Paul
Goble
Staunton, May 31 – In 1997, the
Kazakhstan government established May 31 as the Memorial Day for Victims of
Political Repressions, an occasion for Kazakhs to reflect on the mass deaths of
their co-ethnics as a result of Stalin’s collectivization and forced
sedentarization policies at the end of the 1920s and 1930s.
But after an upsurge of interest in
these tragedies in Kazakhstan at the end of the Soviet period and in the first
decade of independence, something remarkable has occurred: The Kazakhstan government
has pulled back from promoting research and discussion on this question, and
the subject has been largely taken over by Western scholars.
In an article for the Fergana news
agency, Artem Kosmarsky says that until three decades ago, Kazakhs were not
able to focus on these politically sensitive issues and Western scholars did
not do much because they knew far less about the events in Kazakhstan than
those in Ukraine in 1932 or among Armenians in 1915 (fergana.agency/articles/107717/).
In the 1990s, the Kazakhs took the
lead in doing research, but by 2010, Kosmarsky
says, Nursultan Nazarbayev decided to tone things down lest a focus on
this issue offend Moscow. Speaking at the opening of a monument to famine
victims in 2012, the first Kazakhstan president warned against “’politicizing’”
this subject.
There are three additional reasons
why Kazakh research on this subject has declined. First, the mass deaths in
Kazakhstan had more causes than was the case elsewhere and assessing their
number is complicated by the fact that hundreds of thousands of Kazakhs fled
abroad at that time.
Second, access to sources has been
more difficult not only because they are held mostly in Moscow but also because
Kazakhstan went through two alphabet reforms, from Arabic to Latin to Cyrillic,
limiting the number of scholars who can exploit them even if they have access.
And third, Kazakh scholars have focused Kazakh society in focusing mostly on
the future.
As a result, the subject has become
dominated by Western scholars, all of whose work has been closely attended to
by Kazakhs and two of whose books have been translated into Russian. The
Western research has answered many questions, but perhaps the most important
message from it is that the scholars disagree among themselves.
Some for example view what happened in
Kazakhstan as an obvious case of genocide; others reject that
characterization. But perhaps most
striking is that even this new wave of research has not resolved the question
of just how many Kazakhs perished as a result of Stalin’s various policies even
though all agree the percentage was higher than among Ukrainians.
This lack of agreement has opened the way
to suggestions by others, including representatives of Turkic groups in Russia
like the blogger Kavkaz Omarov who argues that Stalin’s genocide of the peasantry
in the early 1930s was directed not only at the Ukrainians but at all Turkic groups
in the USSR (facebook.com/kavkaz.omarov/posts/1449398031870162).
“These repressions,” he writes on this
Kazakh memorial day, “were carried out with one single goal – to destroy as
many Muslims of the empire as possible. This was a genocide and ethnocide in
the course of which the empire pitilessly destroyed the Tatars, Kazakhs, the
peoples of Central Asia and Muslims of the Caucasus and of the non-Muslims only
the Ukrainians.”
According to Omarov, “the result is that
regions of Siberia, Omsk, Orenburg, Tyumen, and the northern regions of
Kazakhstan were cleansed of Kazakhs, Tatars, and representatives of other
Turkic peoples. Today, the indigenous peoples of these regions remain only as
minority populations.”
“The Crimea was cleansed of Tatars, Georgia
was partially cleansed of Turks. Massively destroyed were the population of the
historically Azerbaijani regions of the South Caucasus in order to ‘free up’
space for Armenian re-settlers” from the Middle East. And in the North Caucasus, were destroyed
tens of thousands of Muslims” even before the deportation.
Omarov’s discussion may strike many as hyperbolic
and profoundly wrong, but it is the product not of some sick imagination but
rather of the failure of the Russian authorities to be honest about the crimes
of the Stalin era, including but not limited to the terror famine in Ukraine, Kazakhstan
and elsewhere.
