Paul
Goble
Staunton, November 6 – Today,
Vladimir Putin met with Kazakhstan President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev in Orenburg
to discuss the demarcation of the border between the two countries as well as
more general issues of cooperation. Not surprisingly, media outlets across the
Russian Federation has used this as a hook to report on Kazakhstan and Kazakhs.
Most are the kind of boosterism
typically associated with such events and precisely the kind of thing that the
Kremlin certainly welcomes. But not all –
and the fate of one shows what happens when journalists especially beyond the ring
road overstep the bounds and report things the center doesn’t want reported,
especially when Putin is promoting a different message.
The Astrakhan news agency AST-News
published a story quoting Kazakhs living in that southern Russian city – they number
approximately 23,000 and form just over five percent of the city’s population –
to the effect that two-thirds of this ethnic group have become less interested
in using Kazakh over the last two or three years (ast-news.ru/node/dve-treti-astrakhanskikh-etnicheskikh-kazakhov-ne-znayut-rodnogo-yazyka/).
That is the same period during which
Putin has been promoting the use of Russian over non-Russian in the schools of the
Russian Federation; but it is certain that he and his regime do not want
foreign leaders to recognize that what is being done to the indigenous
population of the Russian Federation is also being done to those who come from
abroad, in this case, Kazakhstan.
A few hours after the report was
posted online, it was taken down and is now not available at the AST-News
site. But as Putin has yet to learn, in the
age of the Internet, nothing really ever disappears completely; and so both the
existence of this article and what is says about Russia today is something even
the Kremlin can’t expunge.
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