So Far, Only Putin Supports Kazakh President’s Call for Promoting Russian Across CIS

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Oct. 12 – At the Astana summit, only Russia’s Vladimir Putin supported Kazakh President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev’s call for the creation of an organization within the CIS to promote the Russian language across the members of that organization. But the idea and its prospects are sparking discussion.

            Saule Isabayeva of Kazakhstan’s QMonitor portal queried two experts, Leonid Polyakov of Moscow’s Higher School of Economics and Yury Serebryansky, a Kazakhstan writer and cultural specialist, about the value and prospects for adoption of such an arrangement (qmonitor.kz/society/4500).

            Polyakov said he was sure that more countries would join it because they would recognize that the alternative would be more countries moving in the direction of Ukraine and generating the response that it has. He suggested that a Russophone organization would likely begin first in Central Asia.

            Serebryansky was somewhat more skeptical. He said that “Russia is a colonial inheritance,” but that it remains useful and perhaps more useful to the Central Asians than to Moscow given that large numbers of Russians opposed to the war are now coming to the region. If Russian remains available to them there, even more will come.

            Thus what might look like something that would work only for Russia will in fact work for Central Asia. But precisely because that is the case, Russia may be less enthusiastic about having something like a Francophone arrangement lest it lose control over its conception of a Russian world.