Postcards from Stanland

by David H. Mould

  I wondered if Yeleusizov would be offended by being called an actor. He wasn’t. “Life is itself a play,” he said, “and an election is a great play with characters. I will take my part.”

  The plot had a final surreal twist. Emerging from the polling station in Almaty, Yeleusizov informed journalists that he and his family had all voted for Nazarbayev.

  Election Shenanigans

  The day after the election, my friend Hal Foster called me. “Want to go for dinner at the Uighur place?” he asked. “OK, let’s meet at the Ramada. I’m covering one of the press conferences by election observers.”

  I wandered into the room where a small group of local and Western journalists had gathered. The Independent International Observer Mission—a panel of academics and former diplomats—gave a positive accounting of their monitoring. The Western journalists asked a few softball questions; the local journalists were silent. I wondered how this group could come to such a different conclusion from the OSCE observers who had reported “serious irregularities.” No one asked that question.

  As the press conference was ending, I raised my hand. “Who paid for your trip to Kazakhstan?” I asked. The mission’s leader, Daniel Witt, answered: “The International Tax and Investment Center.” I’d never heard of it, but it didn’t take more than a few minutes to find its website. What I learned and reported in an article for Transitions Online (later cited in Silverstein’s piece on Salon.com) provides a glimpse of Kazakhstan’s image-making machine.8

  Facing weak opposition, Nazarbayev won the election by a landslide. The turnout of registered voters was almost 90 percent, with Nazarbayev receiving more than 95 percent of votes. The OSCE, with more than four hundred election observers on the ground, noted “serious irregularities, including numerous instances of seemingly identical signatures on voter lists and several cases of ballot box stuffing.” Witt’s mission, which deployed only eight observers for four days, visited sixty-five polling stations in four regions and said it witnessed no irregularities. While the OSCE reported that “many local authorities intervened in the election process in order to increase turnout,” the mission saw “no visible signs of centrally directed administrative mobilization of voters to show up at the polls.” Instead, it reported, “voters seemed motivated by a sense of civic consciousness and patriotism.” The mission’s goal, said Witt, was to communicate “the success story of democratic, social, and economic reforms to our colleagues in the U.S. and Europe.” The theme was summarized in the title of its press release, “Kazakhstan’s Democratic Roots Deepen.”

  How can two election observer groups come to such different conclusions? It didn’t take long to figure out that the International Tax and Investment Center (ITIC) had a horse in the race.

  ITIC is a Washington, DC–based group that provides tax and investment policy advice for governments and commercial clients in the former Soviet Union and has worked with the government of Kazakhstan since 1993. Its main Kazakhstan office is in Astana’s government complex, and its Almaty office in the Ministry of Finance. Its funding comes mainly from commercial sponsors, including multinational corporations doing business in Kazakhstan. They include oil companies (BP, Chevron, Exxon-Mobil, Lukoil, and Shell), mining and tobacco companies, banks, and business consulting and accounting firms (Ernst & Young, KPMG, and PricewaterhouseCoopers). Kazakhstan sponsors include Air Astana, PetroKazakhstan, and the Kazakhstan Petroleum Association. The American Chamber of Commerce in Kazakhstan is also a sponsor. ITIC’s work is even endorsed by Nazarbayev. Its website quotes him as saying that ITIC has helped the government “to define problems and lay out ways of further perfecting tax legislation and establishing a favorable investment climate in our country.”

  At the press conference, Witt did not mention ITIC’s ties to the government or the business sector but repeatedly referred to his team as independent observers. He acknowledged that they were not “technical experts on elections” and said the OSCE was “second to none” at examining the “nuts and bolts.” Yet team members went on to comment on their observations at polling stations. There is no evidence that the observer mission or ITIC has monitored elections in other countries.

  “I think that the vast majority of the world knows who the definitive voice is when it comes to election observation—and that’s the OSCE,” said OSCE Parliamentary Assembly spokesperson Neil Simon. While declining to comment on the group’s report, Simon said that the OSCE findings were “clearly the true picture of what happened in Kazakhstan over the past few weeks. Everything from the ballot box stuffing we observed on election day to the lack of a genuine competitive election due to blocked freedom of media and assembly shows that the country still needs to make improvements to live up to its democratic commitments.”

  History on the Streets of Almaty

  In winter 2009, on one of my longer trips to Almaty, I rented an apartment on Vinogradov. I didn’t spot any grapevines (in Russian, vinograd means vine or grapes) but it seemed a fitting name for a quiet, leafy, street with wide sidewalks and park benches. Like most city streets, Vinogradov was officially renamed after independence in an effort to erase the Soviet legacy. The new government reached into its gallery of eighteenth-century Kazakh warrior chiefs, and Vinogradov became Karasai Batyr. It’s taken some time for the new name to stick.

  The Kazakh word batyr is derived from an old Turkic word for a hero, knight, or brave warrior, a title bestowed upon individuals for military service among the Turkic and Mongol peoples. Many batyrs are celebrated in Kazakh history, because there was a lot of fighting.

  With the death of Genghis Khan in 1227, his empire was divided between his sons. Most of present-day western and northern Kazakhstan became part of the Golden Horde, whose domain extended to European Russia and Ukraine. Central and southern Kazakhstan, as well as present-day Uzbekistan and western Xinjiang, became the Chaghatai khanate. In the fourteenth century, the khanate split, with the region south of the Syr-Darya river adopting settled agriculture and Islam, and the north retaining its nomadic, animal-herding culture. The northern tribes became the Kazakhs and by the end of the fifteenth century they had established one of the world’s last great nomadic empires, stretching from the Caspian Sea to the Altay Mountains, from southern Siberia to the Tian Shan. The Kazakh khan was reportedly able to bring 200,000 horsemen into the field, and the empire was feared by all its neighbors.

  Kazakh unity and central authority began to weaken in the first half of the sixteenth century as the khanate broke up into three separate “hordes,” or zhuz—the Great Horde in the south, the Middle Horde in the center and northeast, and the Little Horde in the west. In each horde the authority of the khan was curtailed by tribal chieftains, and even more by the bis (the sages or judges) and batyrs who headed the clans or extended families that made up each tribe.

  From the 1680s, the Kazakhs were involved in wars with the Oyrats, a federation of four western Mongol tribes, including the aggressive Dzungars. In 1723, the Dzungars invaded the eastern Kazakh lands, slaughtering entire clans, taking captives and seizing pastures, an era known in Kazakh history as the “Great Disaster.” In 1726, the leaders of the three hordes—Tole Bi, Kazybek Bi, and Ayteke Bi—met at Ordabasy near Shymkent to form a confederacy against the Dzungars, and the Kazakhs won major victories in 1726 and 1729. Meanwhile, Russia’s westward expansion into Siberia brought it into conflict with the Oyrats. Between 1731 and 1742, the khans of the three hordes, considering the Russians the lesser of two evils, swore allegiance to the tsar and asked for Russian protection. Although the Russians established a line of forts across northern Kazakhstan, the Dzungar threat was ended by the Manchu Chinese. In two campaigns in 1757–58, imperial troops virtually wiped out the Dzungars and incorporated their lands into China. Stuck between two great powers, Ablai Khan of the Middle Horde did the smart diplomatic thing; he offered his submission to the Qianlong emperor. In 1771, Ablai was confirmed as ruler by both the Chinese and the Russians. After almost a
century of warfare, the Kazakhs had survived as a people but had been forced to surrender their independence.

  The street names of central Almaty evoke this turbulent period. Walking west from my apartment on Karasai Batyr (Vinogradov) brought me to the junction with one of the main north-south streets, Nauryzbai Batyr, named for another chieftain who fought against the Dzungars. Although many residents still used the Soviet-era name, Dzerzhinskiy, I preferred walking along a street named for a Kazakh warrior than one named for the founder of Cheka, the precursor of the KGB, which became notorious for torture and mass summary executions during the Russian Civil War and the 1920s. One block north, at the junction with Bogenbai Batyr (formerly Kirov), my friend Sergey Karpov lived in an apartment in a solid three-story block built by Japanese POWs in World War II. One more block took me to the junction with Tole Bi (formerly Komsomoloskaya) and Silkway City, the downtown mall where I often shopped. From there, Kazakh history continued north—Kazybek Bi (Sovietskaya), then Ayteke Bi (Oktyarbr’skaya). South of my apartment, it was one block to Kabanbai Batyr (Kalinin). To reach the university, I took a bus on Ablai Khan (Kommunisticheskiy), which runs one-way north-south. Coming back, I got off at the stop on Zheltoqsan (Mira), a street whose name, which means December, commemorates a more recent conflict—the 1986 riots to protest the appointment of a Russian as head of the Kazakh SSR Communist Party.

  MAP 6.2 My Almaty (map by Brian Edward Balsley, GISP)

  Clan and Language Politics

  It’s difficult to blame Ablai Khan and the other eighteenth-century Kazakh chieftains for doing deals with the Russians to save their people from the Dzungar raids, but that’s when the demographics started changing. The troops that established a line of forts across northern Kazakhstan—Omsk in 1716, Semipalatinsk in 1718, and Ust Kamenogorsk in 1719—were followed by Russian, Tatar, and Cossack settlers who plowed up the steppe and planted crops. A century before the range wars of the American West, when ranchers and farmers fought it out over grazing and water rights and bands of cowboys cut fences across Texas, Kazakh herders were battling to preserve their traditional grazing grounds.

  Although they had forged a confederacy to fight the Dzungars, the Kazakhs failed to unite against Russian expansion. Internal disputes weakened the hordes, with some tribes overthrowing their leaders. Exploiting the divisions, the Russians formally abolished the hordes as political entities—the Middle Horde in 1822, the Little Horde in 1824, and the Great Horde in 1848. In the 1840s, Ablai Khan’s grandson, Kenisary Qasimov, was able to rally enough horsemen from the supposedly defunct Middle Horde to launch one more brave but futile campaign against the Russians. Militarily, it was the last gasp of a fading power. The Russians steadily extended their grip over the region, moving south to conquer parts of the Khokand khanate and founding a fort at Verniy (later Almaty) in 1854.

  With the abolition of serfdom in Russia in 1861, the pace of agricultural settlement increased as freed peasants headed east to claim lands. The settlement pattern closely paralleled that of the American West. The military led the way, establishing a line of frontier forts with supply lines. Farmers followed, fencing lands for arable crops. Railroads, such as the Trans-Aral line from Orenburg in the Urals to Tashkent, transported agricultural produce and supplied the farmers with manufactured goods. The farmers were followed by administrators, lawyers, tax collectors, customs agents, traders, teachers, fortune seekers, and criminals. The more upstanding migrants established villages and towns with shops, banks, hotels, bars, and theaters. Depicted in late nineteenth-century photographs, the main streets of towns in northern Kazakhstan look much like frontier settlements in Kansas, Nebraska, Colorado, and the Dakotas—frame and clapboard storefronts with boardwalks, horse-drawn wagons, and the occasional carriage. For the tsarist government, the frontier was a convenient dumping ground for high-profile dissidents and political opponents such as the writer Fyodor Dostoyevsky, exiled to Semipalatinsk. In this frontier drama, the Kazakhs played the part of the tribes of the northern Great Plains, driven from their ancestral grazing and hunting grounds. No one knows how many Kazakhs died from revolts or famines.

  The 1917 revolution gave brief hope to Kazakh nationalists when moderate upper-class intellectuals formed a political party called Alash Orda, named for the mythical ancestor of their people. “Alash Orda!” (Horde of Alash) had long served as their traditional battle cry. Despite later Soviet charges, the party was progressive on social issues while calling for the creation of an autonomous Kazakh region. After vacillating between the White and Red Armies, most leaders accepted Mikhail Frunze’s promise of amnesty and in December 1919 recognized Soviet authority. Acquiescence did not save them. The provisional government was abolished, and Alash Orda members were expelled from the Communist Party, executed or sent to labor camps. Thousands of Kazakhs and Russian settlers died in the civil war. And the economy was devastated. From the mid-1920s, Kazakhs became an ethnic minority in the country.

  After establishing military and political control, the Soviets embarked on the next stage of social reform—the elimination of private property and the collectivization of industry and agriculture. Technically, it wasn’t much of a challenge to nationalize the steppe because the boundaries between the grazing lands of families and clans were a matter of oral tradition, not of legal title. If the Kazakhs had been left free to travel in family groups with their herds, they might not have cared much that their animals were grazing on state property. However, the Soviets viewed the traditional economy and the social organization of clans and tribes as primitive and potentially subversive. They forced the Kazakhs to move onto kolkhozes and surrender their herds. Collectivization threatened not only their livelihoods but a centuries-old nomadic culture. Many killed their livestock rather than hand them over to the state. Unaccustomed to settled agriculture, more than 1.5 million people died between 1926 and 1939, mostly from famine and disease. Those who openly opposed collectivization were executed or sent to labor camps. Thousands fled to China, although many died on the journey; others fled to Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan. Kazakhstan’s population fell by more than two million between 1926 and 1933.

  From the late 1920s, the Soviets embarked on a systematic program of deporting ethnic groups from their ancestral or adopted homelands to remote areas of Siberia and Kazakhstan. The program, which reached its zenith under Stalin in the 1930s and World War II, was motivated by two factors: the need to supply cheap labor to the mines and industrial plants exploiting the region’s natural resources, and fears that ethnic groups would support a foreign invasion. In the mid-1930s, the two Polish Autonomous Districts created in Belarus and Ukraine in the 1920s were abolished, and their leaders executed. The rest of the population was deported in 1936, 75,000 of them to northern Kazakhstan, with many dying on the journey. In 1937, almost the entire population of ethnic Koreans, about 170,000 in number, was deported from the Russian Far East to Kazakhstan. In public pronouncements, the Soviets denounced Koreans as potential collaborators with the Japanese. Maybe the Soviets had not forgiven the Japanese for Russia’s defeat in the war of 1904–5 when Japan gained control of the Korean peninsula, formally annexing it in 1910. However, claims of collaboration were ludicrous; if any ethnic group hated the Japanese more than the Russians, it was the Koreans. In June 1941, days before Germany invaded the USSR, almost 30,000 ethnic Romanians from Moldova and western Ukraine were deported to Kazakhstan and Siberia. In August, the Supreme Soviet issued a decree to deport the largest ethnic group—some 480,000 Volga Germans. Deportation of other non-Slavic nationalities from the Black Sea region followed—Crimean Tatars and Greeks, Chechens, Ingush, Balkars, Kalmyks, Karachays, Meskhetian Turks, and Armenians. Many were sent to the Kazakh SSR or were moved to its labor camps from Siberia.

  The camps were closed after Stalin’s death in 1953, but many members of the so-called Trudarmiya (Labor Army) remained in Kazakhstan. A new wave of Russian and Ukrainian migrants arrived in the 1950s under Khrushchev’s Virgin Land
s scheme, which aimed to convert the steppe into arable land, growing wheat and other grains for the rest of the Soviet Union. Others came to work in the coal and iron mines, the power plants and factories. In 1959, the SSR’s population stood at 9.3 million, but only 2.7 million (29 percent) were ethnically Kazakh, and Kazakhs were in a majority in only seven of the 20 oblasts. From the 1960s, primarily because of a relatively high birthrate, the proportion of Kazakhs in the population increased, so that by the 1989 census they made up 40 percent of a population of 16.4 million, with Russians at 38 percent. History determined that when Kazakhstan became independent, it was the only Central Asian republic where the ethnic group that gave its name to the country constituted less than 50 percent of the population.

  Although all Central Asian republics experienced population decline after independence, Kazakhstan’s was dramatic. In the first post-Soviet census in 1999, its population was just 15.6 million—the result of economic hardship which contributed to out-migration and a declining birthrate. More than a million Russians and 800,000 Germans, almost 11 percent of the 1989 population, left the country in the 1990s. In 1999, TV commercials by a charity backed by businesses and the president’s wife, Sara Nazarbayeva, lamented the sharp drop in the birthrate and went on to offer “real money for real children”—100,000 tenge ($1,150), almost the annual average wage—to the parents of the first 2,000 babies born in 2000.

  From 2000 onward, Kazakhstan’s economy grew by close to 10 percent a year, creating a modest baby boom and population rebound. Although ethnic Russians and Germans continued to leave, the country attracted migrants from its impoverished Central Asian neighbors to work on building sites, especially in Astana and Almaty, and in the cotton and tobacco fields of the south. The proportion of Kazakhs increased dramatically, not only because of the birthrate and out-migration by other groups, but because of immigration by Kazakhs from China, Mongolia, Russia, and western Uzbekistan—the so-called oralmans. Today, Kazakhs account for almost two-thirds of the population of over 17 million.