What does it mean to be Kazakhstani? Scholar Diana T. Kudaibergen explores the title question – “What Does It Mean to Be Kazakhstani? Power, Identity and Nation-Building” – in the context of Kazakhstan’s more than three decades of independence. A period marked by as much change as continuity, Soviet-era elites maintained Soviet-style mindsets and state structures at the same time that Kazakhstani society underwent transformations of its own, emerging from the shadow of empire into a future of its own making. Kudaibergen’s insights are built not just on academic roots but lived experience and her fieldwork, listening to all sorts of people reflect on Kazakhstaniness and what it means to them to be Kazakh, or to be Kazakhstani.
In the following interview with The Diplomat’s Catherine Putz, Kudaibergen discusses some of the book’s core themes, including the role played by ethnicity in how the Soviet Union structured its empire, how contemporary Kazakhstani authorities approach the matter of inter-ethnic relations, and the position of ethnic Russians in Kazakhstan in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Throughout, Kudaibergen returns time and again to the great tragedies in Kazakhstan’s history – the 1930-1933 famine, Asharshylyk; the December 1986 protests, Zheltoksan; the 2011 Zhanaozen massacre, and 2022’s Bloody January, Qandy Qantar – as not just painful touchstones but turning points that have shaped Kazakhstani identity.
What role did ethnicity play in how the Soviets organized their empire? Did independent Kazakhstan retain that framework? In what ways has it shifted?
Ethnicity in the Soviet Union was a governing phenomenon and category that created and sustained hierarchies, power structures, and access to these power structures. It was also an instrument to construct and control whole communities and their representation through theatrical and ceremonial frames to demonstrate ethnic diversity but also uphold the colonial hierarchy that existed within the Soviet concept of ethnicity. This is especially true for the “ethnic minorities,” who were often left with these colorful attributes of their groupness but were not given real representational rights.
The Soviet empire spent a long time and many resources to establish, sustain, and impose ethnic divisions and ethnic hierarchies on communities, spaces, localities, histories, and lived experiences that did not live in this paradigm before. It implemented strict codification of ethnicity in communities and places where identity and a form of pre-colonial ethnicity was either fluid or not practiced at all or was not lived in the rigid ways imposed by the Soviet empire. Under the banner of “equality” and “friendship,” the system explored multilayered domination and hierarchization of individuals, communities, societies, identities, and rights.
People who did not represent the dominant “titular” ethnicity (I really don’t like this colonial term, but we have to use it in historical discussions and in the vocabulary that the Soviet Union introduced and sustained over the years) or Russian ethnicity (and Russian ethnicity in many republics outweighed the “titular” ethnicity) simply could not have equal access to education, jobs, propiska – the scary word for urban registration, which in many big and central cities was a privilege. For example, in Chapter 2, which is dedicated to the Zheltoqsan 1986 – December 1986 protests in Kazakhstan, I cite archives and official statistics where ethnic Kazakhs were restricted from gaining propiska in Almaty as late as 1985-1986. [Mikhail] Solomentsev, who was parachuted from Moscow to “deal” with the “nationalists” in Almaty (I discuss the problematic nature of these terms too in the book), was scolding local politicians for “allowing” too many ethnic Kazakhs to live and study in Almaty. Of course, most of these documents, statistics, and quotas were kept secret and became available only after independence. Unfortunately, the institution of ethnicity was used as a form of control, violence, and “divide and rule” technology of the imperial center.
I am a strong proponent of thinking critically of the institution of ethnicity, of the political history of Sovietized codification and sustainability of ethnicity because we need to address these issues and what parts of it still haunt us in the present. Since 1991, the Nazarbayev regime inherited this codified system and did not do much in terms of changing it or critically looking into it. The lived experiences of ethnicity were shifting on their own and that’s why it was so important for me to highlight the individual stories and life-stories of how people address their ethnicity away from the nationalizing regime that co-opted the nation-building process to solidify the personalized regime of the Soviet-educated dictator. In the book and through the available data, I also wanted to show that there are shifts within this inherited colonial hierarchy of ethnicity, but these inequalities and shifts are far more complex than the divisive and solidified system of domination over ethnicity that the Soviet Union had.
In recent months we’ve seen individuals put on trial for inciting ethnic hatred toward Russians. Are concerns about the risks of ethnic conflict in Kazakhstan overblown or mischaracterized by the government and media?
I think we need to tread carefully and approach each trial separately. It is easy but not right to place all of them under some homogeneous, unified cause or unified reason for such trials mushrooming all of a sudden. Are these cases united? Are these cases the symptom of a special context where potential ethnic conflict is possible? I don’t think so. Besides, in the contexts where the rule of law is not consistent and instead, there is something that my colleagues, like Assel Tutumlu, describe as “rule-by-law,” figuring out why each trial and each investigation under the article of “inciting ethnic hatred” becomes incredibly important.
For example, the case of Temirlan Yensebek, the former editor of the satirical (and fake) news agency QazaqNews24 that only exists within the realm of social media, stands alone as a very specific “political” case. Yensebek was tried and sentenced on the exact pretext and legal cause of “inciting inter-ethnic hatred” but most of the followers and readers of the satirical news and memes Yensebek created were predominantly political. He was an avid critic of mass-scale corruption that became its own infrastructure and a form of political reality in Kazakhstan; an important satirical voice who managed to turn bitter problematics of a non-democratic rule into something that can be laughed at too. Through this highly popular meme-critique of the political and the politicians in Kazakhstan, his work achieved a lot – most importantly, it politically involved a lot more people, especially young people who now care about politics and have the language to critique the political system they are living under.
Yensebek was warned by the police on many occasions before his trial this year on the claims that he incited “inter-ethnic hatred” because he used an anonymous Kazakh rap song that is problematic on many levels. It is not his original song; he was not the author of the song. But if the system wants to find a reason to put you on trial, the charge of “inciting inter-ethnic hatred” comes in handy. I see a lot of problems with that because the political use of this particular article and law can blur the line if an actual incitement of inter-ethnic hatred, God forbid, happens. People like Yensebek were tried for political reasons – because he did things that the regime or certain regime politicians did not like, because he posted satirical posts about corruption, not for the actual crime of inciting inter-ethnic hatred. This is the case of the rule-by-law; when the law does not apply equally to all and is often applied contextually. It works in different contexts and for the interests of the regime, not the rule of law or the state per se.
So, to conclude, I think we need to look into these trials case by case to really figure out if the investigation was transparent and fair, if it managed to prove the crime, and what were the parameters of such an investigation, or if the case was fabricated because, unfortunately, this particular article is quite open to legal and political interpretations.
But I also can rely on the available data and my own decade-long research to highlight how the risk of an inter-ethnic conflict between ethnic Kazakhs and ethnic Russians is quite low, especially if we focus on data stemming from local communities. Unfortunately, there are risks of an external danger or of third parties using these communities, that are far from the rigid terms they are often described in, to achieve their own goals. In the book, I spend quite a long time describing how these rigid divisions emerged and why different regimes were in favor of keeping them like that and how the lived experiences of local Russians and local Kazakhs are actually quite far from the old and Soviet Russo-Kazakh bi-community divisions. We need to problematize this dichotomy and its colonial origin. I hope there will be more studies coming out of Kazakhstan soon.
Since the Russian full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, what are some of the struggles that ethnic Russians in Kazakhstan have faced? What does it mean when that community is referred to as “our Russians” by other Kazakhstanis?
Kazakhstani society is very diverse. So, the Russian full-scale invasion in 2022 also created diverse responses, including a popular solidarity movement with the Ukrainians. There are a lot of community projects, fundraisers, collaborations, and solidarity projects with a very strong pro-Ukraine and anti-colonial, decolonial stance. There was also an influx of Russian migrants who were exiled from Russia due to the war, and they were also welcomed.
How did the war reflect on “our Russians”? That’s how I write about people who identify with Russian ethnicity but who also claim Kazakhstan as their home. It is a big question. I tackle some of it in Chapter 3 on “Our Russians.” Let me give the gist: the main argument is that all identities are connected to lived experiences and, as such, are flexible, contextual, and constantly changing. Ethnicity is not rigid, Russianness is not rigid, at least not when it is lived and experienced in Kazakhstan, and I believe in Central Asia. It is important to study it through these experiences, not just thinking of the whole community as an agentless “group” in the hands of major geopolitical forces and analyses or as figurines on a major geopolitical chessboard. I am very much against such frames of looking into real people and their lived experiences.
In what ways did independent Kazakhstan perpetuate Soviet approaches to remembrances – such as that of the famine, Asharshylyk, or the December 1986 protests, Zheltoksan?
I think there have been different stages of the regime’s relation and its desire to control memory politics. I touch upon it a little bit through contextual and genealogical analysis, for example, looking into how difficult and traumatic speaking of Asharshylyq is but also how, at the same time, it is something that is very much embedded in almost every Kazakh family and family history and in everyday life experiences. After I finished this chapter, I wrote a reflective essay expanding on it and looking more into the idea of missing graves and missing bodies – the graves and bodies of our great-grandfathers, great-grandmothers, and the rest of the whole family tree. I am the generation of independence, so these traumas are still quite recent, but I look into it through the experience of my father, who, in the absence of monuments and memorial places, had to create his own space where he could commemorate the big family he never knew and whose graves he will never be able to locate or whose names he will never find in the local archives.
But this is not just the story of my family – I hear more of these stories all the time. People commemorate their ancestors when celebrating a 100th birthday, for example, of a deceased grandfather, and often they include not even the names but simply the “souls” of all those whose deaths were probably not recorded and whose memory was erased for decades until first discussions about it appeared in predominantly Kazakh-language press in the early 1990s.
The Nazarbayev regime took a long time to address ways to commemorate these victims and it was a long and challenging process until they finally came up with a commemoration of all victims of Stalinist crimes and repressions. Now May 31 is the Day of Remembrance but Kazakhstani society made it their own beyond the Nazarbayevite agenda and frame. People remember victims of Asharshylyq and victims of the repressions, deportations, gulagization, and so forth. All of these crimes against humanity solidify into separate and equally important discourses, not all meshed into one frame of “Stalinist crimes.” Asharshylyq victims had different context, different causes (no less violent) that require separate discourses. Similar repressions and deportations are forming into their own discourses and memory politics where different communities or ethnic groups require equal attention and focus. So, I think we need to separate between the regime-led frameworks that remain quite Sovietized and community-led practices that are more open, more inclusive and more critical of Soviet-style memory framing. The role of the society and citizens-led initiatives are very important in these processes.
How have Kazakhstanis’ sense of what it means to be Kazakhstani been strengthened or influenced by repeated mass tragedies, such as the events of Qandy Qantar, that you chronicle in the book?
Qandy Qantar or the January 2022 mass protests and violence that led to the death of more than 200 civilians became incredibly important for changing what Kazakhstani means. There are long-term processes of post-Qantar developments in different communities that shape citizens’ relation to the regime.
This tragedy drastically changed the political perception of what the vlast’ (power) or regime is and what it is doing, how violent it is on an everyday basis, and how it led to the type of total violence in January 2022 and in its aftermath when the information of mass tortures of protesters and civilians appeared through testimonies, eyewitness reports, and independent investigations.
In the book, I try to tackle the challenging process of realizing this trauma but also living through even more authoritarian rule that denies citizens’ right for a transparent investigation into what really happened. This lack of trustworthy information, investigation, open trials of perpetrators and torturers (many of these trials were closed, including the trials of high-ranking officials of the Nazarbayev regime), creates deep cracks in citizens’ trust to the regime and to the regime-sanctioned version of what happened. I argue that the study of post-Qantar reality will require a longitudinal analysis in different communities, across different class groups, and all over Kazakhstan, not just in Almaty, for example. But what I and my colleagues among local sociologists and anthropologists are seeing already is that there are many divisions as to what people believe happened, and it shapes their attitude to the protests and to the regime.
At the same time, the tragedy of Qantar also unifies many communities and continues to bring across Qantar solidarities and different movements that demand justice for the victims. Like the Zheltoqsan and Zhanaozen 2011 tragedies before that, Qantar will remain a turning point in shaping and transforming not only citizens’ relations to the regime (not the state) in what I term the “regime-society relations” but also how people relate to the wider state of Kazakhstan. It is definitely shaping a lot of political consciousness, creates different political imaginations, and involves a lot more people in political processes either through solidarity movements, crowdfunding, or shaping their understanding that they and not the regime alone make up the state.
What do you wish the wider world understood better about Kazakhstan and Kazakhstani identity?
This is a great question! I am quite critical in the preface where I criticize the colonial gaze of viewing Kazakhstan and Central Asia as a whole region only through the lens of its powerful neighbors – Russia, China, or other major geopolitical forces. Our region is often called “Russia’s underbelly” or “Russia’s periphery” completely erasing our own history, political experiences, and subjectivity, stripping the whole region and its people of agency. This framing de-subjectivizes the people of Central Asia because we are often portrayed at the pawns of more powerful states and empires.
There is another pitfall when analyzing Central Asia as a cohesive space, one in which all the states are the “same” though there is so much complexity on the ground and anyone who has worked with Central Asia (not on it, because even wording is important to avoid this level of extractivism) know it very well.
Also, Kazakhstan is no longer just “post-Soviet.” We need to critically rethink this term and what it means. Is it an ambiguous term that aims to unite the vast space of the ex-Soviet republics or are we talking of the postcolonial moment and remnants of Soviet colonialism that continues to live on in Kazakhstan? Is Kazakhstan’s experience then different from the experience of Tajikistan or Georgia? The term “post-Soviet” became too ambiguous because so many things change quickly, and this term only blurs these processes and is no longer helpful. We need to rethink it, but it is a bigger and collective project that scholars working with Central Asia will resolve together.
What does it mean, to you, to be Kazakhstani?
Being Kazakhstani to me is like feeling a deep sense of belonging that I carry with me. It’s about working with my communities with care and empathy, returning home to the beautiful steppe and mountains, and getting inspired by them all the time. It’s a complex topic, and I’ve written about it in my book. Writing about it was an interesting and transformative experience that changed the way I write. I hope this gives you a taste of what’s inside the book!
