THE "IMPERIAL MINORITY": AN INTERPRETATIVE FRAMEWORK OF THE RUSSIANS IN ? -SEBASTIEN PEYROUSE-

This paper will be devoted to the Russian minorities living in Central Asia (nearly 10 millions people in 1989, about 5 millions today), and more specifically to the Russians living in Kazakhstan, who constitute the main Russian minority in the Near Abroad, apart from . Unlike the Russians living in the other Central Asian Republics, have created some political movements, and Kazakhstan even went through some important secessionist trends in the 1990’s. This paper argues that the Russian minority experienced difficulties to elaborate identity tools in order to manage the post-soviet context: how to pass from the status of a people representing the Soviet State to a minority symbolizing the former colonizer? What kind of allegiance can they swear to Russia: an ethnic, cultural, or political solidarity? Should they have to reply to the development of an ethnic nationalism in these new independent States by the development of a Russian ethnic nationalism, or should the emergence of a civic nationalism be supported? Through the example of an "imperial minority", this article questions some important topics of the post-soviet nationhood as the contradiction between ethnic and civic identities, between the imperial symbolic and the current nationhood. Sociological surveys are rare in Kazakhstan and none has been specifically devoted to the Russian minority. Our research work is thus based on the systematic perusal of the main newspaper that claims to represent the Russian minority, Lad, as well as on long stays in Kazakhstan between 1999 and 2005 in several cities of this republic. A monthly magazine founded in 1994, Lad is the press instrument of the association of the same name. Throughout the 1990s, Lad was the main association, but also the only political party representing the Russian minority. It allied itself with the electoral platforms of the democratic opposition on several occasions, but it did not manage to endure as an ethnic party. Having disappeared from the political stage in the late 1990s, Lad remains today merely a cultural association of defence of the Russians and is marginalized in the Kazakstanese public arena. This study mainly uses the discourses of the associations defending the rights of the Russians, discourses that are centred on highly ideological arguments and not on the individual memory as it can emerge from sociological surveys1. This article will not go back over the debates concerning the definition and the use of the words "diaspora", "community", or "Russophone", which represent a fully-fledged theme2. After quickly presenting the main features of the political situation of the Russians in Kazakhstan and of their massive departure for Russia, we will question three specific issues: the upholding of an historiography that glorifies the colonial and Soviet past, the age-old struggle for the possession of the steppe

1 For sociological surveys carried out among the Russians in Kyrgyzstan, see the work of Kosmarskaya N., Deti imperii v postsovetskoi Tsentral’noi Azii: adaptivnye praktiki i mental’nye sdvigi, Moscow, Natalis, 2006. 2 On this question, see Kolstoe P., Russians in the Former Soviet Republics, Londres, Hurst, 1995 ; Shlapentokh V. and al., (eds.) The New Russian Diaspora, Armonsk, New York - Londres, M. E. Sharpe, 1994 ; Laitin D., Identity in Formation. The Russian-speaking Populations in the Near Abroad, Ithaca – Londres, Cornell University Press, 1998. and the development of a Soviet nostalgia that goes hand in hand with a much ethnicized definition of the Russian identity.

I. AN OVERVIEW OF THE SITUATION OF THE RUSSIANS IN KAZAKHSTAN In 1991, Kazakhstan was the only post-Soviet republic in which the eponymous people was not the majority. At the national level, the new state was undermined by its strong Russian minority and by the deep Russification/Sovietization undergone by the Kazakh society. Indee, in 1989, Kazakhstan took in six millions Russians. This diaspora is the second in gross figures after the one in Ukraine (11 millions in 1989) but the first one in percentage, as the Russians living in Kazakhstan represent 37,8 % of the population of the republic. The relevance of “Russian problem” in Kazakhstan is not only posed due to their number but also due to their fundamentally autochthonous nature: 66% of them were born in this republic and more than 37% of the non-natives had been living there for more than twenty years3. What is at stake is also shown by the geographical distribution of the Russians: in the 1989 census, they represented from 70 to 80 % of the population in the seven Northern regions of the country, almost all on the border with Russia (Akmolinsk, , Kokchetau, Kustanay, North-East, Northern-Kazakhstan, ). Kazakhstan thus found itself in a certain national situation since it had to unify a massively Russian and European North (with Polish, Ukrainian and German minorities) with a predominantly Kazakh and Uzbek South and with a middle space particularly sparsely populated. The unexpected disappearance of the raised many questions and concern, considerably speeding up the migratory flows. If the massive departure of the Russians of Central Asia towards Russia is often presented as resulting from the fragmentation of the USSR, the reversal of the migratory flows, which started well before 1991, could be noticed from the 1979 census onwards. In the 1980s, Kazakhstan lost another 784,000 inhabitants (between 60,000 and 85,000 each year)4. These migrations changed in scale with the independence of the republics. As far as emigration is concerned, Kazakhstan remains the Central Asian republic in which the figures are the 5 highest, in comparison with the other republics as well as with the whole CIS . Between 1989 and 1999, Russians went from 6 to 4,5 millions, that is to say from 40 to 30% of the Republic’s population, with an average of departure of 150,000 individuals a year. In 2000, migrations coming from Kazakhstan alone still constituted more than 28% of the internal migrations in the former Soviet territory6. The traditionally Russian regions of the North and the East of the country have been worst hit by the transformations brought by these departures and were losing around a quarter of their population in less than a decade. Entire neighbourhoods in the big cities such as Pavlodar are entirely dilapidated (

3 Rybakovskii L. L. "Migratsionnyi obmen naseleniem mezhdu Tsentral'noi Aziei i Rossiei", Sociologicheskie issledovaniya, Moscow, RAN, no. 9, 1995, p. 92. 4 Suzhikov M. (ed.) Mezhnatsional'nye otnozheniya v Kazakhstane, , Gylym, 1993, p. 139. 5 Klimova T. "Tendentsii migratsionnykh protsessov v respublike Kazakhstan (sociologicheskii aspekt)", Tsentral'naya Aziya i Kavkaz, no. 3, 2001, p. 206. 6 Zajonchkovskaya Zh. "Migratsionnye trendy v SNG: itogi desyatiletiya", in Migratsiya SNG i Baltii : cherez razlichiya problem k obshchemu informatsionnomu prostranstvu, Moscow, Adamant, 2001, pp. 181-182. a third of the population has left), while in central Kazakhstan, some satellite mining towns of Karaganda have also been almost totally abandoned. Even if the phrase "Russians in Kazakhstan" is commonly used, it must not presuppose the belief in a unity of destiny of several million individuals and it is obvious that this entity is in no way homogeneous7. Many Russians have lost any interest in politics and the national discourse, they cannot find their way in any collective terminology and they analyze their situation only according to their personal situation. Others would be willing to take part in some kind of collective action and identification but are disappointed by the associations supposed to represent them and by the way the governing bodies handle their problems. Some believe in the possible integration of their children in the new Kazakhstanese society and ignore a Russia that represents nothing to them. Others finally hope, in a more or less long term, for their generation or the next, a return to Russia, or even a departure for the West. One cannot but question the actual representativeness of the associations that pretend to defend the interests of “Russians in Kazakhstan”. The two main associations, Lad and the Russkaya obshchina, were founded in 1992. There are also several Cossack communities as well as many Russian cultural associations in each big city of the country. These associations are very often in competition with one another and are divided into radical and moderate strands. The former have campaigned so that Kazakhstan should recognize its status as a bi-national State, a Russian-Kazakh one, in which Russians would be the “constituting nation” [gosudarstvoobrazuyushchaya natsiya] just like the Kazakhs. The latter quickly accepted to collaborate with the political power of N. Nazarbayev and joined the Assembly of the peoples, which has given them some legitimacy. The separatist or secessionist demands, which were very strong in the early 1990s, have gradually ceased and are now replaced by more specific demands: the upholding of the use of the Russian language in the Kazakhstanese public space, the assertion of cultural rights, the call to strengthen the ties between Kazakhstan and Russia. The democratic shutdown of the country has greatly complicated the political game of the Russians. In the first years after the independence, the Russians willingly took part in the process of democratization and were active in all the elections. In the Supreme Soviet in 1993, the representatives of Lad were a dozen. Their success was very clear in the 1994 local elections, in which they succeeded to get many offices in the cities of the North of the country. The Ladovtsy can thus occupy up to 80% of the local offices in the predominantly Russian cities such as Temirtau, Aksu, Stepgorod, Rudnoy and Ust- Kamenogorsk. They are in the majority at the town council of Ust-Kamenogorsk : Lad is joining forces with the German association Vozrozhdenie [Rebirth] and the Tatar cultural centre, which allows it to get six elected members out of 16 at the local Assembly, and twelve out of forty at the regional Assembly8. In 1995, the movement prepared for the new legislative elections with a precise programme and four official candidates. The main politician of Lad, V. M. Mikhaylov9, represented the movement in Parliament and

7 For further details, see Poppe E., Hagendoom L. "Titular Identifications of Russians in Former Soviet Republics", Europe-Asia Studies, no. 5, 2003, pp. 771-787 ; Poppe E., Hagendoom L. "Types of Identifications among Russians in the Near Abroad", Europe-Asia Studies, no. 1, 2001, pp. 57-71. 8 Lad, no. 11, 1995, p. 5. 9 A former conductor and director of the philharmonic orchestras, V. M. Mikhaylov is the founder of the first association Lad in Akmola in 1991. He has been a member of the commission for human rights to the founded there a faction called Eurasia [Evraziya] which received the support of Olzhas Suleymenov, of the opponent G. Aldamzharov and of about twenty MPs10. However, as the country was becoming politically tougher, Russian associations lost their members in Parliament and in the local Assemblies. These associations were no longer represented in the official political bodies since the second half of the 1990s. Nowadays, the administrations of even the mostly Russian cities are very markedly Kazakhized, the Upper and Lower Houses mostly includes almost no Russian member and the only Russians who are sometimes present in the Assembly are all close relations to president N. Nazarbayev. Despite these questions on the representativeness of the Russian associations, the newspaper Lad remains one of the bearers of the collective identity: it presupposes the existence of a homogeneous national identity, creates discourses of recognition and the awareness of a community of destiny, has a symbolic system of representation in the eyes of foreigners and of the organizations supposed to defend the Russians from the near- abroad in Russia. Lad, like the other associations, benefited from a real popular support in the first years after the independence, especially in the northern regions, which were attracted by secessionism. Its political activism in Parliament, at the Assembly of the peoples or in the streets, even if it has become weak and has often been banned, reminds the government of the existence of a “Russian problem” in the country. Moreover, the networks that these associations weave around themselves can in concrete terms, and at a small level, help some people: the bringing together of the teachers from Russian schools, the organization of visits to Russia for brilliant pupils or aged people, legal help for the destitute, specific social actions. These collective actions are all the more important as many Russians feel a very strong ethnic competition with the Kazakhs. Indeed, the policy of nationalization carried on by the republics has intensified from 1991 onwards: the ethnocratization of the public administration, the linguistic nationalization and the system of national preference in getting offices contribute to exacerbate the sentiment of interethnic tensions11.

II. A GLORIFIED COLONIAL AND SOVIET PAST The situation of discrimination in which the Russians think they find themselves magnifies the importance they grant to commemorative policies and to the writing of history. In fact, there cannot be any community awareness without setting up a work of self-definition of the community. Beyond the importance granted to the upholding of the national language, the control of the discourse on the past is one of the main objects of desire, reworking traditions or creating them completely. Consequently, there are two analyses radically conflicting with each other: for the Kazakh nationalists, Kazakhstan has had a millennial existence which has, so far, been stifled by the colonial domination; for the Russians, the country exists only because the tsarist empire and the Soviet Union accepted it. In front of the development of a historical Kazakh discourse that denies Russia the “right to the steppe”, the country’s Russian minority has felt particularly

president. He was a member of Parliament for Lad from 1994 to 1995. He had to emigrate to Russia in 2001 and now works in Moscow in the lobbies defending the rights of the Russian diaspora. 10 Interview with V. M. Mikhaylov, president of Lad, Astana, February 2000. 11 For further details on these issues, see Laruelle M., Peyrouse S., Les Russes du Kazakhstan. Identités nationales et nouveaux États dans l'espace post-soviétique, Paris, Maisonneuve & Larose, 2004. targeted and has interpreted the new historiography as an indictment of the whole Slavic population. If a historical argumentation is very often put forward by Kazakhstanese Russians in order to justify their presence in the country, it is paradoxically little elaborated and remains quite repetitive. After the linguistic and school policies, the Russians classify rewriting of history as an important element of interethnic tension12. Many articles from Lad are devoted to this question, even if one cannot really talk of the constitution of an alternative historiography: no Russian researcher really gets down to answer point by point the official Kazakh discourse and no alternative manual is actually proposed – often because a lack of financial means. The situation of the Russians is different, then, from that of other diasporas, such as Armenians, or from other communities, such as the Pied noirs, who have all very largely contributed to develop research on their own history13. For the moment, being devoid of a “self-history”, the Russians in Kazakhstan are developing a historical discourse which is close to the one of the nationalist circles in Russia. It is but a vulgarized and radicalized repetition of the Soviet argumentation in favour of the benefits brought by the Russian presence and its "civilizing mission" to the Kazakhs. The articles from Lad are quite often final on what constitutes the Kazakh culture and they illustrate the deeply colonial look of the Russians living in Central Asia. The angle of analysis is still European-centred and presented as being obvious: the Kazakh culture is disparaged for its "non-history", its lack of historical sources or of written literary works and its architectural scarcity. The idea that there may be an oral culture, as well as other forms of sociability and expression than those known in European societies, is never mentioned. Russian associations like Lad criticize what they consider to be a false "rebirth" of the traditions and invite the Kazakhs to be careful of not overestimating "their contribution to world culture when this contribution is based on a perfunctory arrangement of the facts and on the falsification of history."14 They are reproached with not meeting the western criteria of history, based on the idea that ancient Mediterranean cultures constitute the very model of civilization. From this perspective, Kazakh history would supposedly only represent the stagnation of an archaic way of life in a time thought as linear, on the model of the African or Oceanian societies, which have long been considered devoid of a history: "those who remained in the khanat kiptchak (…) have nomadized till the 1930s as their ancestors did twenty five centuries ago."15 This negative vision of the Kazakh past has had deep consequences on the way the Russians interpret the contemporary situation of the country, since the nomadic culture is judged to be directly responsible for the current problems: nepotism, the authoritarianism of the governing bodies, corruption and cooptation through enlarged networks of relatives would not be the product of the Soviet system but in the very nature of the Kazakh people. The references to the "feudalism" of Kazakhstan are numerous and some articles present, not without any humour, the power of Nazarbayev as "a feudalism

12 Kurganskaya V. D., Dunaev V. Iu., Kazakhstanskaya model' etnicheskoi integracii, Almaty, Tsentr gumanitarnykh issledovanii, 2002, p. 234. 13 On the construction of a “Pieds-Noirs” historiography, see Savarèse E., L'invention des Pieds-Noirs, Paris, Séguier, 2000. 14 Lad, no. 7-8, 1998, p. 2. 15 Lad, no. 3, 1997, p. 2. with a human face"16 or the privatisation carried on by the nomenklatura as "a form of compilation of Genghis Khan and Stalin"17. An everyday racism is also sinking in with the arrival of the Kazakhs from Mongolia or from Afghanistan, defined in the pages of Lad as "half-savages"18, and the movements of the population from the South to the North. Thus, many articles complain about the arrival of these "Southerners" who would bring along their large families, the mob, drugs money and tribalism. The analysis by Russian activists of what the Kazakhs would have won with the independence is thus deemed final. This unilateral vision of the events shows the impossibility, for many Russians, to think the current situation as the product of the social realities of the previous system, and induces them to an essentialization of the discourse on the eternal and immutable "nature" of the Kazakh people. To the creation of a new national historiography by the Kazakhstanese authorities, the leaders of the Russian minority answer by developing further the Russian-Soviet historiography around the theme of "the friendship of the peoples"19. The Russian- Kazakh relationships are apprehended as being very ancient. The Kazakhs are praised for choosing Russification against a possible sinicization or uzbekization, giving birth to a multiethnic Eurasian civilization. In order to validate the analysis of the colonization as one of "voluntary incorporation" [dobrovol'noe soedinenie], following the Soviet terminology, Lad has published in many articles the classic historical texts on the issue: archive documents describing the relations between the tsar Boris Godunov and the Nogay, the exchange of correspondence between the khans of the different hordes and the emperors in Saint-Petersburg. The 19th-century authors are also put to contribution : the influence of F. Dostoyevsky upon the Kazakh ethnographer Chokan Valikhanov (1835- 1865), texts from the writer Kunanbayev (1845-1904) and the pedagogue Ibrahim Altynsarin (1841-1889) on the benefits of the Russian domination and the necessary command of this language, etc.20 The rehabilitation of the tsarist domination is accompanied by a positive look at the Soviet period and both are lived without any special discontinuity. The emphasis is put on what Russia brought to the development of the country and takes place in the continuity with the proposed reading of the colonial period. The USSR would have thus made possible "some relatively peaceful years both on the physical and spiritual level, obtained thanks to the Russian people, to its huge sacrifices in favour of the development of the far reaches (…), sacrifices which are nowadays shouted down and defined as a colonization and a Russification."21 Two other facts are also disparaged on the Russian side: the so-called attempts by many Kazakhs to escape from the front line during World

16 According to the expression "socialism with a human face" used in Czechoslovakia in the 1960s. Lad, no. 10, 2000, p. 3. 17 Lad, no. 4, 1998, p. 5. 18 Lad, no. 3, 2003, p. 3. 19 Tillet L., The Great Friendship. Soviet Historians on the Non-Russian Nationalities, Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 1969. 20 Genotsid. Russkie v Kazakhstane: tragicheskaya sud'ba, Moscow, Assotsiatsiya pereselentsev iz Kazakhstana v Rossii, 2001, p. 393. Russians regularly quote many extracts chosen in the touches of Abay, which are quite critical towards the Kazakhs and which regularly evoke the necessity to master the Russian language in order to get access to world culture. 21 Lad, no. 1-2, 1999, p. 1. War II22, while the losses among the Russians were massive, and the debate on the collectivization and the “genocide” carried out by the Soviets. Lad thus regularly denounces Kazakh historians who would have the mission of swelling the figures of the human losses during the 1920s-1930s: according to the newspaper, one should not forget that among the dead can also be found a great number of Russian peasants as well as of Cossacks; that the starvation and sudden decrease in the livestock have been recurrent phenomena in the history of the steppes, due to the natural conditions more than political ones ; and that it is not the seizure, by the Bolshevik power, of the possessions of the great Kazakh lords [bay] which would have impoverished the population itself23. These discourses are thus build on a principle of resentment, on the impression of having been used and then thrown out: "We’re trying to transform into chauvinists and colonizers those who built the industry of the republic, founded its cities, ploughed the virgin lands, nursed and educated the Kazakh population."24 Generally speaking, the cultural life of the Russian minority remains marked by the Soviet system of folklorization: entire pages from Lad are devoted to the numerous historical jubilees (the 850 years of Moscow, the 1812 national war against Napoleon), to the commemorative the days devoted to the great national figures (Pushkin, Kutuzov, Dmitri Donskoy, Suvorov…) and the Woman’s day on March, 8. The Day of the Slavic culture “Cyril and Method”, on May 24, is the most celebrated, for it symbolizes the Slavic rooting in Kazakhstan. Beyond this folklorization, some commemorations are more political, like every year, in May, the celebration of the end of World War II, which keeps all the Russian associations occupied for several weeks and can be distinguished by the upholding of a cant discourse about “the Soviet victory on the fascist enemy”. A certain nostalgia for greatness thus clearly appears and many articles invites Russians to be proud of their past as a great power. This assumed nostalgia is not helpful in analyzing more or less objectively the post-Soviet situation, as reveals the scornful discourse of the Russians on the Kazakh language. Thus, for Lad, the officialization of Kazakh as the state language would mean the definitive orientalization of the country, with the culturalist clichés of such a vision : according to the newspaper, the Kazakh language will see its "Turkization, that is to say its transliteration into an Arabic system of writing [sic!], which will open for the Kazakhs a window on the world of the European culture."25 Russian associations also consider that the danger of these new linguistic laws does not only lie in the forced kazakhization of the country but in the risk of a kazakhization of the Russian language itself. The "purity" of the Russian language would indeed be threatened by a whole series of changes of the place names, titles and abbreviations: the kazakhization of the name of the town of Tchimkent would, for instance, make the new name contrary to the rules of

22 Lad, no. 3-4, 2000, p. 1 ; Genotsid, op. cit., p. 343. In 1995-96, Kazakh nationalists attempted to lead campaigns – only in Kazakh – in the media in order to discredit the meaning of World War II for Kazakhstan: they considered that the country had never been really threatened by the nazi armies and that the Kazakhs had been forced to take part in the war under Russia’s pressure. 23 Lad, no. 11, 1995, p. 4 ; Genotsid, op. cit., pp. 342-343. 24 Lad, no. 9, 1997, p. 7. 25 Lad, no. 5, 1995, p. 1. Russian phonetics26. Lad is concerned about what it considers to be a leeway, since more and more Russian terms would be pronounced according to the "Kazakh consonances"27. Kazakh society is thus often apprehended by the associations of defence of the Russians as a society that has no history and culture in the western sense of the term: only the arrival of the Russians would have brought it elements from the modernity, only the Soviet experience would have given it industrialization and mass education. Even when the vision of the Kazakh is positive, it is never devoid of ambiguities : they are considered to be assimilated or acculturated to the Russian world, implying that the contemporary situation of their independence is still debatable.

III. THE MEMORIAL BATTLE FOR THE POSSESSION OF THE STEPPE The official historical discourse of the new republic wants, quite naturally, that the current territory corresponds to that of the historical settlement of the Kazakh since an ancient era: the independence would have only meant that fate was fair to the Kazakhs, deprived of their state by the Russian domination. The development of a historical discourse which ‘privatizes’ the Kazakh territory and denies the Russians the right to assert themselves as autochthonous on that soil could only provoke some reactions among the important Russian minority of the country. A great part of the discourse of legitimization produced by the Russians indeed insists on the existence of a Slavic presence in the steppes before the Kazakhs’, who settled according to them only further South. A new mode of argumentation then comes into play, that of the work of the land. There can be found a myth of the pioneer whose importance, underrated in the study of the Russians identity discourses since the 19th century, would deserve to be looked deeper into. Could we thus compare the Russian case with the one of the United States, or to that of the Pied-noirs? In both cases, it is the work on the land which would give a property right and this, even if the Native Americans or the Arabs were formerly present on that soil28. The historical discourse of Russian associations is deeply marked by the idea of a natural move forward into the steppes, which would only be "living space" zhiznennoe prostranstvo] of the nation29 : many allusions are made to the notion of Lebensraum and to the German geopolitician, Friedrich Ratzel, who considered that each culturally and economically developed people had a right to a territory that meets its needs. The references of the Russians are indeed those of the pioneer tradition. The massive presence of Russian peasants in the steppes at the beginning of the twentieth-century is extolled and the historical figure of P. A. Stolypin30 is quite appreciated as he opened the zone to the agricultural colonization, particularly after the revolts in Central Russian in 1906-07.

26 Lad, no. 1, 1995, p. 5. 27 Lad, no. 11, 1996, p. 3. 28 On this autochthonous question for the Post-Soviet Space, see Grigor Suny R., Intellectuals and the Articulation of the Nation, Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 1999; and Shnirelman V., Who Gets the Past? Competition for Ancestors among Non-Russian Intellectuals in Russia, Washington, D.C., Woodrow Wilson Center Press, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996. 29 Genotsid, op. cit., p. 19. 30 P. A. Stolypin (1862-1911), a conservative statesman, was appointed minister of the Interior and Prime Minister by Nicholas II in 1906. He set himself the target of setting up deep agrarian reforms in Russia in order to develop the country but also to neutralize the revolutionary tendencies of the peasantry by transforming it into a class of small landowners. His reforms would give more freedom to the peasants in Lad thus devotes in each issue a column to bring out the work of the Russians in the steppes : their role in the building of the railway lines, in the electrification of the country, in the foundation of cosmodrome and in the development of agriculture during the campaign of the virgin lands were exalted there without cut and dried. Some columns are also devoted to all those, explorers and scientists, who have contributed to the better knowledge of the country. Considering the economic achievements done in the late 19th century and throughout the Soviet era, the Russians felt they had given more than they received. Hundreds of letters sent to Lad and regularly published on several pages witness this fundamental misunderstanding: how can the Russians be accused, now, of having "colonized" Kazakhstan whereas they were mostly peasants and miners and that all the industrial constructions were realized on the budget of the Union?31 The whole traditional imaginary world of the pioneers seems to be present in the discourse of the Russians: the settler transformed into a civilized country, in peril of his life and by the sweat of his brow, what until then only a desert. The region is thought out as abandoned or empty before his coming, and if some of them sometimes admit the existence of former occupiers, they are considered as illegitimate since they were not able to exploit their own land. The very fact that they failed to defend their country against the Russian advance would be the unquestionable proof of their non-right to it. This positive vision of the work on the land and of the industry is accompanied by a negative analysis of trade, perceived as "oriental" and too often dishonest. Even more than anger, the feeling expressed by the articles in Lad plays on the mode of the disappointment of the settler who seems to have never thought that his good intentions may one day be questioned. This discourse does not seem to be specific to the political or associative elites but on the contrary is largely spread and representative of the opinion of many Russians. A consequence of this myth of the pioneer, the issue of the land as the place and the materialization of remembrance turn out to be a crucial stake for the Russians. The onomastic and toponymic changes experienced by the country - like all the other ex- USSR republics – since 199032 are thus particularly resented. They question the Russian memory of the zone and try to erase the Slavic past of these regions. The authorities indeed want to give back to certain places their Kazakh names which they had for a long time but the Russians consider that since these names were not administratively attributed to the land but present only in the "mental atlas" of the Kazakhs, they were not worth anything against those given by the Slavic peasants when they arrived there. Several opinion polls on that issue revealed the difference of assessment between the Kazakhs and the Russians: thus, in 2001, 60 % of the Kazakhs were favourable to toponymic changes while 70% of the Russians were opposed33.

the choice of their representatives in the zemstvo (but not in the Duma), the right to become a landowner and leave their village communes. Stolypin thus hoped to induce the peasant masses to settle in Siberia but also in the Kazakh steppes, which were open to the agrarian settlement. 31 Lad, no. 4, 1995, p. 4. 32 The State onomastic commission was founded by the decree of the council of ministers as early as April 20, 1990. 33 Kurganskaya V. D., Dunaev V. Iu., Kazakhstanskaya model' etnicheskoi integracii, op. cit., p. 233. See also Monitoring prav etnicheskikh men'shinstv v Kazakhstane. Nauchno-issledovatel'skii otchet, Almaty, Tsentr gumanitarnykh issledovanii, 2003. The dismantling of the statues devoted to famous Russian figures, such as Ermak in Pavlodar, raised strong criticisms and petitions from the Russians34. Many cities have seen their name changing (Gurev into , Ermak into Aksu), others have been threatened to, but the authorities drew back because of the local pressures (the name of Petropavlovsk was to disappear for that of Kyzyl-Jar), some, finally, have been Kazakhized (Alma-Ata into Almaty, Aktyubinsk into Aktöbe, Semipalatinsk into , Ust-Kamenogorsk into Öskemen, Uralsk into Oral). Many articles from Lad are denouncing this policy of Kazakhization of the toponyms: the newspaper cannot accept that small villages entirely founded by Russian peasants at the end of the 19th century lost their name, which most of the time evoked the region or the village of origin in Russia itself (Ivanovo, Konstantinovka)35. What is grasped as an insult to the memory of the Ancients and thus to that of the whole community is put in parallel with the Western experience: in the United States, in Australia and in Africa, the European settlers are celebrated, they feel at home and these countries abound in monuments dedicated to the great discoverers of the country. Why would the Kazakhstanese situation not be similar to that of the territories conquered by the Anglo-Saxons ?36 The shifting of the capital from Almaty to Astana, was also little appreciated by the Russian population. The transformation of an ancient small peasant Russian town, which had been founded by two Cossack officers in 1830 and has become in the 1950s the centre of the campaign for the virgin lands, into the capital of the new state is grasped as a signal destined to the Russians: any separatist would be repressed. Nazarbayev indeed is trying to officialize the fact that the North of the country historically belongs to the Kazakh nation. Astana then symbolizes the process of ethnic Kazakhization of a region that has been Russian so far (60% of the population in the census of 1989) since a lot of Kazakhs from the South are invited to settle in the Northern cities, and most particularly in the new capital37. At the heart of this age-old possession of the land can also be found the cemeteries. Lad thus recounted in a virulent way several desecrations of Russian cemeteries or their displacement in order to make space for new buildings38. The main scandal took place in Astana, where, at the end of 1996, the dismantling of a statue of Lenin supposed to make place to the presidential palace allowed the discoveries of human mortal remains, which were apparently those of the victims of the terror in the 1920s. The presence of the bodies was first denied by the local authorities, who ended up, under the public pressure, to admit it and accept the official transfer of the bodies to another cemetery39. The cult of the cemetery as a place of worship is thus maintained by Russian associations. Thereby, for several years now, the Russkaya obshchina in Almaty has taken upon itself to organize, for the Russians in Kazakhstan settled in Russia, of

34 The same thing happened to the statue of Pushkin, dismantled in Dzhalal-Abad in Kyrgyzstan, Lad, no. 2, 1996, p. 8. 35 Lad, no. 11, 1999, p. 10 et no. 1-2, 1999, p. 3. 36 Lad, no. 10, 1997, p. 2. 37 On that subject, consult Savin I., Alekseenko A., "Problemy emigratsii v yuzhnom Kazakhstane", in Vitkovskaya G. (ed.) Sovremennye etnopoliticheskie protsessy i migratsionnaya situatsiya v tsentral'noi Azii, Moscow, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1998, pp. 113-118. 38 Lad, no. 3, 1998, p. 2. 39 Lad, no. 9-10, 1997, p. 8. memorial journeys constituted by the visit to family cemeteries40. The remembrance of the dead and their sacralization are indeed an integral part of the constitution of the community and of its unity. The evolutions of the urban landscape are thus lived by the Russians as direct attacks to their national memory and their territorial rooting in Kazakhstan. The importance that Lad gives to these controversies, as well as the obsession for the myth of the pioneer clearing a so-called virgin land show the difficulty of the work of mourning still in progress: when the territory does not belong any longer to someone, they have to learn to yield the land where the fathers are buried. If these discourses are produced by the elites, a lot of Russians in Kazakhstan take part in this skilful adjustment of history: many are those who think they are the descendants of pioneers, even if they are city dwellers who arrived late in the region, after World War II, in order to hold administrative and political positions. The territory of Kazakhstan is not grasped as the one of the colonial empire set up in the 19th century in Turkestan but as the one conquered during the Russian advance in Siberia. Even if, in fact, a part of the current territory of Kazakhstan was really been controlled only in the 19th century, regions such as the Ural, the North of the country and the Altay, marked by the Russian presence since the 17th and 18th centuries, are perceived as the prime historical referent. The competition between the two national memories, the Russian and the Kazakh, is particularly intense in certain regions like the Altay: this region indeed has a strong regional consciousness, is inhabited by Russians for quite a long time and has raised, a decade after the independence, strong secessionist movements asking to join the Russian Federation41.

IV. SOVIET NOSTALGIA AND ETHNONATIONALISM Soon after 1991, the openly pro-Soviet movements were numerous and Lad did not conceal its supporting them. The magazine published for instance, in almost each issue until 1996, the declarations of the group Soyuz [Union] and of its president, L. M. Kartauzov, on the judicial illegitimacy of the disappearance of the Union. It also supported the declaration of the communist Gennadi Seleznev, voted by the Russian Duma, in favour of the rehabilitation of the USSR and of the unconstitutionality of the agreements of December 8, 1991, and it devoted in December 1997 a page to the 75th anniversary of the creation of the USSR. Yet Lad has claimed several times that it brought its support to these organizations even though it considers that a restoration of the Union has become impossible and that one should now devote oneself to other political 42 struggles . Nevertheless the movement continues to think that the USSR was a real homeland and that the post-Soviet population still feels united by a certain sentiment of community ["nashi even though byvshie"]43. In the first years after the independence, the polls showed a very high rate of nostalgia for the Soviet Union from the Russians, much

40 A piece of information obtained at the Russkaya obshchina in Almaty, May 2003. 41 For more details on the specific case of Altay, see Laruelle M., Peyrouse S. "Russkie na Altae. Istoricheskaya pamyat' i nacional'noe samosoznanie v Kazakhstane" [Russians in Altay. Historic Memory and National Conscience in Kazakhstan], Ab Imperio, Kazan, no. 1, 2004, pp. 439-466. See also Commercio M. E. "The “Pugachev Rebellion” in the Context of Post-Soviet Kazakh Nationalization", Nationalities Papers, vol. 32, no. 1, 2004, pp. 88-113. 42 Lad, no. 5, 1996, p. 3. 43 Lad, no. 12, 1998, p. 1. more than among the eponymous nationalities44. In the spring of 1998, according to the data gathered by the Muscovite institute INDEM, 24% of the Russians interviewed still 45 considered themselves as citizens of the USSR against 11% as citizens of Russia . This Soviet nostalgia is accompanied by a negative discourse on the contemporary situation, which is analyzed in geopolitical terms as a loss of power. Thus, the promotion of the eponymous nationality in Kazakhstan would have a hidden goal, which is to attract investors from the Muslim world and the United-States. Yet, "as long as there is an important part of Russians in the population of Kazakhstan, Russia will be seriously opposed to transnational companies in the realization of their economic interests in this republic."46 The geopolitical alternative proposed by Lad is thus turned toward Russia and the re-forming of a post-Soviet political and economic block, which is presented from a culturalist perspective by many references to "the clash of civilizations" predicted by American political analyst Samuel Huntington. Ukraine is thus regularly invited to choose the alliance with the Slavic neighbour rather than with the West, the union agreement clinched since 1996 between Russia and Belarus is extolled and the authoritarian policy of the Belarus president, A. Lukashenko, is very popular. In front of this Slavic block, the panturkist and panislamist danger - both are considered as inseparable and are often mistaken – is regularly hammered: Turkey and Pakistan, both Muslim countries allied to the United States, would like to create in the region a “great Turan” against Russia in order to dismember the latter by arousing separatism in Caucasus, in Tatarstan and in Siberia. The NATO’s extension to the former Eastern countries is lived as an interference in Russian affairs, a willingness to lay hands on the military and oil productions of Kazakhstan, to expel Russia from shores of the Caspian sea and to transfer Siberia to a double Japanese and American control47. This gloomy geopolitical vision (Islamism, the Uzbek expansionism, the Japanese or Chinese ambitions) thus presupposes that, on the long term, Kazakhstan has no future without the paternalistic protection of Russia: its only international legitimacy would be to be a second-rate ally of the Slavic world. The only possible response to this western attack on all sides would indeed lie in the defence of a "Slavic and orthodox civilization", of a "Slavic alternative" to the globalization48. Thus, according to Lad, the Kazakh elites look too much toward the United States: if Kazakh, as the official language, must be protected, it is in order to "not to defend from the Russian language or culture but from the loss of cultural identity and from the rampant americanization."49. This analysis of the contemporary situation reveals the deep uneasiness of the Russian elites from Kazakhstan, which is symptomatic of the sentiment felt by many of their fellow citizens, in front of the quickness of the political and social changes, lived as a defeat of the Soviet project. The rise of the Kazakh nationalism and the rehabilitation of Islam are understood by Russian activists as a mere epiphenomenon of globalization and of the westernization to which the country would be

44 See the surveys done on that subject in Savoskul S. S., Russkie v novogo zarubezh’ia. Vybor sud'by, Moscow, Nauka, 2001, p. 362. 45 Analiticheskii otchet o sotsiologicheskom issledovanii "Politicheskie vzglyady naseleniya Kazakhstana", Almaty - Moscow, Institut Giller, 1998, p. 40. 46 Lad, no. 12, 1996, p. 4. 47 Lad, no. 11, 1997, p. 12. 48 Lad, no. 12, 1999, p. 3. 49 Lad, no. 6, 1997, p. 2. submitted. The charges brought against Nazarbayev can thus make use of a two-fold basis: the president is being condemned for being susceptible to the Kazakh nationalist demands and, at the same time, to represent a non-national power submitted to the American interests, dispossessing the people from its riches. The situation is above all analyzed in geopolitical terms: the end of the USSR was a shock, not because of the disappearance of communism but due to the international obliteration of the "Slavic block", to which it was assimilated. Considering the evolutions of the last fifteen years, the associations of the Russians in Kazakhstan answer with the promotion of a strong ethnonationalism. In the first years after the independence, Lad still believed in the possibility of a project of Eurasian union and extolled the national diversity of Russia as an example to be followed for the neighbouring republics. It then took place into movements that do not differentiate clearly the terms of "ethnic Russian" [russkii], "Rossian" [rossiiskii] and "Eurasian" [evraziiskii]. The situation evolved in the second half of the 1990s. While the remarks published in the Kazakhstanese newspapers often remain within the range of the "politically correct" and do not question the new state, what is said in private or in Russia is much more radical. Associations such as Lad did not conceal the little regard they have for the integrity of the new republic and have more or less openly campaigned for the incorporation of all the new state or of the sole southern regions to Russia. The leader of Lad, V. M. Mikhaylov, claims for instance that "Nazarbayev openly carries out a national-chauvinistic policy similar to Hitler’s national-socialism"50 ; as for the president of the Association of the subsidiaries of Russian universities in Kazakhstan, A. V. Zubarev, he reckons that "the Russians in Kazakhstan are an inalienable part of the constituting nation called Russia"51 ; and even in an article in Russkoe slovo, the organ of the association claims without beating about the bush that "to be Russian means to belong to Russia."52 Through their apprehension of the nation, the Russian associations from Kazakhstan are thus connected to the most radical parties of contemporary nationalism. An article published in Lad (with the revealing title of "The biological strength of the Russian people") thus claims that the current demographic weakness of Russia would be caused by the energy spent by the Russian people to support the other Soviet republics and, nowadays, the small peoples of the Federation53. A. Shushannikov, the leader of Lad in Ust-Kamenogorsk until his exile to Russia in 2003, also considers that Russia has lost its national "immunity" by wearing itself out in building of the Soviet Union: "we were ready to embrace with love any Black man coming from South Africa but we had completely forgotten how to offer our Russian compatriot a helping hand and how to come to his assistance."54 This discourse, which has been a common place within the nationalist movements since the 1970, conceives the nation as a biologic entity and does not conceal its racism. A. Shushannikov thus regrets that "the notion of Russian means [nowadays] much more than a cultural community of kinship"55 and is denouncing

50 Soyuznaya gazeta, journal of the association “Sootechestvennik” in Moscow, no. 4, 2000, p. 4. 51 Soyuznaya gazeta, no. 5, 2002, p. 7. 52 Russkoe slovo, journal of the Russkaya obshchina in Almaty, no. 2, 1997, p. 1. 53 Lad, no. 3-4, 2000, p. 13. 54 Lad, no. 4, 2003, p. 9. 55 Ibid. Russia’s membership in the OSCE for it forbids any legislation based on the national preference. Armed with this perception of the national interests, the associations of the Russians in Kazakhstan all take side with the movements asking for a “nationalisation” of the Federation. Indeed, in Russia itself, the place of the Russians in the state structure is largely debated. The federal statute of the country and the numerous rights granted to national entities provoke violent reactions in the nationalist circles, which interpret this situation as a reproduction of the Soviet experience56. The rise of autonomist demands from the subjects thus feeds a Russian nationalism suspicious of the State, which it considers to be too "internationalist". An article titled "The dictatorship of the national minorities" that demanded the transformation of the Federation into a Russian national state [Russkoe natsional'noe gosudarstvo], claims for example that all the peoples have rights in Russia except the Russians: "contemporary Russia is de facto a non-Russian state [nerusskoe], in which the mission of the Russians is to play the role of foundation on which is built stateness, thus allowing the life and fulfilment of the other peoples."57 Lad thus shares with the other movements of defence of the Russians such as the Russkaya obshchina and the Cossacks from Kazakhstan the same desire for a legal recognition of the primacy of the "ethnic" Russians against the other citizens of Russia58. They all supported pressure groups that demanded the vote of a law by the Duma that would confer to the Russian people the statute of an eponymous and constitutive nation of the state. They became their ally in their refusal to remove the fifth point on the passport, which, in the Soviet tradition, signalled the nationality of its holder. They analyze the term Rossian [Rossiyan] as "an interdiction for the Russians to be Russians … [while] the belonging to the Russian nation cannot be the object of a free choice."59 One can thus see that within the associations of the Russians in Kazakhstan, the "imperial" tendency of Russian nationalism seems to be nowadays in the minority against the "ethnicist" movements, which wants a withdrawal of the Russians inside the Federation. The reorientation of discourses on the "ethnic" unity of the Russians is exacerbated by the impression of a people which is suddenly divided by artificial and arbitrary borders. Russian activists are thus no longer concerned about the Kazakhization of Kazakhstan - a phenomenon that is already considered as inevitable - but about the derussification of Russia.

Conclusion The uncompromising discourse of the associations of the Russians in Kazakhstan, among which Lad, cannot put up with the reality in progress : how can they believe to represent Russians who have lived for several generations from living with another people without opening up somewhat slightly on this people at the cultural level ; how can they condemn Kazakhstan cut and dried whereas Russia recognize it and does not lead a policy favouring the return of the Russians from the country to the mother land ? The discursive radicalism of the association representing the Russians in Kazakhstan

56 Russkoe slovo, no. 1, 1999, p. 7. 57 Russkoe slovo, no. 1, 1997, p. 10. 58 Lad, no. 11, 1999, p. 7. 59 Kazak stepnoi, journal of the Cossacks of Kazakhstan Association, no. 1, 2002, p. 2. cannot only contrast with the reality of their mediocre influence on the Russophone populations. These associations are indeed disappointed by the lack of support they got from the population and from the decrease of the commitment of the latter in comparison with the early 1990s. The feeling of isolation against the majority of the Russians and of lack of understanding between the masses and their representatives is all the stronger than the leaders of these associations are very much committed politically but also nationally : it is hard for them to understand the feeling of attachment from one part of the Russian population towards Kazakhstan, even its lack of interest for the questions of national identity. There is not, or at least not yet, among the Russians in Kazakhstan any tradition of self-history as in many diasporas throughout the world have been able to build up. The historiographical debates published remain far from the narration of individual situations and take place presently at a clearly ideological level, opposing the new memory that independent Kazakhstan wants to give to itself to an old Russian and Soviet memory of the zone. Both are based on the partial reading of the facts, on a play of light and shadow that enlighten or make disappear certain events and deny the existence of the neighbouring peoples. Their discourse is focussed on the national question: history is analysed in ethnic terms, projection the contemporary nation and its problems in the remotest past possible. The territory is thought as being exclusive and cannot have belonged, according to times and places, to different peoples. Between the official Kazakh and Russian discourses, few common threads give hope for the birth of a reconciling look on the history of the steppes. The Russians in Kazakhstan considered themselves for a long time as living in a predominantly Russian republic, culturally closer to Russia, Ukraine and the Belarus than to Central Asia strictly speaking. The political independence and later the massive emigration of the Russians are then lived more difficultly in Kazakhstan than in the rest of Central Asia. Most Russians cannot indeed grasp the change of scale that happened with the independence : Kazakhs think of Russians as a Slavic minority in the eponymous State while the Russian associations think that the Kazakh society is a minority enclave inside a large Slavic ensemble, encompassing Russia, Ukraine and the Belarus. By trying to inscribe Kazakhstan in this whole, they hope to reverse the global vision of the country and to show the “identity illegitimacy” of its independence. The associations of defence of the Russians in Kazakhstan have thus very rarely campaigned for the creation of a Kazakhsanese civic identity. The republic’s territory is not, indeed, considered by the Russians as the one of the colonial empire established in the 19th century in Turkestan but as the territory conquered during the Russian advance throughout Siberia. Even though, in fact, a part of the current Kazakhstan has only been controlled in the 19th century, the border regions such as the Ural and the Altay, marked by the Russian presence since the 17th-18th centuries, are apprehended as the prime historical referent. Saying goodbye to a territory that has such a strong national symbolic value thus poses a problem: to deny the Russians the right to consider themselves as natives, and thus to have a “right to the land” in the North of the country is perceived as a questioning of the whole Russian presence beyond the Ural. The process of appropriation of the new post-Soviet states and of their borders is necessarily long and provokes contentions/disputes that can be easily understood among the non-eponymous groups which are those who lose the most on it: it is painful for the Russians in Kazakhstan to see themselves dispossessed from the nation’s historical heritage sites such as the Ural or the Altay, to say to themselves that they do not belong any longer, overnight, to the vast Slavic space of Russia and its region. However, the progressive obliteration of the "Russian question" in Kazakhstan with the resigned departure of the ones who are the most concerned proves the adaptation of the post- Soviet societies to the territories that have been handed down to them: the idea of an adequacy between the State and the nationality of the population seems to everyone, in the long term, to be an inescapable reality. The populations, whether they represent the majority or the minority, thus seem to share the feeling of their intellectual and political elites according to whom they have, in order to become integrated into the world arena, to enjoy what they consider as their "normalcy", that of the nation-state.