Paul
Goble
Staunton, December 17 – Yesterday,
Nursultan Nazarbayev commemorated the 25th anniversary of Kazakhstan’s
independence (centrasia.ru/news.php?st=1481876040),
but today is an even more important anniversary: the 30th of the bloody
suppression of protests following Moscow’s replacement of an ethnic Kazakh with
an ethnic Russian as party secretary there.
On December 17, 1986, thousands of
residents of Kazakhstan’s largest cities, including both ethnic Kazakhs and
ethnic Russians, came into the streets to protest the sacking of longtime
republic CPSU first secretary Dinmukhamed Kunayev and the installation of an
ethnic Russian Gennady Kolbin who had earlier been a Russian second secretary
in the Georgian SSR.
Moscow dispatched forces to suppress
the demonstrators and reportedly more than 200 were killed as a result. And that event more than any other suggested
to many around the world that the USSR was truly “the evil empire” US President
Ronald Reagan had described it as four years earlier and that as an empire, it
was fated to fall apart.
But more than that, the events in
Kazakhstan’s cities 30 years ago showed three reasons why that collapse was
likely to happen sooner rather than later and thus simultaneously energized
movements in other Soviet republics and the occupied Baltic countries and
ensured that “the nationality question” would no longer be treated as something
marginal in the West.
First, these events demonstrated
that Mikhail Gorbachev did not understand the nature of USSR over which he
ruled and was ready to violate the rules of the game that had emerged over the
previous decades. Under Brezhnev, the
non-Russian republics had gotten used to the idea that the leader of their
lands should be a member of the titular nationality even if real power resided
with a Russian number two.
Gorbachev claimed at the time that
he had to install Kolbin as party leader because there were no qualified Kazakhs
for the job, an insult that he made worse by immediately having an ethnic
Kazakh named as second secretary. If that individual deserved that post, why,
many asked there and elsewhere, couldn’t he have the top job?
Some in the West and in Moscow
celebrated Gorbachev’s “nationality blind” approach as a step forward toward a
situation in which ethnicity would play a lesser role and the much ballyhooed “Soviet
people” would take on more content; but Gorbachev’s clumsiness in this and
other cases vitiated any possibility of a positive outcome.
Second, as few in the West were
prepared to acknowledge at the time but as ever more evidence has piled up
since that time, the clashes in Kazakhstan’s cities were not simply between
ethnic Kazakhs and ethnic Russians but between members of both groups who had
enjoyed preferences under Kunayev and those who thought they’d be better off
under someone else.
That may sound like a small thing,
but in fact it was vitally important for the future of Kazakhstan and of the Soviet
Union. On the one hand, it showed that the elites in the republics had
succeeded in forming a political base that was larger than ethnicity, something
critical in places like Kazakhstan, where the titular nationality was outnumbered
by ethnic Russians.
And on the other, the formation of
such unions meant that the ground had been laid for ethnic Russians to join the
titular nationalities in the republics in pressing for greater powers and
ultimately independence. Had the nationality question in Gorbachev’s time
simply been between ethnic Russians and non-Russians, 1991 would likely have
been very different and more bloody.
Finally, third, the events of
December 17th 30 years ago, call attention to one of the most
serious problems in understanding what happened in the Soviet Union and what is
happening in the Russian Federation: the tendency in Moscow and the West to pay
attention to a problem only when it sparks violence.
Had Moscow and the West 30 years ago
been paying broader attention to the nationality issues in the USSR and were
they paying broader attention to similar issues now, they would have seen and would
see now that the violence they attend to highlights problems and may accelerate
the process but is not necessarily the most important thing going on.
Except where Moscow either
encouraged violence as in Armenia and Azerbaijan or used it so many other
places, most Soviet republics moved toward independence without it as those who
did keep track of such things were aware. And today, although violence in the North
Caucasus and its suppression gets the most attention, arguably there are other
places that matter more for fate of the Russian Federation.
Among them are the republics of the Middle
Volga, Tuva, Buryatia, and what may surprise people most, predominantly ethnic Russian
regions whose populations are also being driven away by Moscow’s arrogance and
disdain just as rapidly as any non-Russian nation or republic.
That is the real lesson of December
17, 1986, even if it is one that still needs to be learned in the Russian
capital and the West.
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