PSCRP-BESA Reports No 17 (November 22, 2023)
In the months after 21 September 2022, when the Kremlin announced military mobilization, nearly a million Russian citizens entered Kazakhstan; though, two-thirds had already left the country before January 2023. The reason for the unexpected rise in popularity of migration to the Central Asian state was that Russian citizens do not need a visa or even a “foreign travel” passport to go there. However, these holders of Russian passports do not have Kazakhstani nationality, hence they are unable to directly influence the political sphere in the country in the framework of standard democratic procedures. Nevertheless, the factor of the Russian-speaking minority (with full-fledged Kazakhstani citizenship) is still present in Kazakhstani politics.
Let us overview and analyze it in more detail.
The Ethnic Russian Factor in the Kazakhstani Politics
The permanent Russian settler presence began on the territory that now is Kazakhstan, in the 18th century approximately. It was back then that their uneven dispersion trend was set: Russians constitute a large group in the north and west of Kazakhstan, while their presence in the south is not that significant. According to the 2021 Census, 3.5 million Russians lived in Kazakhstan, which accounts for 18 percent of the country’s population. This number might seem large but, according to the 1989 Soviet census, 37.8 percent of the Kazakhstani population identified as Russians (compared to just 39.7 percent of Kazakhs, the “titular” group).
In the USSR, Kazakhstan was regarded as a “people’s friendship incubator,” and the ethnic composition of the local population has been dramatically changing influenced by several events, including Stalinist deportations and collectivization, the “Virgin Lands campaign,” and the massive influx of relevant specialists from all the Union’s corners. The shift towards the titular group’s numerical domination was caused by the emigration of the local Russians and Germans in the 1990s to their “historical homelands,” and with a larger fertility among the Kazakhs. Also, the Kazakhstani government undertakes efforts to attract oralmandar (since 2021, qandastar) – ethnic Kazakhs from the diaspora, mainly from the Peoples Republic of China, Uzbekistan, the Russian Federation, Afghanistan, and Mongolia. They are supposed to settle in the northern, western, and central areas, to “level” the interethnic balance. Nevertheless, in the Kostanay and North-Kazakhstani oblasts, there live still more Russians than Kazakhs. The Russians also account for more than a quarter of the population in the East-Kazakhstani, Pavlodar, Karaganda, and Akmola oblasts, and in the city of Almaty.
Right after the independence was gained, fears were quickly spreading about the potential destabilization of interethnic peace. On the one hand, there were reasons for such expectations, including the public statements of prominent Russian intellectuals (like Alexander Solzhenitsyn), and practical actions of Cossack formations (like the incidents in Taldykorgan oblast in 1994 and in Ust-Kamenogorsk in 1999) and radical National Bolsheviks. On the other hand, the hypothetical “Russian threat” (though it was not often called “Russian” officially) could justify many non-democratic measures of the Kazakhstani leadership aimed at consolidating the personalist regime, as well as the administrative reform (merging the “Russian” and “Kazakh” districts) and the “Kazakhization” of the managerial human resources. Nevertheless, nowadays, ethnic diversity does not seem to be the most dangerous destabilizing factor. In 1998, 23 percent of respondents spoke in favor of Kazakhstan’s joining the Russian Federation; now, such percentage is unimaginable. Interestingly, during the massive protest rallies that took place in January 2022, no ethnic demands were voiced, despite some experts’ concerns.
Although Kazakh is the only state language in Kazakhstan, Russian has a status of “officially usable” (according to the 1995 Constitution and the Law “On the languages in the Republic of Kazakhstan”). The omnipresence of the Russian language is still considered a problem: a significant part of higher education programs is realized in Russian (including for Kazakh students); Russian is the mother tongue or the main communication tool not only for ethnic Russians but also for many Kazakhs, especially in big cities (the so-called shala qazaqtar, i.e., “half-Kazakhs,” or “asphalt Kazakhs”). In this situation, most Russians in the Soviet time and the first post-Soviet decennia did not find it necessary to master the Kazakh language. When the USSR collapsed, just 1 percent of Kazakhstan’s Russian residents spoke Kazakh. The members of other ethnic groups also used Russian, and not Kazakh, as lingua franca while in Kazakhstan.
The Kazakhstani party system is highly centralized around the dominant party (Nur Otan; in 2022, it changed its name to Amanat); some smaller parties declare their oppositional nature, but this stance is mostly nominal. Considering the ban on the creation of “ethnic parties,” it is difficult to speak about organized political representation of ethnic groups. The main channel of ethnic interest advocacy is the inclusion of ethnic minority members into the party lists and participation in the Assembly of the People of Kazakhstan. The latter is a peculiar creature: it is a governmentally supported non-party actor that, before 2023, used to constantly occupy nine pre-reserved seats (out of 107) in Mazhilis (the parliament’s lower chamber), thus being a semi-executive enclave in a legislative body. The most visible “Russian” NGOs (without party functions) are the Republican Slavic Movement “Lad” (formed in 1992; in recent years, it has nearly disappeared from the public space) and the Russian Community of Kazakhstan, as well as several Cossack associations.
Apart from the above-mentioned Russian Community, the Assembly of the People of Kazakhstan includes the Kazakhstani Russian Cultural Center, the Russian Ethnocultural Union “Bylina,” and some other cultural institutions, that mostly confine their actions to the ethnocultural domain and refrain from political actions. An attempt to voice a broader “Russian” agenda was undertaken in 1991 when Alexandra Dokuchaeva founded the “Kazakhstan Party of Democratic Progress.” However, in a couple of years, the party ceased its activities and gave birth to such non-party actors as “Lad” and the Russian Community; Alexandra Dokuchaeva emigrated to Russia in 1995 (nowadays, she is the vice-director of the “Institute of CIS Countries” in Moscow). Out of the parliamentary parties, the People’s Party of Kazakhstan is considered the most “Russian” (before 2020, it bore the name “Communist People’s Party of Kazakhstan”); for instance, in the 2007 elections, Russians made up for 35 percent of this party’s electoral list.
The Field Research – Conclusions and Recommendations
During our fieldwork in Kazakhstan in 2020-2021, which was a part of the project studying the electoral behavior in the post-Soviet borderlands, led by Igor Okunev, 36 expert interviews were collected in the cities of Kostanay, Atyrau, Aktobe, Uralsk, and Petropavlovsk (in the last four cities, the interviews were conducted remotely because of the COVID-19 outbreak). The sample included scientists, communal and political activists, journalists, and state servants. Though the sample is not very large, all the questioned people are considered experts in their designated fields. Most of the respondents regard the electoral behavior of the people who live in “their” respective regions as passive; they point at the absence of protest voting, but at the same time consider ethnic affiliation important for voting decisions.
According to our interviewees’ estimations, there is no party in Kazakhstan that would represent the demands of the Russian-speaking population better than the other parties; however, they also do not think that the country’s political system needs explicitly ethnic or regional parties. As regards foreign policy, the experts interviewed believe that Kazakhstan should adhere to the “multi-vectorial strategy,” though prioritizing cooperation with Russia and other post-Soviet countries (these responses were probably, at least in part, affected by the location where the interviews took place, and by the ethnic affiliation of the respondents). The opinions were extremely divided as to whether the relationship between Russia and Kazakhstan is tied to the state of the Kazakhstani Russian-speaking population, with most responses still being negative.
A certain political passivity and indifference are inherent in any authoritarian political system. In the case of Kazakhstani Russians, too, political competition is not viewed as a potential tool for improving an ethnic group’s condition, because a party standing for the Russian ethnic interests does not exist (and is not considered necessary). With the interviewees’ answers being often dubious, unclear, and self-contradictorily, it nevertheless seems that the salience of ethnic divisions in Kazakhstan is frozen. However, this frozenness might be temporary; the fact that ethnicity hardly affects voting behavior, might seem positive in the short run, but strategically it is imbued with dangerous potential.
Being unable to manifest itself in political decisions, ethnicity might take its share of social influence in other ways and fields, and compact territorial concentration of a non-assimilated and weakly integrated ethnic group might impel the reinvigoration of separatist (or rather, irredentist) aspirations. In the situation of geopolitical turmoil and Kazakhstan’s attempts to strike a difficult balance between the Russian, Chinese, Turkish, and Euro-American influences, such lull of ethnopolitical claims might signalize a looming storm: the 1990s’ experience is still not forgotten.
It seems unfeasible to extrapolate the situation in the authoritarian Kazakhstan to the democratic Israel. However, the Israeli Arab minority beyond Jerusalem and Judea and Samaria is also territorially concentrated, ill-integrated, and demonstrating a persistent trend of political passivity. Canalizing the potential Arab protest via the political funnel (by stimulating Arab political participation in non-radical, preferably nationwide parties/movements in Israel) is an essential, though surely not the single, tool for taming and preventing violent extremist manifestations, especially during and after the “Swords of Iron” operation.
Dr. Petr Oskolkov is an affiliated researcher at the BESA Post-Soviet Conflicts Research Program (PSCRP) and a postdoctoral researcher at Ariel University of Samaria. His research focuses on ethnic politics, nationalist movements, and right-wing political parties.
Illustration V. Myahkov