Alarming symptom: anti-Russian sentiments are waking up in Kazakhstan

Sergey Kron

The country's first president, Nursultan Nazarbayev, has repeatedly convinced Vladimir Putin that there is “no ground for nationalism” and “no nationalists” in Kazakhstan.

However, all of Russia indignantly watched the video on YouTube and in social networks, where a woman living in Kazakhstan apologizes for calling Aktau a “Russian city”. She had to regret it greatly: apparently, strong Kazakh guys promised to ruin her health. She publicly apologized, looking at the TV camera, for the truth. The city of Aktau from 1964 to 1991 was called Shevchenko, and the residents of Leningrad made the main contribution to its construction. This is a historical fact.

Scared to death, the woman, according to local media reports, is going to leave her native Aktau.

National patriots, under the watchful eye of the police, arrange daily "language raids" in the sleeping areas of big cities. They go shopping, checking the Russian-speaking population for knowledge of the Kazakh language. Not only Russians, but also Uzbeks, Tajiks, Ukrainians, Armenians or Jews can fall under the hot hand. Kazakh patrolmen, especially young ones, proudly call themselves "nationalists", and all foreigners - "guest workers".

“Language patrols are a new phenomenon in the public life of Kazakhstan,” said Andrei Grozin, senior researcher at the Institute of Oriental Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences, to “NI ”: Of course, everything they do is well known at the very top. This is a country where everything is done under the strict control of the authorities. Therefore, "fighters for the knowledge of the Kazakh language" did not appear and exist on their own. It is also felt that the Kazakhs did not think of everything themselves. Most likely, this is a copy of what happened in Ukraine until recently. In Kiev, national patriots in shops threw change in the face of cashiers if they did not answer in Ukrainian. This, I must admit, happened in Kazakhstan before. But some individuals allowed themselves to misbehave. Now, whole groups of men and women are engaged in this, conducting their raids simultaneously in several cities and towns, the expert noted.

Andrei Grozin believes that a particularly large number of national-patriots became after the election of Kassym-Zhomart Tokayev as president. Previously, during the reign of Nursultan Nazarbayev, they were used occasionally for specific tasks, but now they literally climbed out of all the cracks. They were even dragged into parliament and the President's National Council. Initiatives have emerged for the rehabilitation of the Turkestan Legion, a national armed formation created by Nazi Germany in the republics of Central Asia. Statements against the Russians, who allegedly starved the Kazakhs in the 1930s, reappeared in parliament.

“I am especially touched by President Tokayev's thesis about the famine of 1921, allegedly organized by bloody Russian-Jewish Bolsheviks long before collectivization,” said the leader of the Socialist Movement of Kazakhstan, Ainur Kurmanov . - Here's what he wrote in his recent article:

“100 years have passed since the mass famine that claimed the lives of millions of Kazakhs in 1921-1922. If not for the mass death due to this disaster, the number of our people would have been much larger than it is now. These black pages of our history have not yet been comprehensively studied. Moreover, even among the scientists themselves there is no common understanding about the exact number of victims of famine. "

The paradoxical situation with "language patrols" in Kazakhstan itself at the official level is explained by the processes of urbanization, since, they say, the urban environment in the country is still predominantly Russian-speaking, and therefore the Kazakh population from villages and auls, moving to the city, masters Russian in order to be competitive in the urban labor market, which is, they say, wrong.

After watching the video, the head of Rossotrudnichestvo, Yevgeny Primakov, said that the government of Kazakhstan reacts extremely painfully when someone from Russia reminds of the origins of modern Kazakh statehood, and does not relay the propaganda myth about the Golden Horde. And the state is loyal to its national-patriots, since there are many of them. In addition, officials from Kazakhstan do not deny that they are building the Kazakh nation, but they assure that the Russians have no problems against this background ...

According to the statistics service of Kazakhstan, an average of 25,000 Russian-speaking citizens leave the republic for permanent residence in other countries per year. This year, there are clearly more of them.