With World War II Veterans Passing from the Scene, Kazakhstan Extending Special Benefits to Others who Suffered Then or Later

Paul Goble

            Staunton, May 9 – Only 57 veterans of World War II remain alive among the 20 million citizens of Kazakhstan. Astana continues to give them enormous bonuses on the anniversary of the end of that conflict. But now with their passing, it has expanded the reach of this bonus system to others.

            This expansion first involved awards to 31,349 current Kazakhstan residents who worked there during the war, but now, the Bugin news service reports, Astana has extended it to 110 children who were in concentration camps, 2900 who fought in Afghanistan, 2707 who were involved with the Chernobyl cleanup, and almost 10,000 who became invalids because of nuclear testing in Kazakhstan in Soviet times (bugin.info/detail/epokha-zakanchivaetsia-v-ka/ru).

            What this means, the portal continues, is that Kazakhstan is “establishing a unified system of historical social memory into which it is gradually incorporating all groups linked to the major traumas of the Soviet era – war, radiation catastrophes, military conflicts, the Afghanistan war, and nuclear test sites.”

            “Through a system of social benefits, the state is constructing its own historical hierarchy,” it continues. “The inclusion of Chernobyl liquidators and participants in nuclear testing in this system is particularly telling as it remains one of the nations in the world bearing the heaviest historical legacy of the nuclear age.”

            And that shows something else, Bugin says. The Kazakhstan state “is seeking to combine several eras into a single historical line: Soviet industrial heroism, military memory and present-day Kazakhstan statehood,” a move complicated by just how many different traumas its people have suffered in the past.