Paul Goble
Staunton,
February 3 – The dropping of Russian and Soviet names from streets and towns throughout
Kazakhstan over the last few months, Aleksey Pakholin says, has become a
concerted “campaign against the Soviet ‘colonial past,” an effort that does not
reflect the views of the local population and that is taking place in many
cases despite their wishes.
The
Russian commentator says, “the size of the renaming effort in Kazakhstan is
shocking. A vertical onomastic revolution is taking place. According to some
date, already by the mid-2000s, 60 percent of all geographic names [there] had
been changed. And in Wikipedia one can find data on almost 1700 population
points and other geographic objects which have received new names after the
disintegration of the USSR (fondsk.ru/news/2019/01/30/bum-pereimenovanij-v-kazahstane-47524.html).
“The
absolute majority of these objects bore ethnic Russian, including Soviet names,
but now they sound Kazakh,” Pakholin continues. In the past, this campaign hit Kazakh-majority
areas more than those with mixed Kazakh and ethnic Russian populations. But now
the Kazakhs are focusing on the latter as well.
According
to the Russian commentator, the cities of Uralsk, Petropavlovsk, and Pavlodar
may soon be given new Kazakh names as part of a campaign against “the Soviet ‘colonial
past’” which even those engaged in this effort do not deny is their intention.
They
routinely say that “residents of Kazakhstan aren’t required to remember when
they lived in ‘the Soviet empire.’ They have the complete right to give
districts, population points and streets ‘national’ names.” But in doing so,
they are ignoring the interests of the second largest nation in Kazakhstan, the
ethnic Russians and threatening inter-ethnic concord.
Just
how sensitive this issue is becoming is reflected in something else: After
posting this article on its portal, Russia’s Strategic Culture Foundation took
it down almost immediately. But in the age of the Internet, nothing is ever
really completely lost – and the article is still available via other sites.
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