Civic Nation-Building Discourse in Kazakhstan and Russia
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City University of New York (CUNY) CUNY Academic Works All Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects 5-2019 Being Ethnic on the Eurasian Steppe: Civic Nation-Building Discourse in Kazakhstan and Russia Nathan P. Jones The Graduate Center, City University of New York How does access to this work benefit ou?y Let us know! More information about this work at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu/gc_etds/3251 Discover additional works at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu This work is made publicly available by the City University of New York (CUNY). Contact: [email protected] Being Ethnic on the Eurasian Steppe: Civic Nation-Building Discourse in Kazakhstan and Russia by Nathan Jones A dissertation submitted to the Graduate Faculty in Anthropology in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, The City University of New York 2019 © 2019 Nathan Jones All Rights Reserved ii Being Ethnic on the Eurasian Steppe: Civic Nation-Building Discourse in Kazakhstan and Russia by Nathan Jones This manuscript has been read and accepted for the Graduate Faculty in Anthropology in satisfaction of the dissertation requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Date Gerald Creed Chair of Examining Committee Date Jeff Maskovsky Executive Officer Supervisory Committee: Katherine Verdery Michael Blim Bruce Grant THE CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK iii ABSTRACT Being Ethnic on the Eurasian Steppe: Civic Nation-Building Discourse in Kazakhstan and Russia by Nathan Jones Advisor: Gerald Creed Civic nation-building as a concept has emerged within the political discourses of various post- Soviet states, particularly in relation to the status of ethnic minorities in Russia and Kazakhstan. This dissertation investigates the institutional efforts to establish civic nations in these states among their non-titular populations. My primary ethnographic sites are the various institutions producing and serving the discourse of civic nation-building to understand how the transmission of concepts and behaviors relevant to the civic nation operate in the context of daily interactions. I demonstrate the institutional dependence upon what I identify as “ethnicness” within the discourse and procedures of civic nation-building. My inquiry into this phenomenon largely takes place among communities with significant populations of people publicly identifying as ethnic German. I analyze this community and its members’ sense of “Germanness” as a case to understand how individuals from other ethnicized communities react and coalesce with the discourse and activities of civic nation-building. I generally conclude that attempts at civic nation-building are met with tremendous ambivalence. Yet, its discourse often resonates with the targeted audiences given its partial emergence from familiar Soviet ideas and practices. In addition, civic nation-building processes occasionally offer the distribution of valuable resources to those whom they engage. iv Table of Contents 1. Introduction: Conceptualizing Germanness as a Site of Ethnographic Inquiry – 1-33 2. Civic Nations, Multiculturalism, and the Discourses of Nation-Building in Russia and Kazakhstan – 34-90 3. “Developing” Ethnic Property – 91-145 4. The Discourse and Practice of Ethnic Territoriality and Autonomy in Russia – 146-190 5. Making Citizens the Soviet Way: Civic Nation-Building and “Socialist Production” in Contemporary Kazakhstan – 191-252 6. Sustaining Intimacy Between Kazakhstan and Kaiserslautern: Long Distance Relationships and Local Modes of Expression – 253-301 7. Conclusion: Complementing Civic Nation-Building in the Pursuit of a State Monoculture – 302-325 Bibliography: 326-345 v Chapter 1 Introduction: Conceptualizing Germanness as a Site of Ethnographic Inquiry Searching for Germanness from Kaliningrad to Kazakhstan In the summer of 1994, I decided to lose myself in Europe for a year and eventually landed in the northern German city Rostock. A city located along the Baltic Sea, Rostock is steeped in European nautical history, from its membership in the medieval Hanseatic League to serving as the primary port for seafaring commerce in the former communist German Democratic Republic. Just years earlier, the communist state had dramatically melded into the West German Federal Republic of Germany, and its people were still struggling to acclimate to the environment of European parliamentary democracy and German capitalism. To bring the Soviet-style residential tenements up to West German standards, there was a commercial building boom occurring in East Germany at the time I arrived, and armed with a foreign student-work visa, I quickly found a construction job rebuilding apartment-bloc rooftops. I worked in a crew of hardened members of the East German proletariat, all of whom had gobbled up work in construction since losing agriculture jobs with the several collective farms in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, a region historically identified as “the bread basket of Germany.” My closest friend during that experience was a thirty-something former equine specialist (his primary duty apparently was to assure the farm’s horses were appropriately shod), named Dirk Ehlert.1 A bully of a man, crude and dishonest, and prone to thievery, Dirk took to me immediately because of my utter foreignness. As a student of German history and culture, I was 1 Given that I conducted the bulk of my research in official, state institutions, a large set of my contacts in Russia and Kazakhstan interacted with me in their professional capacities. For those individuals, I have not changed their names, as they were fully aware that our conversations informed the contents of my dissertation. For my interlocutors unaffiliated with official state or cultural institutions (such as Dirk), I have used pseudonyms. 1 intensely interested in life under socialism and incessantly queried Dirk about working on the collective farm, his impressions of Communist Party General Secretary Erich Honeker, how he felt about the influence of the Soviet Union, and his feelings about becoming a citizen of the Federal Republic of Germany and joining the West. One day, a particularly coarse coworker named Berd accused Dirk of being Russian (for East Germans at that time, a particularly harsh slight). Dirk replied defensively, “I’m not Russian, I’m from Königsberg.” “Same thing,” replied Berd. “Nein,” Dirk reacted bemused; “Königsberg was as German a place as anywhere.” The name Königsberg seemed remotely familiar to me, but was not identifiable on any map, so one night over cokes and pizza in Dirk’s home, I encouraged him to talk about the place. Dirk explained that Königsberg was once a culturally important German city, the political center of the Teutonic Knights’ medieval state, and later capital of German East Prussia. Königsberg’s storied Albertina University was even home to the philosopher Immanuel Kant. After the Soviet army took the city at the end of World War II, Soviet authorities forced the entire German population to evacuate the region. Dirk’s parents were among the refugees having to abandon their homes and eventually settle in rural Mecklenburg. The USSR annexed Königsberg and its surrounding territories constituting East Prussia in the post-war treaty of 1945 and formally renamed the city and region Kaliningrad (after the Bolshevik leader Mikhail Ivanovich Kalinin). Since the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Kaliningrad has become an exclave of the Russian Federation, physically separated from the mother country by the Baltic States and Poland. My relationship with Dirk left me obsessed with the idea of German traces (or as I term it, “Germanness”) in geographic spaces in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe formally inhabited by Germans. Pursuing this passion while working on a master’s degree in Central and 2 East European Studies, I read every book, journal, and newspaper article I could find in English and German about Königsberg and its successor city, Kaliningrad, and prepared for an eventual visit. My first trip to Kaliningrad happened in the final weeks of 1999. I spent my birthday and the holidays that year trying not to slip and fall on the frozen alleyways of the post-Soviet city, as I searched for landmarks of its German past, including the site of Kant’s tomb at the Königsberg Cathedral, remains of the Teutonic Order’s castle now buried beneath an unfinished monster of a Soviet administration building, and the reconstructed Albertina University. I followed well-worn paths that “nostalgia tourists” from Germany had established over the last decade to rediscover their lost homeland, from which the Soviet army forced their parents to leave after the War. This passion for the idea of Germanness in Kaliningrad led me to a research fellowship there in 2000, where I worked with a development institution intent on servicing the needs of the ethnic German population residing in the region. I found the notion of ethnic Germans living in Kaliningrad fascinatingly ironic, as their residence there was a product of the post-Soviet mass migration of Germans residing in Siberia and Central Asia to western Russia and Germany. Many of these Germans descended from peasants who had migrated from southern Germany to the plains along the Volga River in the 18th century, establishing viable agricultural communities at the request of Tsarina Catherine the Great. Two centuries later in 1941, the invading Nazi army provoked Stalin to relocate Germans residing in the Volga region