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Kazakhstan: Dreams and Realities
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20482 |
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CURRENT ISSUES
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| Issue
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5 / 1992 |
3,277 Words |
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Marat Akchurin
Marat Akchurin is a Soviet writer and publisher. His
forthcoming book, Lost Empire: A Tartar's Tour through Soviet
Ethnic Republics, will be published in January 1992
(HarperCollins). In the Soviet Union, Akchurin supervised the
editing of more than fifty volumes of Asian ethnic literature. |
Gradually, the large-scale political and economic changes occurring in post-Soviet Kazakhstan have become prosaic reality. No longer do well-versed overseas observers and the U.S. mass media perceive Kazakhstan as an enigmatic terra incognita populated by polygamous communist nomads. The best news is that the more sophisticated TV anchors finally have learned how to pronounce the exotic name of Kazakhstan's political leaders.
Some essential elements in Kazakhstan's political life and economy remain unaffected by time and political fashions. Supporters of President Nursultan Nazarbayev boast of the political stability of his regime, as opposed to those in the European portion of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS). Simultaneously, his opponents and critics claim that now, after the collapse of the USSR, Kazakhstan is run by a modernized national Bolshevik autocracy. There is another historical precedent for his approach: Early this year, Literaturnaya Gazeta, a moderate and still-influential Moscow weekly, quoted the Italian magazine Espresso, which described President Nazarbayev as "the great khan of Kazakhstan."
Historical Background
Before 1991, Kazakhstan was one of 15 Soviet republics. Before the Bolsheviks seized power in 1917, the land that would become Kazakhstan was a colony of czarist Russia. Much of the Kazakh territory was part of the Russian protectorate for more than 200 years.
Alma-Ata, the verdant and beautiful Kazakh capital, today has a population of about 1.2 million. It was founded as a fort in the second half of the nineteenth century by cossacks, who came from Russia with the czarist troops. Until the 1930s the city kept its original name, Vernyi, which means "loyal" in Russian. There are truly ancient cities in Kazakhstan, such as Turkestan, Otrar, Chimkent, Dzhambul (formerly Aulie Ata), and Kzyl-Orda; most were known since the early medieval ages as large cultural, economic, and political centers of the Muslim East. In the manuscripts of European travelers these cities were mentioned regularly after Genghis Khan conquered Central Asia in the thirteenth century.
Four times the size of Texas, with vast natural resources, Kazakhstan is the second-largest republic of the former USSR. Nonetheless, Kazakhstan's population is relatively small--only 16.5 million. According to Moscow magazine Stolitsa, the largest national groups are the Kazakhs with 39.7 percent and the Russians with 37.8 percent of
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