Paul Goble
Staunton,
September 22 – Sometimes the most important developments, like the classic case
of the dog that didn’t bark, are those that don’t occur. One of these has just
taken place: Despite Moscow’s inclusion of forces from China and Mongolia in
its massive Vostok-2018 maneuvers, it did not include any from Kazakhstan,
despite Astana’s formal alliance with Russia.
In
a comment for Tallinn’s International Centre for Defence and Security, Vadim
Shtepa, the editor of the After Empire
portal, suggests that the absence of Kazakh troops in this case suggests that
everything isn’t as advertised in Russian-Kazakh relations and that there may
be more problems ahead (icds.ee/ru/vozmozhna-li-novorossija-v-kazahstan/).
There is mounting
evidence of this, Shtepa says. Kazakhstan was furious when Vladimir Putin suggested in
August 2014 that Nursultan Nazarbayev had “’created a state on a territory
where there had never been a state before,’” something that isn’t true and that
sounded to many Kazakhs like the Kremlin leader’s repeated claims that Ukraine
is not a country even now.
Moreover, Kazakh Eurasianism is
something very different from Moscow Eurasianism: It does not set itself
against Europe but rather seeks to become a basis for cooperation with Europe on
the basis of mutual interests. Further, Kazakhstan
is promoting trilingualism (Kazakh, Russian and English) and replacing Cyrillic
with the Latin script, things Moscow doesn’t like.
Kazakhstan has not recognized Moscow’s
Anschluss of Crimea as legitimate, and its economy, based as Russia’s is, on
the export of raw materials is more a competitor to Russia than a complementary
one. The real competition in Kazakhstan, Shtepa continues, is between China and
Russia, with the former growing and the latter declining in importance.
Some in Kazakhstan fear Chinese
expansionism, but they also fear Russian demands for special privileges. And consequently, Astana continues to pursue a multi-vector,
balanced foreign policy that is anything but what Putin and his regime would
like to see in a former Soviet republic.
But
“Kazakhstan is not Ukraine,” the Russian regionalist continues. “’A Novosrossiya’”
in Kazakhstan is hardly likely. Kazakhs
form an increasing share of the population even in the Russian-dominated north,
and Astana is promoting that. And there
is perhaps an even more important reason.
“The majority of
people who speak Russian in Kazakhstan are ethnic Kazakhs and not Russians,” Shtepa
points out. As a result, Moscow is seeking to increase its influence in
Kazakhstan as a whole rather than moving to seize Russian areas, something that
would only drive Astana further away from the Russian Federation.
That is likely to continue to be
Moscow’s approach and helps explain why the Russian side is proceeding so
cautiously in its dealings with Kazakhstan.
But “nevertheless,” it is theoretically possible that there could be a
Novorossiya in Kazakhstan under three different conditions, the regionalist argues.
First, if Putin is unable to
orchestrate a successfully union with Belarus by 2024, he might want to try to
do that with Kazakhstan in order to create a new position of president of such
an entity as a means of extending his power.
Second, if after Nazarbayev leaves
the scene, a pro-Western politician takes power in Astana, it is entirely
possible that Moscow despite everything might take pages from its Ukrainian
playbook and apply them in Kazakhstan.
Or third, if the Russian Federation
collapses, Moscow wouldn’t invade, but the emergence of new post-RF Russian
states might attract some of the ethnic Russians in northern Kazakhstan to join
one or another of them.
Such a scenario, the Russian regionalist
concedes, may seem improbable now, but no more so than the demise of the USSR
did “at the start of 1991.”
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