RECLAIMING THE RUSSIAN NORTH OF KAZAKHSTAN - December 27, 2008

Kazakhstan also has its own separatist issue: the Russian irredentism

n its vast northern expanses populated by Russians for 400 years and known to them as the Great Steppe -- the immense tract of wilderness that stretches from the Caspian Sea to China along the 7000-kilometer Russia-Kazakhstan frontier. For centuries the Great Steppe was traversed by successive waves of nomads migrating from the East to

the West: the Scythians, Sarmatians, the Huns, and the mighty swell

of Mongolo-Tartars which left in its trail the Turkic tribes who became later known as the Kazakhs.

Most historians believe that the self-appellation of Russian Cossacks originates from the Turkic word Kazak [a free man], which is exactly how Cossack sounds in Russian, as opposed to Kazakh, referring to a native of Kazakhstan. Therefore, both words have the same root and even the same spelling in both languages [Kazak]. Historically, the Russian word Kazak [Cossack] pertained to a paramilitary Russian colonist settled on the Russian frontier to protect the Empire, while the name Kazakh (to distinguish from the Russian Kazak) applied to the nomads of the Great Steppe beyond the Cossack settlements.

The sparsely populated Great Steppe was seen by Russian settlers as a land of opportunity, to be tamed, colonized, developed and civilized exactly as the settlement of the Great Plains prairie was seen by American squatters. A further analogy (which is suppressed in academic literature as politically incorrect) might be drawn between the American Indians and the nomads of the Great Steppe. To stake Kazakhstan’s claim to these northern territories, the first Kazakh president Nazarbaev moved in 1998 his country’s capital from the southern city of Almaty northward to the Russian city of Akmolinsk in the forbidding steppe of Virgin Lands, and renamed the city Astana.

There has always been a substantial Russian population in the steppes of what is now Kazakhstan since the 17th century. The first Russian traders and settlers appeared on the northwestern edge of modern Kazakhstan in the early 1600s (simultaneously with the Puritan colonists in North America), when the Ural Cossacks established on the Ural River the forts that later became the cities of Uralsk in the hinterland and Guriev on the Caspian Sea. In the 18th century the Russian Empire organized, along the perimeter of its Great Steppe frontier, the Ural, Orenburg and Siberian Cossack Hosts [Voyska in Russian], which gradually established themselves in the Northern Kazakhstan.

In 1710-1720 the Siberian Cossacks founded Ust-Kamenogorsk, Semipalatinsk and Pavlodar as border forts and trading posts with the nomad Kazakh tribes, which were organized in three Hordes [Zhooz in the Kazakh language]: the Junior Horde in the North, the Senior Horde in the South of Kazakhstan and the Middle Horde between them. In 1730 one of the khans of the Junior Horde sought Russian support against the stronger Kalmyks who were passing through the Great Steppe on their move from Mongolia to North Caucasus, and Russia, in exchange for help, gained control of this Horde. Then Russia conquered the Middle Horde by 1798, but the Senior Horde remained independent until the 1820s, when the expanding Kokand Khanate (in the Uzbek oasis region to the south of Kazakh steppes) forced the Senior Horde to choose Russian protection against the Uzbeks, which seemed to them the lesser of two evils.

In 1824, Siberian Cossacks from Omsk founded a fortress on the upper Ishim River named Akmolinsk, which is known today as Astana, the capital of Kazakhstan. In the same year they founded the fort of Kokchetav, nowadays a northern Kazakh city. In the 1850s the construction of Russian forts began in southern Kazakhstan, including Verniy, renamed Almaty when it became the capital of Kazakhstan in 1929. In 1869-1879 the Orenburg Cossacks to the west founded the forts of Aktubinsk and Kustanay, which are now Kazakh cities. The only towns that existed on the modern territory of Kazakhstan before the Russian conquest were Hazrat-e Turkestan, Taraz and Chimkent, all of which belonged to the Khanate of Kokand.

In 1863 the Russian Empire created two administrative districts in Central Asia: the General-Governorship of Russian Turkestan, which included the southern Kazakhstan, with its capital in Tashkent, and the Steppe Region [Stepnoy Kray] with its capital in Omsk, which included the lands of Siberian and Semirechensk Cossack Hosts in the modern North Kazakhstan. The north-west of Kazakhstan, including the lands of Ural and Orenburg Cossack Hosts, was at the time part of the Orenburg Gubernia. The first governor-general of the Steppe Region, Gerasim Kolpakovsky (and all his successors) was, at the same time, the Ataman [the chief] of Siberian Cossack Host, thus symbolizing the important role the Cossacks played in the Russian colonization of Kazakh steppes.

Christianity spread in this predominantly Muslim region together with the Russian settlers: in the 1890s non-Cossack Russian peasants began to migrate into the fertile lands of the Great Steppe. In 1906 the Trans-Aral railway between Orenburg and Tashkent was completed, further facilitating the Russian colonization: in 1906-1912 more than half a million Russian farms were started there as part of the agrarian reform by P.A.Stolypin, the Chairman of the Council of Ministers in 1906-1911. By 1917 there were a million Russians on the modern territory of Kazakhstan, about 30% of the total population.

The Russians of Kazakhstan suffered severely during the Civil War of 1917-1922. The Basmachi [Assailants in Turkic languages] insurrection of 1918-1926 against the Soviet rule in Turkestan affected the areas of southern Kazakhstan in the form of ethnic conflict between the Russian settlers and native Muslims. Thousands of Russians were killed in that insurgency, which was followed by the equally bloody reprisals against the natives by the Red Army. During the Sovietization of 1920s-1930s the Russians in Kazakhstan were discriminated by the local authorities who promoted the Kazakh language and culture, and targeted many local Russians by labeling them as either the kulaks [prosperous farmers] or Cossacks (whose Hosts fought against the Red Army during the Russian Civil War).

In 1925 Stalin created a Kazakh autonomy within the RSFSR and, in spite of the strong objections from the Russian population, transferred to the newborn Kazakh ASSR the overwhelmingly ethnic Russian provinces [oblast] from the Southern Ural and Siberian Regions of the RSFSR: Petropavlovsk, Kokchetav, Kustanay, Aktubinsk, Uralsk, Guriev, Akmolinsk, Pavlodar, Semipalatinsk and Ust-Kamenogorsk. The local Russians, who opposed these land transfers, were criticized by Bolshevik leaders as “chauvinists.” On 5 December 1936, by the new Soviet Constitution, the Kazakh ASSR became a constituent union republic Kazakh SSR and formally withdrew from the RSFSR with all the Russian lands granted by Stalin in 1925.

Many more Russians arrived in the years 1953-1965, during Khrushchev’s campaign to cultivate the Virgin and Fallow Lands in the Great Steppe of Northern Kazakhstan and Southern Siberia. The 1979 census showed that ethnic Russians numbered 6 million, almost half of the Kazakh SSR population, while Kazakhs made up only 30 percent. Given the completely Russian character of Northern Kazakhstan, the Soviet government formed there in 1960 the so-called Virgin Region [Tselinniy Kray] which was, in fact, an autonomous Russian formation within the Kazakh SSR, with its capital in Akmolinsk, renamed then Tselinograd (and later Astana).

After the 1964 ouster of Khrushchev by Brezhnev and his associates in Moscow, the new Kazakh leader D.Kunaev, fearing the secession of Virgin Region, abolished and dispersed that Russian autonomy in 1965 with an approval from Brezhnev (who briefly served before as the party boss of Kazakhstan). Kunaev was later condemned by Gorbachev as a Kazakh nationalist. Breaking with the tradition of ethnic Kazakh dominance in local administration, Gorbachev appointed in 1986 Gennady Kolbin, with no ties to the republic’s natives, as the new chief of Kazakh SSR. Following several incidents of ethnic unrest in 1989, Kolbin was replaced by Nursultan Nazarbaev who became in 1991 the first president of independent Kazakhstan.

Although Nazarbaev is widely credited with peaceful preservation of the delicate ethnic balance in Kazakhstan, many Russians left Kazakhstan in the 1990s due to economic hardships as well as ethnic discrimination and lack of education opportunities. By 1999 the number of Russians in Kazakhstan dropped to 4.5 million (from 6.2 million in the 1989 census), but now many are coming back, a smaller percentage, but they are returning. The Russians, once a majority in Kazakhstan, now account for a third of the 17 million population. Only the emigration of Russian-speakers since independence has made the titular nation a marginal majority in their own country.

The Russian community in Kazakhstan exists today not only in a narrow ethnic sense but as a part of larger Russian-speaking community which also includes the Russophone Ukrainians, as well as the local (Siberian) Tartars, Volga Germans (exiled there by Stalin during the Second World War), the omnipresent Jews and even a number of Russified Kazakhs in major cities. Given the fact that the natives are still a nation-building people, the Russians and Russophones remain an influential political group, which is active in Kazakhstan’s public, military, cultural and economic life. However, notwithstanding the presence of some Russians among Kazakhstan’s high-ranking officials, the Kazakhs are routinely preferred in career advancement.

Whereas open ethnic tensions have rarely surfaced so far, Russian nationalists have blamed Nazarbaev of discriminating against the Russian population and thus pushing them to emigrate. Their ideologues argue that Kazakhstan never existed in its present boundaries and that its northern regions are historically an integral part of Russia, being so much Russian-dominated that they merge imperceptibly across the border with Siberia. So far Moscow has made no territorial claims on Kazakhstan since the disintegration of the USSR in 1991. Russian officials only vow to protect the rights of Russians living there. However, despite the official pronouncements, the future of Kazakhstan’s Russian population remains a divisive issue between the two countries.

Several measures by Kazakh authorities against the Cossack leaders added fuel to the dispute. A number of Cossacks activists, notably in the cities of Uralsk (northwestern Kazakhstan) and Semipalatinsk (northeastern Kazakhstan), have been sued or detained in recent years on charges of defamation. There are several Cossack revivalist movements on both sides of the border who want Northern Kazakhstan to be returned to Russia as they consider these lands an ancestral possession of their Hosts, according to all historic documents. At every convention of the All-Russian Congress of Cossack Communities since 1992 the delegates of five Hosts situated along the northern frontier of Kazakhstan have officially lodged a demand to transfer their lands to the Russian Federation. These Cossack Communities [Kazachestvo] with territorial claims to Kazakhstan include Uralskoe Kazachestvo, Orenburgskoe Kazachestvo, Sibirskoe Kazachestvo, Semirechenskoe Kazachestvo and Altayskoe Kazachestvo.

In November 1999, Kazakhstan’s National Security Committee (KNB) detained 22 Cossacks, including 12 Russian citizens, in the northeastern city of Ust-Kamenogorsk. KNB searched for the group after reading a report in a newspaper of the neighboring Russian region, and alleged that the group’s leader, Vladimir Kazimirchuk, was planning a terrorist campaign aimed at creating a Russian independent enclave in northeastern Kazakhstan. The group wanted to join the enclave to Russia. On 8 June 2000 a Kazakh court in Ust-Kamenogorsk sentenced 13 of them to jail; Kazimirchuk received an 18-year prison term. The plotters were not sentenced for any concrete action: it was a show trial to send a message to all Russian irredentists.

Officials on both sides tried to play down the incident: Nazarbaev said the affair looked like a criminal incident, not a political plot. He also promised that it was not going to affect relations with Russia. Putin also dismissed the incident as not serious. When the sentence was announced, Russian diplomats in Kazakhstan appealed to Kazakh authorities to deport Russian citizens. The Russian government has only complained that its “transparent” border with Kazakhstan is virtually open to smugglers, such as the drug dealers from Central Asia and Afghanistan, and bordering Russian regions dispatched local Cossack militia to guard the border. Russia and Kazakhstan still have not formally agreed on their land border.

Dr. Alec Rasizade

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Dr. Alec Rasizade holds Ph.D. degree in Modern History from Moscow State University and M.A. degree from Azerbaijan State University. He is presently a Senior Associate at the Historical Research Center in Washington, D.C. Dr. Rasizade used to be a lecturer at many universities, including Stanford University and Columbia University. Prior to that he worked at Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington D.C.

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