BACKGROUND: While benefiting from the positive consequences of soviet rule in terms of industrialization, universal literacy, public education, and medical care, Kazakhs also suffered the downside of the Soviet regime. As a nation, they paid a great human and cultural cost for ‘socialism building’ and ‘progress’ of the Soviet era. During the forced collectivization and sedentarization of the 1920 and 1930s, almost half of the Kazakh population died of starvation. The demography of Kazakhstan changed dramatically with the influx of Russians and other settlers from the European part of the Soviet Union. By the 1950s, Kazakhs became a minority in their titular republic and gradually came under the threat of complete cultural russification. The issue of the Kazakh language was among the main grievances articulated by Kazakh intellectuals in the wake of the national revival during Perestroika. This issue was addressed already in 1989, when the Supreme Soviet of Kazakhstan granted Kazakh the status of the state language and created the society for the protection of Kazakh Language ‘Ana Tili’ (Mother Tongue). Kazakhstan’s current constitution, adopted in 1995, also designates Kazakh as the state language. On the other hand, it recognizes Russian as the language of ‘interethnic communication’ and guarantees its ‘equal use’ in the government and media. Complete Kazakh Language proficiency today is required only of the highest state official, the President, as all candidates to Presidency should pass Kazakh Language test. When adopting the 1997 ‘Law on Languages’ it was decided that the rest of the state cadre should be given 15 years ‘grace’ period to learn the state language. Under the State Program for Development of Languages (2001-2001), the government wants to ensure that Kazakh is gradually installed and used on an equal foot with Russian. However, the endorsement of the Kazakh language has not gone smoothly with the Russian-speaking population and seemed to exacerbate hard feelings that Russians already had about living in independent Kazakhstan and being ousted from the ruling elite. In addition, some measures to enhance the use of the Kazakh Language have been seen as a pretext to silence opposition, which as a rule is Russian-educated and Russian-speaking. For instance, the violation of the requirement of at least 50 percent Kazakh-language programming has been used to close down independent TV stations associated with the opposition.

IMPLICATIONS: The majority of the Russian population perceives state promotion of the Kazakh language as unfair towards the Russian language and Russian-speakers. Many radically inclined Cossack, Slavonic and Russian public associations through media in Kazakhstan and Russia, as well as Russian diplomatic channels attempted to exhort pressure on the government to recognize Russian not just as an ‘language of interethnic communication’ but as the second state language of Kazakhstan. They brought to attention that the promotion of the Kazakh Language in the government went hand in hand with Kazakhization of the state apparatus and the emigration of 1,6 million Russians from the country. The leadership of the Slavonic Public Movement “Lad” also made it clear that language is the main issue at stake for Russians to consider Kazakhstan their home. The main line of Lad’s argument is that one doesn’t need to learn Kazakh in order to live in Kazakhstan, there is no necessity for Kazakh, because all forms of knowledge and information are available in Russian, and all Kazakhs except for the state-sponsored returnees from China and Mongolia (oralmans) speak Russian fluently. Thus according to the movement, the government is trying to ‘invent the bicycle’ by translating all existing knowledge into Kazakh (also channeling public money into this project), and create difficulties for Russians by forcing Kazakh to be used equally (fifty-fifty) with Russian. One of the prominent leaders of the Lad, Michail Sytnik, published several works explaining that Kazakh is not fit for the modern public sphere because it cannot serve as a language of modern politics, science and education. Historically, he wrote, Kazakh never was the language of ‘civilization’ but just the language of nomad poetry. Such statements in turn provoke Kazakh nationalists, who see in Russian reluctance to learn Kazakh another manifestation of colonial mentality and disrespect for Kazakh culture. There are some Kazakh nationalists who also criticize the state language policy for not showing enough persistence in making Kazakh the real de facto state language. In their demand for the wider use of the Kazakh language, Kazakh nationalists appeal to the nationalist citizenship tradition in Europe, where one is often required to know the language to become a citizen. Kazakhs also emphasize that Russian demands will again put Kazakh in a position of inequality, as Kazakhs speak both Russian and Kazakh while Russians by and large do not. The language debates show not only the gap between the Russian and Kazakh populations’ expectations from the state, but also the growing social division among the Kazakhs themselves—a division between the elite and the people, as well as between newly urbanized Kazakhs who speak Kazakh and second or third generation city dwellers who usually speak Russian (in Soviet Kazakhstan, only one fourth of Kazakhs used to live in cities). The Kazakh-language media reasons that the situation of the Kazakh language in the country reflects the situation of the people who speak it. Despite state support, Kazakh remains the language of the poor and marginalized. If in Soviet times, the national elite in all republics had to be ‘close’ to their people to justify their status as the elite, today it is no longer required. For instance, parliamentarians have many times criticized Kazakhstan’s diplomatic cadre (comprised mainly of ethnic Kazakhs) for not speaking Kazakh while they are supposed to represent Kazakhstan and Kazakh culture abroad.

CONCLUSIONS: The debates on the status of the language opens up a Pandora’s box where one can observe a principle disagreement between Russians and Kazakhs on issues concerning the future of the country they share. The good news is that public space has been created for the discussion of these issues and for channeling the concerns of different segments of population. The state is taking notice of these concerns and, it seems, trying to find a way to promote the Kazakh language without antagonizing the Russian population. Thus unlike other Central Asian republics, Kazakhstan did not proceed with its plan of transition to the Latin alphabet. Considering Kazakhstan’s peculiar situation with a sizable and powerful Russian minority and almost 7,000 km of common border with Russia, it would be difficult to pursue state building based exclusively on Kazakh national identity. However, the government could just be playing for time: today the average age of ethnic Kazakhs is under 30, while the average age of Russians is over 60. That means ethnic Kazakhs will determine the future of Kazakhstan.

AUTHOR’S BIO: Alima Bissenova is with the American University in Cairo, Egypt.