Khrushchev Rejected Renaming Kazakhstan ‘the Kazakh-Russian SSR’

Paul Goble

            Staunton, February 26 – Kazakhstan is an independent country now because Stalin violated his own rules as to which Soviet territories could be union republics and which had to remain autonomies, according to Yandex’s Living Central Asia page (zen.yandex.ru/media/centralasia/pochemu-kazahstan-stal-soiuznoi-respublikoi-a-ne-ostalsia-avtonomiei-v-sostave-rossii-5e5678c728b13e7343dda6b0).

            For Stalin, a territory could only become a union republic if it had lay on the border of the USSR. Otherwise the right to seek independence would be meaningless. Second, it had to have a population of at least a million or it would be too small to survive. And third, its titular nationality had to be a majority of the population.

            When the Soviets created it, what is today Kazakhstan was the Kyrgyz Autonomous Republic within the RSFSR with Orenburg as its capital. Five years later, its capital was shifted to Kyzyl-Orda, Kazakh regions of Turkestan were joined to it, and it was rechristened the Kazakh ASSR.

            In 1936, Stalin decided to boost its status to that of a union republic even though its titular nation was not dominant.  “Perhaps,” the Yandex page says, the Kremlin leader wanted to win Kazakh support before the war or perhaps Moscow was concerned that some would view t as a colonial power if it kept the Kazakhs in a more subordinate position.

            Or it may be, the news page says, that Kazakhstan, which had suffered mightily because of sedentarization and collectivization was close to open revolt --- “there had been several regional risings” there – and that Moscow felt that giving it the more elevated status would buy off the population and elites.

            The Kazakh share of the population actually fell in the late 1950s because of the Virgin Lands program, and some party officials asked Nikita Khrushchev for approval to rename the Kazakh SSR “the Kazakh-Russian SSR.” Khrushchev, however, refused, saying that it would remain Kazakhstan “even if there was only one Kazakh there.”

            This history resonates today for two reasons. On the one hand, many non-Russian autonomies within the Russian Federation declared themselves union republics in 1990 in the hopes of exploiting the provision of the Soviet constitution that would have allowed them to pursue independence. Moscow and the West rejected that idea, but it still remains alive.

            And on the other hand, the notion that ethnic engineering may mean that residents of the Russian Federation may declare two nationalities and thus open the door to the possibility of renaming the republics of which they are a part to reflect such identities is something many non-Russians fear – and Khrushchev’s position thus will be something they may view as a precedent.