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History Politics in Kazakhstan History politics in Kazakhstan The 550th Anniversary of the Kazakh Khanate: Geopolitics or nation building? Thea Hilding Master Thesis Department of Literature, Area Studies and European Languages Faculty of Humanities UNIVERSITY OF OSLO 10.09.2018 II History politics in Kazakhstan The 550th Anniversary of the Kazakh Khanate: Geopolitics or nation building? «Нам необходимо вглядеться в прошлое, чтобы понять настоящее и увидеть контуры будущего»1 Н. А. Назарбаев «We need to look into the past in order to understand the present and foresee the future» N. A. Nazarbayev 1 Source: http://e-history.kz/ru III © Thea Hilding 2018 History politics in Kazakhstan. The 550th Anniversary of the Kazakh Khanate: Geopolitics or nation building? Thea Hilding http://www.duo.uio.no/ Print: Reprosentralen, Universitetet i Oslo IV Abstract This thesis investigates how history become subject to national elites’ political goals, who use the promotion of certain interpretations of history as a means to forward their political agenda. It examines a case of history policy in Kazakhstan, where the government through a mass celebration argued that Kazakhstan has existed as a state for 550 years. Based on a combination of field observation, semi-structured interviews, document analysis and a review of traditional and social media, I investigate the immediate and long-term factors influencing Kazakhstan’s history policy, the means by which the policy is carried out and the response it received in society. I discuss the room that elites have for influencing perceptions of history, and what implications the history policy has for nation building in the country. I find that although the celebration of the 500th Anniversary of the Kazakh Khanate portrays Kazakhstan’s history in exclusively ethnic Kazakh terms, within the context of balancing ethnic and civic nation building policies, it still serves as a careful history policy. My findings suggest that geopolitical concerns influence Kazakhstan’s history politics to a larger extent than theories of national identity would suggest. V VI Preface This master thesis would not have seen its conclusion without the help and support of many people. My deepest gratitude goes to my supervisor, Pål Kolstø, for his patience and guidance through the daunting task of a master project, and for seeing potential in me when I only saw my own insecurities. I want to thank NUPI, and especially Helge Blakkisrud, for providing me with an inspiring working environment, and amazing colleagues, during large parts of the writing process. I would also like to thank my institute, ILOS, at UiO for awarding me with funding towards my fieldwork. A big thank you also to my informants, for being so welcoming and sharing their time and knowledge. I would not have pulled through without the support of my family and friends. Thank you for bearing with me. Special thanks go to my friends in Kazakhstan for cheering me on during my field research, to Sofia and Anniken for both academic and moral support, and to Vegard for his constant love and excellent proof reading skills! All shortcomings in this thesis are my own responsibility. Notes on transliteration and translation I have used the US Library of Congress system for transliteration of Russian. I have made some adjustments, however. I have used the popular Western transliterations for names well known in the West. I have also removed diacritical marks for the sake of easy readability. Shorter quotes within the running text are translated for better flow of reading, while longer quotes are set off from the running text and kept in the original language. Where I have translated from Russian, the original quotes are given in the footnotes. VII VIII Contents Abstract ..................................................................................................................................... V Preface ..................................................................................................................................... VII Contents .................................................................................................................................... IX 1 Introduction ........................................................................................................................ 1 2 Historical background ........................................................................................................ 5 2.1 A short history of the Kazakhs .................................................................................... 5 2.2 Legacies of the Soviet nationality and history policies ............................................... 7 2.3 A fragmented society ................................................................................................. 10 2.4 Kazakhstan’s national identity building policies since independence....................... 11 3 Theory .............................................................................................................................. 13 3.1 National identity ........................................................................................................ 13 3.1.1 Five dimensions of national identity .................................................................. 16 3.2 Nation building .......................................................................................................... 18 3.2.1 Particularities in the post-soviet setting ............................................................. 19 3.2.2 The importance of history for nation building and national identity ................. 20 3.3 History politics .......................................................................................................... 22 3.3.1 History politics as myth-making and myth-cultivating ...................................... 26 3.3.2 The toolbox of history politics ........................................................................... 27 3.3.3 Operationalization within this thesis .................................................................. 29 4 Method ............................................................................................................................. 31 4.1 Case study .................................................................................................................. 31 4.2 Documents: Idea analysis .......................................................................................... 32 4.3 Field observations ...................................................................................................... 34 4.4 Interviews .................................................................................................................. 35 4.5 Methodological challenges ........................................................................................ 38 5 A case of history politics in practice: The celebrations of the 550th Anniversary of the Kazakh Khanate ....................................................................................................................... 40 5.1 Background and context ............................................................................................ 40 5.2 Spectacular history politics ........................................................................................ 42 5.3 Mythologization of national history .......................................................................... 46 IX 5.4 Monoethnic (and exclusive) narrative of nationhood ................................................ 51 5.5 Concluding remarks ................................................................................................... 52 6 Developments in Kazakhstan’s history politics since independence ............................... 53 6.1 A note on presidential speeches ................................................................................. 53 6.2 The use of history in presidential speeches ............................................................... 55 6.2.1 Multinational vs ethnic definition of national history ........................................ 57 6.2.2 Kazakhstan – a modern or an ancient state? ...................................................... 62 6.2.3 The place of the Kazakh Khanate in official state discourse ............................. 64 6.3 Managing a minefield of history ............................................................................... 66 6.3.1 Assessing trends and breaks in historical policy ................................................ 66 6.3.2 Why the Kazakh Khanate? ................................................................................. 68 6.4 Concluding remarks ................................................................................................... 70 7 Public response to history politics .................................................................................... 72 7.1 Comments on the media landscape in Kazakhstan .................................................... 73 7.2 Public response in Kazakhstan to the celebration of the 550th Anniversary of the Kazakh Khanate ................................................................................................................... 74 7.2.1 Critical coverage in traditional online news journals ......................................... 74 7.2.2 In comments sections ......................................................................................... 76 7.2.3 In blogs ..............................................................................................................
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