mother’s friends were Russian speakers—I think there were only two or three Kazakh speakers. When she had her birthday or celebrated an achievement at work, they sang Russian songs. There was candy, vodka, and cognac on the table, and it felt like a Russian celebration.

  Asqat’s family was from the Naiman tribe of the Middle Horde, Kazakhs who had moved to central Kazakhstan from the eastern Altay region after a famine in the 1930s. At home they spoke Kazakh. Until he went to school, he “learned Russian from TV, from the street.” As a young child, he did not have a strong sense of ethnic identity. “All my friends were Russian speakers, all the neighbors were Russian speakers. At that time the word Kazakh did not mean ethnicity or nationality.”

  His views started changing during the Gorbachev period, as the local mining economy declined and neighbors started leaving. “I asked my mother, ‘Why are they moving out?’ and she said it was because they were going back to their motherland. At that time, I started to realize who they were. That this neighbor was Dungan, and another was Armenian, and the family on the first floor were Germans.”

  From the age of five, Asqat had listened to Kazakh fairy tales from his grandmother. After independence, the school curriculum was changed to include textbooks on Kazakh history and literature. Asqat started reading about the Alash Orda movement and the works of Saken Seyfullin, the poet, writer, and national activist from central Kazakhstan who called for greater Kazakh autonomy and was executed in 1939. At school, the students staged plays and concerts to mark Kazakhstan’s independence day, December 16.

  All this built a sense of Kazakhness in my mind. However, I realized that I could not use my Kazakh language in my everyday life, and I wondered why. I started subscribing to a youth newspaper called Ulan [in the Soviet era, it was Kazakhstan Pioneer] to read what kids from other regions were saying. I sent them my first poem. They rejected it but sent me a letter encouraging me to continue writing. I was really good in Kazakh language and literature classes. I started to participate in high school competitions, and was motivated to be a journalist.

  Zheltoqsan

  For a quarter of a century, the dominant figure in Kazakh politics was Dinmukhamed Kunayev. In the 1950s, he became a protégé of Leonid Brezhnev, who served as first secretary of the Communist Party of the Kazakh SSR. In 1960, Kunayev was appointed first secretary, the first native Kazakh to hold the top post; all his predecessors had been Russian. During his long tenure, Kazakhs occupied prominent positions in the government, economy, and educational institutions. In December 1986, the Politburo, under pressure from Gorbachev, fired him on charges of corruption. His replacement, the Russian Gennadiy Kolbin, had never lived in the Kazakh SSR. On December 17, thousands of demonstrators—mostly young, ethnic Kazakhs—took to the streets of Alma-Ata (now Almaty) to demand a stake in the political process. Nazarbayev, who was serving as prime minister but had been passed over for the post of first secretary, urged the demonstrators to disperse, warning that the authorities would use force. His pleas were ignored. Moscow brought in security forces, and the riot was brutally suppressed. Many doubt the official death toll of three (one Kazakh student, two Russians), claiming that more than 100 were killed. Some demonstrators received long prison sentences while others saw their careers ruined. The so-called Zheltoqsan (Kazakh for December) protests were the first major riots of the perestroika period. They showed that the grip of the central government was weakening and re
vived latent Kazakh nationalism.

  Word of Zheltoqsan reached Zhezdy, as Asqat recalls. “There was a neighbor who was Dungan—I knew she was Dungan because she made Dungan lapsha [noodles]—her husband was Kazakh, and their son studied in Almaty. She came to my mom crying that her son was involved. My mom tried to calm her.” To Asqat, it was an early sign that the old Soviet order was beginning to break apart.

  In the 1990s, with Kazakhstan facing an economic slump, Russian and German out-migration and potential social unrest, Nazarbayev’s government pursued a dual strategy—providing more opportunities for ethnic Kazakhs in higher education and government service and promoting Kazakh language and culture, while telling non-Kazakhs that the country was a multiethnic society where all were welcome. At school, Asqat struggled with the notion of identity.

  There was a strong message “Be a Kazakh” in all school activities, but they didn’t tell us what it means to be a Kazakh. At that time, being a Kazakh to me meant to follow the culture—to wear the national costume, play the dombyra, and speak Kazakh. When I went to university to study Kazakh language and literature, my view started to change. The Kazakh language was not widely spoken in Zhezkazgan. For me, being Kazakh then meant to fight for the status of the Kazakh language.

  After two years at the state university in Zhezkazgan, Asqat moved to Almaty to complete his studies and started working as a journalist for an opposition weekly newspaper. Asqat and his Kazakh colleagues were responsible for the three or four Kazakh-language pages in a mostly Russian publication, and he worked closely with Russian journalists.

  At first, I did not want to work with Russian speakers because I believed they never wanted to learn the Kazakh language. They were in Kazakhstan, but their mentality was still Russian. But when I started working with them, we didn’t talk much about language. We talked more about social issues and that started to change my mind about what it means to be a Kazakh. I thought, “Why should I be happy to say that I am a Kazakh?” It’s like saying I was born on a Monday or a Tuesday or I have black hair. It’s not an identity I chose. What does it mean to be Kazakh? Does it mean to play the dombyra? Anyone can learn to play a dombyra. Does it mean the Kazakh language? Well, anyone can learn the language, and that does not make them Kazakh. For many, their tribal identity is more important than being a Kazakh.

  Asqat, like most Kazakhs, can trace his family and tribal lineage back for at least seven generations. It’s not a matter of genealogical interest or family pride, but a biologically based tradition with socioreligious support to avoid overlap in bloodlines. You need to be able to identify the lineage so that you don’t marry a close (or even distant) relative from the same tribe. That’s why, when Kazakhs meet for the first time, the conversation often begins with two questions: Where were you born? And what is your zhuz (horde) and ru (tribe)?

  If zhuz and ru are more important, then what does it mean to be Kazakh? For Asqat, national identity—or Kazakhness—should derive from a sense of common purpose, what he calls [in Russian] a grazhdantskaya pozitsia (a citizenship position) in a multiethnic society.

  There should be one visible and understandable goal for everyone—that’s more important than language. The word Kazakh, translated from the old Turkic, means “brave and free.” Being Kazakh is not so much about politics or ethnicity as about citizenship, a grazhdanskaya pozitsia. Some people in government are sending the message that being a Kazakh does not mean simply to speak Kazakh. Being a Kazakh means we should all have the same goal and respect others.

  The concept is admirable for its inclusiveness, but Asqat’s views may not be shared by those who suffered from economic and cultural discrimination in the Soviet era. For some, independence offered an opportunity for payback for almost three centuries of Russian (and then Soviet) political, economic, and cultural oppression. They did not embrace Nazarbayev’s vision of a multiethnic state, and they didn’t mind if the Russians (and other minorities) left, even if it meant the loss of talent.

  The Politics of Language

  The Soviets did not outlaw the study of Kazakh language and literature, but they did little to promote it. Despite the recognition of nineteenth-century literary greats such as Abai Qunanbayev, Shakarim Qudayberdiev, and Mukhtar Auezov, whose writing (unlike Seifullin) was considered politically safe, Kazakh (like Kyrgyz) was regarded by many as a village language. Knowledge of Russian was key to a successful career and advancement in the Communist Party. The best and brightest studied in Moscow or Leningrad. At independence in 1991, it was estimated that about half the ethnic Kazakh population were either unfamiliar with their own language or could manage only conversational Kazakh.

  Language has become a powerful weapon in the struggle to establish the new nation states of Central Asia. To create a national culture separate and distinct from the Soviet past, each republic has actively promoted its native language and attempted to restrict the use of Russian. Kazakhstan is officially a bilingual country. In 1999, Kazakh was declared the state language; Russian was given a constitutional status allowing its use in state bodies, and it remains the lingua franca in interethnic communication, especially in business. According to the 2009 census, only two-thirds of citizens claimed a decent command of Kazakh, whereas 94 percent understood Russian. The government has set a goal of 95 percent of citizens speaking Kazakh by 2025, while preserving fluency in Russian at about 90 percent. More children are learning the language in school, studying Kazakh history and literature and other subjects in Kazakh. University-level education is offered in Russian, Kazakh, and (at some institutions) English. National and local government agencies and public facilities such as hospitals are switching to Kazakh. Many forms and documents are still issued in Kazakh and Russian, but increasingly official business is conducted in Kazakh. Any applicant for government service is now expected to show proficiency in Kazakh.

  That includes the presidency. Potential candidates have to pass a three-part test—writing an essay, reading a text aloud, and delivering a fifteen-minute speech. That’s no problem for Nazarbayev, who is fluent in Kazakh and Russian, but in 2011 the test eliminated two opposition candidates. The tests are conducted behind closed doors by a panel of five university professors who vote on whether a candidate can run. One candidate was disqualified for making too many spelling errors; he claimed the decision was politically motivated, that the panel had asked him about issues rather than checking his language. Vladimir Kozlov, of the unregistered Alga party (later jailed for his alleged support of the oil workers’ protests in western Kazakhstan), simply pulled out, saying he didn’t have enough time to get his Kazakh up to snuff.

  The slow adoption of the Kazakh language has frustrated academics, writers, and artists who deplore what they regard as continuing Russian cultural influence, especially in the media. Russian-language newspapers are more successful in selling advertising because they attract urban readers with higher income and education than the largely rural readership of Kazakh-language newspapers. Faced with declining circulation and scarce advertising revenue, most Kazakh-language newspapers depend on state subsidies for survival.

  In 1997, Kazakhstan introduced a broadcast language law, requiring all TV and radio stations to devote half their air time to Kazakh-language material. Little licensed programming or music was available in Kazakh, and few stations had the resources to dub or subtitle programs. Even if stations could have complied, it would have been financially disastrous to do so because they would have lost Russian-speaking viewers and their advertisers; stations in Russian-dominated northern Kazakhstan would quickly have gone out of business. Commercial TV stations made a token effort to meet the quota without breaking the budget, airing a few Kazakh-language talk shows and shooting cheap music videos with Kazakh pop stars. This was not the high-brow cultural programming that the Kazakh culture-boosters had expected, but it was all that the stations, struggling for advertising revenue in a stagnant economy, could manage. In 1999, a group of seventy academics, writers
, and artists wrote an open letter to Nazarbayev, deploring the “spiritual and cultural anarchy” of radio and TV and demanding that 70–80 percent of broadcasts be in Kazakh. They also called for the creation of a state artistic council to select programs for both state-owned and privately owned radio and TV stations—essentially a return to Soviet-style censorship. To his credit, Nazarbayev ignored the petition.

  As with other legislation, the problem with the broadcast language law was not so much its intent, but how it was used. The government attempted unsuccessfully to close two stations in the predominantly Kazakh southern city of Shymkent—Otirar TV and Umax Radio—for alleged violations of the law. The maneuver was clearly politically motivated; both stations aired more programming in Kazakh than stations in other cities but had been critical of government policies. Meanwhile in northern Kazakhstan, TV stations were filling over 75 percent of their schedules with Russian-language programs, and the authorities refused to intervene as long as news coverage broadly supported government policy.

  Over the years, the quantity of Kazakh-language TV and radio programming has increased, not because of the law but because the Kazakh-language entertainment industry, especially movies and music, has grown, and quality has improved. Social and cultural change achieved what legislation could not. The broadcast language law achieved little beyond giving authorities another tool—in addition to licensing fees, fire and building codes, and the tax police—to stifle critical coverage, and to jump-start the careers of a few starlets and boy bands.