Soviet Regime in Kazakhstan Kept Number of Dissidents Down by Installing Writers in Senior Posts, Baykhozha Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Dec. 17 – Throughout the Soviet Union, writers played a key role in the dissident movements in various republics. But Kazakhstan was an exception, Zhenis Baykhozha says. There, the regime kept the number of such people who might turn to dissent low by giving writers important party and state positions.

            As the Kazakh analyst notes, there were very few dissidents in Kazakhstan. Indeed, Ludmila Alekseyeva in her classic work about the dissident movement does not discuss any of them, an indication of how few there were and how seldom their activities attracted attention beyond the borders of the republic (qmonitor.kz/society/3197).

            A major reason for this is that potential dissidents in Kazakhstan did not have the access to the outside world that others in major Russian cities or in republics with significant diaspora populations did. But an even more important reason, Baykhozha suggests, is that the communist leadership in Alma Ata worked hard to control writers who elsewhere became dissidents.

            Not only did the Kazakh authorities extend to writers many special privileges, but it hired them. In no other republic of the USSR were so many writers and poets included in party organs and government structures as in Kazakhstan. And these people in the main did not “write for the drawer” but accepted the position of the party and state on all questions.

            They lined up behind the authorities after the December 1986 tragedy, either denouncing those who took part in the protests or remaining silent; and they did not produce the new works when that became possible under perestroika or after independence that writers and poets in other republics did.

            Despite that, the Kazakh writer says, this hasn’t stopped many of them from claiming, falsely, she suggests, that they were always on the side of the Kazakh people.

            (On the oft-neglected political role of writers in the non-Russian republics at that time, see my “Readers, Writers, and Republics: The Structural Basis of Non-Russian Literary Politics” in Lubomyr Hajda and Mark Beissinger’s The Nationalities Factor in Soviet Politics and Society (London, 1990).)