Moscow’s Failure to Give Kazakhstan Union Republic Status Until 1936 Raises Questions Now Far Beyond that Country’s Borders

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Aug. 6 – When the Bolsheviks began the dividing up of Central Asia in the 1920s, they gave union republic status to Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan but not to Kazakhstan despite the fact that the Kazakhstan autonomy met all the formal qualifications of having such a status, Bakhyt Khanabergen says.

            The Kazakh territory bordered a foreign country, its population was more than a million, and its titular nationality formed a majority of the population, the Kazakh historian says. But in 1936, when no longer met the third of these requirements because of the terror famine in the early 1930s, Stalin nonetheless made it a union republic.

            Kazakhs now should thus focus on the question why Stalin delayed taking this action regarding Kazakhstan in the mid-1920s but changed his mind in 1936, Khanabergen says, especially since Stalin’s 1936 decision allowed Kazakhstan to gain independence  in 1991 (spik.kz/2674-stal-by-kazahstan-nezavisimym-ne-bud-stalinskoj-konstitucii.html).

            According to the historian, this event, the 90^th anniversary of which comes this year, is important because had Stalin decided differently “perhaps today we would not be living in an independent Kazakhstan but in one of the autonomies of the Russian Federation – with all the ensuing consequences.

            Stalin acted as he did because in the 1920s, the elite in Kazakhstan remained deeply divided between those who were genuinely loyal to Moscow and those who weren’t and so he gave the Kazakhs union republic status only after he had renewed that elite by purges and the training in Moscow of a replacement elite.

            Those developments and Stalin’s role in them should force Kazakhs to see the Soviet dictator as something more than an unqualified enemy of their people. After all, with Stalin’s action in 1936, Kazakhstan would not be an independent country now and have all the advantages that confers.

            These questions are likely to spark discussions in the Russian Federation and especially in its non-Russian national republics whom Stalin and subsequent Soviet and Russian leaders did not give union republic status as well as in the West where many now view 1991 as a final act of national self-determination rather than an action dictated by Stalin from beyond the grave.

            That is why it happened that those peoples to whom the Soviet dictator gave union republic status were able to leave who didn’t have it or had been stripped of it, as Abkhazia and Karelo-Finnia were, have remained grouped with the autonomies of the Russian Federation and not allowed to work toward the realization of their right to self-determination.

            That means, of course, that the disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1991 proceeded according to principles laid down by Stalin for his purposes in the 1920s and 1930s and did not represent the triumph of national self-determination. If the right of nations to self-determination is to be realized, the world thus needs to move beyond Stalinism.

            To pose the question in this way either by these non-Russians or in the West, is to challenge the very idea that the Russian Federation is the product of self-determination of peoples and to recognize that it and its relations both with the former union republics and current autonomous ones are based not on that principle but on a very different and more odious one.