Abstract
The collapse of the Soviet Union and the emergence of the Russian Federation and Kazakhstan* as independent and sovereign states marked the demise of a political regime which in its Russian and Soviet incarnations had dominated the steppe lands of Central Eurasia for over two hundred years. The sudden end of the Soviet order was not, however, accompanied by the end of the struggle to control the steppe region. The former political systems left an important colonial legacy in the region in the form of substantial Russified settler communities.1 The large size of the settler population and its geographical location — the majority of the non-Kazakhs are located in the north and east of the country in areas contiguous with the Russian Federation — ensured that, with independence, the future of the Russian community became one of the central questions in Kazakhstani society.
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Notes
For a discussion of the imperial character of the Soviet state, see Mark R. Beissinger, ‘The Persisting Ambiguity of Empire’, Post-Soviet Affairs, Vo1.11, No.2, 1995, pp.149–84,
Ronald Grigor Suny, ‘Ambiguous Categories: States, Empires and Nations’, Post-Soviet Affairs, Vol.11, No.2, 1995, pp.185–96;
and Walter Kolarz, Russia and Her Colonies (New York: Praeger, 1952);
and Alexander J. Motyl, ‘From Imperial Decay to Imperial Collapse: The Fall of the Soviet Empire in Comparative Perspective’, in Richard L. Rudolph and David F. Good (eds), Nationalism and Empire: The Habsburg Monarchy and the Soviet Union (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992), pp.15–43.
N. Ye. Bekmakhanova, Formirovanie mnogonational’nogo naseleniya Kazakhstana i severnoi Kirgizii: Poslednyaya chetvert’ XVIII — 60-e gody XIX v. (Moscow: Nauka, 1980);
also Ye. B. Bekmakhanova, Prisoedinenie Kazakhstana k Rossii (Moscow: Akademiya Nauk SSSR, 1957).
George J. Demko, The Russian Colonisation of Kazakhstan, 1896–1916 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1969), pp.131–2.
George J. Demko, The Russian Colonisation of Kazakhstan, 1896–1916 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1969), pp.131–2.
A. B. Galiev ‘Etno-demograficheskie protsessy i etno-politicheskie orientatsii v sovremennom Kazakhstane’, in Mezhetnicheskie aspekty sotsial’nykh i ekonomicheskikh reform (Almaty: Institute of Strategic Studies, 1993).
Allen Hetmanek, ‘National Renaissance in Soviet Kazakhstan: The Brezhnev Era’, in George W. Simmonds (ed.), Nationalism in the USSR and Eastern Europe in the Era of Brezhnev and Kosygin (Detroit, MI: University of Detroit Press, 1977), pp.295–305.
Yaacov Ro’i, ‘The Soviet and Russian Context of the Development of Nationalism in Soviet Central Asia’, Cahiers du Monde Russe et Soviétique, Vol.XXXII, No.1, January-March 1991, p.130.
Hé1ène Carrère d’Encausse, The End of the Soviet Empire (New York: New Republic/Basic Books, 1993), pp.31–46.
V. Galenko, ‘O nekotorykh protivorechiyakh v konstitutsii Kazakhstana’, Birlesu, 1993, No.14.
Dilip Hiro, Between Marx and Muhammad (London: HarperCollins, 1994), Chapter 3.
Ingvar Svanberg, ‘Kazakhs’, in Graham Smith (ed.), The Nationalities Question in the Soviet Union (London: Longman, 1992), p.200.
Shirin Akiner, The Formation of Kazakh Identity: From Tribe to Nation-State (London: Royal Institute of International Affairs, 1995), pp.75–7.
Neil Melvin, Russians Beyond Russia: The Politics of National Identity (London: Pinter, 1995), pp.56–77.
Philip S. Gillette, ‘Ethnic Balance and Imbalance in Kazakhstan’s Regions’, Central Asia Monitor, 1993, No.3, p.21.
Following independence demographic changes produced an increase in overall ethnic compactness in the republic with the settler community further concentrated in the north and east and the Kazakhs consolidating in the southern oblasts and advancing in the cities of Almaty and Leninsk. As a result, the country’s already highly polarised geography of settlement was further accentuated and this fed into the growing sense of confrontation between Kazakhs and non-Kazakhs: H. Mitrokhin and V. Ponomarev, Tsentral’no-aziatskie stranitsy: demograftcheskaya situatsiya v Kazakhstane (Moscow: Panorama, 1995).
Neil Melvin, Forging the New Russian Nation: Russian Foreign Policy and the Russian-speaking Communities of the Former USSR, Discussion Paper 50 (London: Royal Institute of International Affairs, 1994).
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, ‘Kak nam obustroit’ Rossiyu’, Komsomol’skaya pravda (spetsial’nyi vypusk), 18 September 1990, p.2.
Klara Rakhmetova, ‘Strategiya i politika razvitiya neftegazovogo kompleksa respubliki Kazakhstan’, Kazakhstan i mirovoe soobshchestvo, 1994, No.1, pp.8092.
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Melvin, N. (1999). Elites of North-eastern Kazakhstan in a New Geopolitical Context, 1989–95. In: Sakwa, R. (eds) The Experience of Democratization in Eastern Europe. International Council for Central and East European Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-14511-9_6
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