Assessment for Russians in Kazakhstan

View Group Chronology

Risk Assessment | Analytic Summary | References

Risk Assessment

Russians in Kazakhstan exhibit a low to moderate risk of violent rebellion in the near future. Russians are territorially concentrated in the northern region of Kazakhstan and show high levels of group cohesion. Protest, while present since Kazakh independence, peaked in the mid-1990s and has remained relatively low ever since. However, it should be noted that these low levels of protest occured within an authoritarian regime, which often restricts high-level protests. Resentment does linger over the loss in status Russians have experienced since Kazakh independence.

Russian protest is likely to persist, at least at low levels, in Kazakhstan. Discrimination against Russians in senior government positions plus arrests of prominent Russian activists and Russian journalists, and tight control over Russian language newspapers, radio and television programs provide grievances to sustain such protests. Furthermore there is no evidence to show that Kazakhstan's willingness to eliminate some forms of discrimination against Russians is done for any reason other than to appease Russia. Nevertheless, these protests are unlikely to increase barring any significant changes to the current state of affairs. The large exodus of ethnic Russians that occurred during the 1990s has slowed of late, reflecting, in part, the new economic opportunities within Kazakhstan's oil and gas boom; to a lesser degree, it reflects increased difficulties acquiring Russian citizenship.

top

Analytic Summary

The emigration of Russians into the territory of present-day Kazakhstan began about 300 years ago. In the early 18th century, the Tsarist empire advanced into the sparsely populated Kazakh steppe. Cossacks, the farmer-soldiers of the Tsars, settled on the turbulent borders as the Russian empire advanced. The industrial towns of northern Kazakhstan were originally founded as "Stanista," or fortified Cossack villages. Almaty was once the Cossack settlement around a Russian fortress built in the mid-19th century. Following the abolition of serfdom in Russia in 1861, many Russian and Ukrainian peasants moved to Kazakhstan and were granted Kazakh lands. Resentment against immigration led to local disaffection with Russian rule, and in 1916 a major rebellion against Russian control was brutally repressed, with some 150,000 people killed.

The process of Sovietization that occurred under Stalin is well known. Huge numbers of Kazakhs were starved during forced collectivization of farmland, and many Russians, Tatars, Germans and members of other ethnic groups were banished to the republic during the Second World War. After World War II, Nikita Khruschev attempted to open new agricultural lands under his "Virgin Lands Campaign." This fantastic experiment brought thousands of Russians and Ukrainians into Kazakhstan to build communism through increased agricultural production. The campaign, unprecedented in the history of agriculture, ultimately resulted in the ploughing of vast pasture lands. Kazakh President Nazarbayev has said that, on balance, the program was beneficial because it had made Kazakhstan a leading grain producer, increasing production 6-fold, to more than 24 million tons per year.

As a result of Russian and Ukrainian immigration, both before and after the 1917 Revolution, northern Kazakhstan is today predominantly Slavic, with some areas reaching as high as 90 percent (GROUPCON = 3). In the country as a whole, ethnic Russians constitute just under one third of the population. They are racially (RACE = 3), linguistically (LANG = 2), culturally (CUSTOM = 1) and religiously (BELIEF = 2) distinct from the Kazakh majority.

As a newly independent state, Kazakhstan embarked on an ambitious program of "Kazakhization" in 1991-1992, including promotion of ethnic Kazakhs in the government bureaucracy and promotion of Kazakh language education. This "Kazakhization" included a transmigration of Kazakhs into Slav-dominated territories from other areas, close monitoring of the Russian opposition and tight control over the Russian media. Despite the dangers of such a policy, the government believes it will win in the long run and has succeeded in the short-run: emigration of Russians combined with immigration of Kazakhs and their relatively higher birth rates have shifted the demographic and power balance throughout the country and especially in the north.

Kazakhstan also passed several language laws, including naming Kazakh the state language with Russian relegated to a secondary status as an "official" language. Laws requiring the use of the Kazakh language for official paperwork as well as proficiency tests in the Kazakh language for all public sector jobs and university students place limitations on Russians' abilities to take part in public life (CULPO201-06 = 2). Ethnic Kazakhs argue that such programs are necessary to rectify the legacies of 200 years of discrimination and forced Russification. Many Russians, bitter at the sudden shift of political power, have feared that the language law would be the first step in a strategy to destroy Russian identity and culture in Kazakhstan; while the language law is slowly being implemented, these cultural fears and grievances continue to be expressed (CULGR04-06 = 1).

Given that the Kazakh constitution holds that all public jobs require knowledge of the Kazakh language, the policies of Kazakhization have effectively amounted to the exclusion of Russians from the public sector. For instance, currently only 5 percent of government jobs are held by non-Kazakhs, even though more than 30 percent of the population is ethnic Russian (POLDIS01-06 = 3). Such policies also have led to deterioration in the quality of education in Russian-speaking schools as well as Kazakh dominance of the economy, which together decrease the opportunities for social and economic promotion for members of the Russian community (ECDIS01-06 = 3).

During the 1990s, there was a significant emigration of ethnic Russians, largely as a result of the aforementioned economic conditions, and politico-cultural concerns. This migration has slowed in recent years, for a number of reasons. Some of the factors cited include the economic boom currently occurring in Kazakhstan; the fact that many of the most mobile and employable have already left; and that many Russians consider themselves "indigenous," as their families have lived in Kazakhstan for many generations, have their "roots" there, have little or no connection with Russia as their "historical motherland," and have no close relatives in Russia. These "historical" Russians will favor remaining in Kazakhstan, so long as Kazakhstan does not become too nationalist.

Some of these historical Russians, however, have been emboldened by Russian nationalists like Zhirinovsky, Solzhenitsyn and the neo-Communists. These Russians have, since the early periods of Kazakh independence, demanded autonomy for certain regions, with some demanding outright reunification with Russia (POLGR04-06 = 4). While these demands have not turned violent, the government has claimed to have uncovered plots to violently seize power by Russian groups as recently as 2001. There is a division among Russians on this topic, though, as many living in the south and central areas reportedly take a dim view of the autonomy/irredentist idea, for they stand to gain nothing from an aggravation of ethnic relations. At a minimum, most Russians would agree with demands for greater political rights for their communities and equal civil and political rights with Kazakhs. Recent verbal opposition has been directed at this desire for equal rights such as the 2006 denunciations of the law stipulating Kazakh language use in official documents (PROT06 = 1).

top

References

Lexis-Nexis. Various news reports. 1990-2006.

Peyrouse, Sebastien. 2007. "Nationhood and the Minority Question in Central Asia: The Russians in Kazakhstan." Europe-Asia Studies. 59:3.481-501.

U.S. State Department. Country Reports on Human Rights Practices: Kazakhstan. 2000-2006.

Zardykhan, Zharmukhamed. 2004. "Russians in Kazakhstan and Demographic Change: Imperial Legacy and the Kazakh Way of Nation Building." Asian Ethnicity 5:1.61-79.

top