Postcards from Stanland

by David H. Mould

  At other universities, widespread malfeasance would have resulted in student sit-ins and critical editorials in the student newspaper. Not at KIMEP. Indeed, student leaders were also damaging the institution’s reputation. First, the victorious party in student government elections was found to have hired a hacker to change the electronic vote count. Then the elected student officers appropriated $4,000 to finance a trip to Washington, ostensibly to attend a conference. Finally, the student president hired two other students to take summer session final exams for him. The administration suspended him for a year—a penalty most faculty considered too light. What’s more worrying than the offenses themselves is that these students are supposed to be the best and brightest, destined for leading positions in government and business. If they can rig elections, steal money, and cheat on exams, what will they do when they’re in the parliament or running major corporations?

  None of the issues rated mention in the so-called independent student newspaper, the KIMEP Times. In 2010, the Times was moved from the journalism department to the Bang (named after the university president) College of Business. The paper and printing quality improved, but the content left much to be desired. Whereas local media reported on the scandals, the Times’s definition of news (according to its student editor) included “new friends, interesting trips, absorbing movies.” The lead story? “Dr. Bang introduces new course [on leadership].” What’s inside? “Minor in tourism introduced,” “Different organizations at our institute,” “Chess tournament,” and “Dormitory—my home.” Then there was the must-read “I’m a KIMEP student” column. This edition featured the first runner-up in the Miss Popularity category of the Miss KIMEP competition. I can’t wait to read the story on “KIMEP Core Values.”

  Ethnic Germans

  As a young Soviet ham radio champion in the 1960s, Gennadiy Khonin, now a Lutheran pastor, remembers radio enthusiasts from the German Democratic Republic visiting his home in Almaty. “They would ask my mother if she was German. She would answer: No—never! Even our dog is not a German shepherd! My father was in a labor camp, but my mother never talked about it.”

  In the half century after World War II, anti-German discrimination ran deep in the Kazakh SSR. Ethnic Germans were afraid to speak their language outside the family. They were prohibited from traveling more than thirty kilometers from their homes and from gathering in groups of three or more. As late as the mid-1990s, youths spray-painted swastikas on German houses.

  Official policy and public opinion began to change in the perestroika period, according to Aleksandr Dederer, president of Kazakhstan’s Wiedergeburt (Rebirth) national association. “Today, people have memories of clean and tidy German villages. Companies hire Germans because they have a reputation for accuracy, punctuality, and hard work. On the real estate market, ‘German-built’ houses fetch higher prices because they were built to last. Attitudes have changed—from total hatred to something like respect.”

  The shift came too late to stem massive out-migration to Germany in the 1990s. At independence, about 960,000 ethnic Germans lived in Kazakhstan. Over the next decade more than 700,000 left. Although the tide has slowed to a trickle, and a few have returned, the country lost skilled professionals, including teachers, engineers, scientists, and doctors. Coupled with out-migration by Russians, Kazakhstan suffered a huge brain drain, precisely at the time when it needed an educated workforce to rebuild a shattered economy.

  Although German peasant farmers began arriving in Central Asia in the middle of the nineteenth century, most ethnic Germans in Kazakhstan are members or descendants of the Trudarmiya (Labor Army), deported from the Volga region of Russia. Their ancestors had lived there since the mid-eighteenth century when Catherine the Great invited German farmers to settle the sparsely populated region. With the promise of religious freedom, exemption from military service and thirty years of tax exemption, they founded more than one hundred settlements along the banks of the Volga by the 1770s. For 150 years, the communities prospered, growing wheat, winter rye, sunflowers, potatoes, and other vegetables and fruits. Volga Germans suffered heavily in the civil war as the Red and White Armies fought for control of the region, destroying crops and villages; it is estimated that one-third of the population died from famine. In 1918, the Soviets established the Volga German Autonomous SSR and restored limited autonomy; the German language was promoted in education, media, and the arts, and Germans moved into government jobs.

  Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941, changed official attitudes to the Volga Germans. On August 28, 1941, the Supreme Soviet, fearing that they would side with Hitler’s advancing army, abolished the autonomous republic, stripped Volga Germans of their citizenship and ordered their deportation to Siberia and the Kazakh SSR. About 480,000 were rounded up by troops. Each was given as little as five minutes to pack one suitcase with belongings and food. Those who resisted or tried to hide were summarily shot.

  “They were packed into cattle cars for a journey that could last up to two months,” said Dederer. “They had little food or winter clothing, and some died on the journey. When they arrived, those selected for work were sent to the labor camps. Others were driven out onto the steppe and abandoned. They tried to dig holes in the ground, but most of them died.”

  “The labor camps and prohibitions against German language and culture were bad enough, but what was worse was the hate cultivated by Soviet movies and propaganda,” he said. Dederer recalls the 1942 poem “Kill Him” by the Russian writer Konstantin Simonov that urged patriotic Soviet citizens to protect their homes and families by killing Germans.

  Dederer, a factory engineer, began secretly organizing Germans in the city of Kostanai in northern Kazakhstan in the 1980s. In the perestroika period, Germans were allowed to hold meetings organized by the Communist Party. “The authorities were talking about peace and friendship, but the people wanted to discuss injustices and the preservation of their language and culture,” he said. History was rewritten at a national congress in Moscow in 1989 when the Soviet authorities formally stated that the deportation and injustices suffered by Germans were wrong. The question of reestablishing the Autonomous Republic of Germans in the Volga region was discussed. Yeltsin dashed those hopes on a visit to the Volga region, stating that the region would never be returned to the Germans. According to Dederer, he said: “If the Germans want to come back, let them live in Kapustin Yar [a region near Volgograd used for nuclear and chemical missile tests].”

  Yeltsin’s statement provoked anger, and Germans in Kazakhstan who had considered returning to Russia decided to migrate to Germany. The German government supported migration, offering free flights and assistance with housing, jobs, and social services. Dederer credits Germany with “taking responsibility,” but notes that only those who could prove they had been deported were accepted with their families. Since the late 1990s, stricter language tests, legal requirements and annual caps on visas have significantly reduced migration.

  With financial assistance from the German government, the twenty Wiedergeburt centers provide social support for elderly Germans living on pensions and families in need. There are free lunches, care packages, and medical assistance—free eyeglasses and hearing aids and discounts on doctors’ visits and prescriptions.

  For Viktor Kist, president of the Karaganda oblast branch of Wiedergeburt, the rising Phoenix in the society’s emblem represents cultural rebirth after two centuries of official repression of language, religion, and tradition. The Karaganda region, where most of the labor camps were located, has the largest concentration of ethnic Germans, estimated at 48,000. Because fewer than 10 percent speak fluent German, the Karaganda center offers language classes, now funded by the German government. In the 1990s, according to Kist, people studied German to prepare for emigration, but now they “feel they should know their language to preserve their traditions.”2

  The Lutherans

  The German language is still alive at the Luther
an church in the Turksib district of Almaty. Half the hymns, prayers, and readings are in German, half in Russian.

  Empty pews are a vivid reminder of the mass exodus in the 1990s. After independence, the church regularly attracted more than a thousand worshippers, with the service relayed over loudspeakers to an overflow congregation in the basement and churchyard. “The German language and the Lutheran faith were always part of our national identity,” said Pastor Khonin, a former nuclear physicist. “In 1992, when I became a member of this congregation, everything was in German. People talked to each other in German—they had the feeling of being at home. But today most young people don’t know German.”

  In the 1990s, according to Khonin, the church acted as a migration way station, helping people prove their German identity. Many who attended Khonin’s confirmation classes emigrated. “One man asked me for two confirmation certificates. He said he needed one for himself and one for the embassy.”

  Today, the church has about fifty members, most of them elderly. The oldest, ninety-four-year-old Aleksandr Riel, a Trudarmiya veteran and retired music teacher, is the only male member of the choir. He has relatives in Germany and could have emigrated, but his Russian wife and family members were denied visas. “Before she died, my wife told me—don’t ever leave your children. I gave her my word.”

  For Germans who stayed, the psychological effects of seeing relatives and neighbors leave could be devastating. “In some villages, almost every family was German,” said Dederer. “When only one or two families are left, how do you think they feel? These people are depressed. They could not leave for Germany, and they now feel that they are in the minority.”

  FIGURE 7.2 Pastor Gennadiy Khonin and Aleksandr Riel outside Lutheran church in Turksib district, Almaty

  The government has worked to improve the status and rights of minority groups. Article 2 of the constitution protects minority languages and culture and religious freedom. The government provides operating funds and staff salaries for Wiedergeburt branches and the Deutsche allgemeine Zeitung (DAZ), a weekly published in German and Russian. It has a small print circulation, but the online edition, with over 30,000 unique monthly visitors, reaches ethnic Germans and the larger diaspora in Germany.

  DAZ covers “issues of integration in Germany, both successful and unsuccessful,” said chief editor Olesja Klimenko. “In the 1990s, people thought Germany was a paradise. Some migrants were successful—they learned the language, used their qualifications, and continued their education. Others found that their qualifications as engineers, scientists, doctors, and teachers were not accepted. They were already middle-aged, and it was difficult to re-train. Some ended up as lab assistants or drivers. It’s good to present a picture of what it’s really like to live in Germany.”3

  The Brain Drain

  Dederer and Kist are leaders in the Kazakhstan-German Association of Entrepreneurs, helping Germans start their own companies and find business partners in Germany. With trade between the two countries growing, there is potential in mining and natural resources, equipment supply, retailing, and the service and tourism sectors.

  “There was a huge brain drain in the 1990s,” said Paul Kirol, who owns a vegetable storage and food processing plant, a transportation company, an industrial equipment importer, and a hotel in Astana. Kirol was part of the brain drain. With his family, he migrated in 1995 and became a German citizen. Most of his relatives live in Germany, but Kirol decided to return to take advantage of Kazakhstan’s growing consumer market. “Germany is a safer place, but I feel freer here because my business is not restricted,” he said. “I know the language, I know the business culture. In Germany, I would have to learn all over again.”

  Dederer says that emigrants have few incentives to return. Kazakhstan companies cannot match German salaries and will not make contributions to the German social welfare fund. Migrants can earn almost as much from unemployment benefits in Germany as in a full-time job in Kazakhstan. “Why would you give up almost 900 euros a month in unemployment to come to Kazakhstan and work full-time for 1,000 to 1,500 euros?” said Dederer.

  Ethnic Germans in Kazakhstan continue to face a complex push-and-pull relationship with a country where most of them have never lived. Yana Baumgartner, president of a German youth club in Astana, is an energetic advocate of German culture. Her group holds folk music and dance performances at city festivals, celebrates German holidays, and conducts a youth leadership program and a summer ecology camp. “It’s so important to maintain our traditions and let other people know about them,” she said.

  Baumgartner credits Nazarbayev with supporting minority cultures and says she feels no discrimination against ethnic Germans. “I am lucky,” she said. “I have a choice between German, Russian and Kazakh cultures.” But long ago she made a choice to move to Germany for graduate study and work. “It’s my dream. I have lived in Kazakhstan all my life, and I love the country. But in my heart, I’m German.”4

  eight

  The President’s Dream City

  Planet Astana

  To look at, Astana is so strange that it has one grasping for images. It’s a space station, marooned in an ungraspable expanse of level steppe, its name (to English speakers) having the invented sound of a science fiction writer’s creation. It’s a city of fable or dream, as recounted by Marco Polo to Kublai Khan. Except it’s not quite so magical: it’s also like a battery-operated plastic toy, all whirring noises and flashing colours, of a kind sold by the city’s street vendors.

  —Rowan Moore, Observer, August 20101

  For many visitors, the capital of Kazakhstan is an astonishing sight—unlike any other city they’ve seen. I visited Astana for the first time in September 2010, one month after Rowan Moore. My first impressions—from the air and then from the airport highway—evoked otherworldly metaphors. Strange shapes rose out of the steppe—spires, domes, globes, ovals, and pyramids in gold, silver, blue, and turquoise. The taxi passed the gleaming facade of Nazarbayev University, then sports stadiums and arenas built for the 2011 Asian Winter Games, with their massive, curved metal and concrete spans. Then triumphal arches, monumental public buildings, upscale apartment blocks, the huge Nur Astana mosque, shopping malls, and manicured parks, most of which on a chilly Saturday afternoon were almost deserted.

  Whatever you think about futuristic architecture (or what it cost to build it, and whether the money could have been better invested in Kazakhstan’s social needs), Astana is unlike any other capital city in Central Asia. Almaty (the former capital) and Tashkent look like other Soviet-era cities with their colonnaded public buildings and monotonous apartment blocks. Bishkek and Dushanbe have similar architecture, but are rougher around the edges. Astana looks more like Dubai or Abuja. It is growing fast, but even by the latest (2012) population estimate of 775,000, it is still less than half the size of Almaty or Tashkent (each of which has about two million inhabitants). However, the futuristic architecture makes Astana look and feel bigger. Which is exactly what its chief conceptual architect, President Nazarbayev, intended.

  It’s fun to depict Astana in the language of science fiction, but Moore’s Marco Polo analogy may be more appropriate. Like other capital cities throughout human history, Astana is designed to impress visitors. Just as medieval travelers returned home with tales of the fabulous cities of the East, modern travelers to Astana are treated to a visual spectacle. Astana is a twenty-first-century version of Karakorum, the thirteenth-century capital city of the Mongol Empire.

  Contemporary visitors to Karakorum were suitably awed, perhaps because they thought the Mongols were too busy rampaging and pillaging their way across Asia and Eastern Europe to actually build anything more than siege fortifications and campfires. In 1253, the Flemish Franciscan William of Rubruck, who had accompanied the French king Louis IX on the Seventh Crusade, set out from Constantinople for Karakorum. Louis had given the monk the medieval version of mission impossible—convert the Mongols to Christianity. Whether
or not William knew the futility of his assignment, he set out to record his party’s journey in detail, producing one of the great travel narratives of the age, comparable to that of Marco Polo.

  After traveling for almost seven thousand miles William and his companions entered a wealthy, bustling city at the heart of a major trading network, with markets, temples, and a cosmopolitan population, including Christians. The Great Khan even staged a debate at court among adherents of Islam, Christianity, and Buddhism. William’s detailed account of the journey and the six-month stay at Karakorum, and the reports of other missionaries and merchants, helped to counter popular views of the Mongols as a murderous horde.

  Like Karakorum, Astana is the concrete symbol of a modern and business-friendly Kazakhstan, an emerging economic and cultural power at the crossroads between Europe and Asia. In his writings and public speeches, Nazarbayev positions Kazakhstan within Eurasia, arguing that the nation embodies the best of the West and the East in its economy, education, religion, civil society, and values. The Eurasian motif is visible in the signature architecture of Astana, where elements of Western and Eastern design are combined. Astana hosts Eurasian conferences and events; businesses claim to reach the Eurasian market; Eurasian National University is the largest institution of higher education in the capital.

  For Nazarbayev, Astana was never the otherworldly, utopian fantasy that its critics have claimed. “It was a dream,” he wrote in 2006. “Now it is a true city, the pride and heart of Kazakhstan.”2 Astana is a combination of Karakorum and Dubai, the center of a new Mongol empire built, not on military conquest, but on oil and gas revenues, authoritarian government, investments in technology and education, and soft diplomacy with the West, Russia, and China. In a commentary for the Kazakhstanskaya Pravda newspaper to mark Astana Day, the city’s fifteenth anniversary, on July 6, 2013, Nazarbayev wrote: “The fate of Astana is the fate of all Kazakhstanis who have boldly crossed the threshold between two centuries. This is the fate of independent Kazakhstan, which has walked the great path from the obscure fringe of a fallen superpower known to few in the world to a dynamic modern state which the international community knows and respects.”3 Astana Day was also (not coincidentally) Nazarbayev’s seventy-third birthday. For the crowds who attended the birthday celebrations and the millions who watched the spectacle on TV, the association between city, country, and president was more than metaphorical. Astana was Kazakhstan. Nazarbayev had created Astana. Ergo, Nazarbayev was Kazakhstan.