Russians Tried but Failed to Make an Ethnic Kazakh Ashamed of His Name and His People, ‘Horizontal Russia’ Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Oct. 10 – The Horizontal Russia portal which reports on developments in that country outside of Moscow and especially among its non-Russian residents has published its latest article in a series on what it calls “the non-Russian world” of such people, this time about Tamerlan, a Kazakh teenager who was made to feel ashamed about his name and identity.

            The pressure against his name and background was so intense that at the age of 15, he wanted to change his name to the more Russian Timofey; but that he says now, three years later, he is glad that bureaucratic difficulties got in the way and he is proud of both his name and his nationality (semnasem.org/articles/2025/10/20/nerusskij-mir-tamerlan).

            His mother was an ethnic Ukrainian but she married a Kazakh man and lived in Kazakhstan before divorcing him and moving to the Russian Federation’s Tambov Oblast. When he enrolled in a kindergarten there, he immediately felt he was different from the other children. Many of them and even many of his teachers refused to use his real name.

            As a result, Tamerlan says, he became ashamed and sought on his own to change his name to Timofey or something else “more Russian” than the name he had been given at birth. Pressure to do so grew after his mother married a Russian in order to be in a position to get Russian citizenship.

The parents of his stepfather were openly hostile to all things Kazakh. One of them frequently said that “Russians taught you [Kazakhs] how to go to the toilet.” Unfortunately, no one in his family or among his fellow pupils disputed his words; and they left Tamerlan extremely depressed. 

Things got worse when Tamerlan excelled in classes on the Russian language. His fellow students said it wasn’t right for a non-Russian to know their national language better than they did. Such an outcome was unthinkable and thus must be the result of some misconception or other behind the scenes action.

At 15, he decided to change his name and his nationality. But that required going through a complicated bureaucratic process and so he didn’t complete it. One of his teachers also worked to keep him from doing so, arguing that as someone of mixed ethnic heritage, now living in another country, he was “unique” and that that uniqueness was something to be proud of.

When he turned 16, he visited the family of his birth father and fell in love with all things Kazakh. He began learning the language; and by 18, he decided against changing his language or his official identification. Instead, Tamerlan is now proud of his Kazakh roots and ignores the attacks some Russians bring against him because of them.

The upshot of this is that now Tamerlan plans to go to Kazakhstan to get his university education.