Hello, and welcome back to The Beet! 

I’m Eilish Hart, the editor of this weekly email dispatch from Meduza covering Central and Eastern Europe, the Caucasus, and Central Asia. If someone forwarded you this newsletter, sign up here to have our next issue delivered to you directly. Some of our feature stories — like last week’s report on Russians living with HIV in wartime — are available on Meduza’s website, but only subscribers receive every edition of The Beet. 

When hundreds of thousands of Russian draft dodgers began fleeing to Kazakhstan earlier this fall, President Kassym Jomart-Tokayev urged locals to look after them. Ordinary people had been offering their help for almost a week by the time Tokayev made this statement, but the influx of foreigners had indeed provoked concerns. Seven months before the mobilization, tens of thousands of Russian émigrés relocated to Kazakhstan when Moscow launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Now, a second wave of newcomers is disrupting daily life and dividing public opinion. In addition to raising the cost of consumer goods and rental housing, the inrush of draft dodgers has rekindled discussions about Moscow’s colonial legacy and the discrimination Central Asians face in Russia today. 

Experts I interviewed in October warned that this would happen. Public opinion in Kazakhstan about Russia, they explained, is undergoing a major shift. “Russian aggression against Ukraine has been jarring for many Kazakhs, including those whose first language is Russian,” sociology professor Azamat Junisbai told me. “Many are alarmed by the obvious similarities in the narratives deployed by Russian officials against both Ukraine and Kazakhstan.” Indeed, Russia’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine has not only stoked fears about Moscow threatening Kazakhstan’s sovereignty but also led to soul searching among Kazakhstan’s citizens who are Russian-speaking or of Russian descent. For The Beet, researcher Colleen Wood reports on how the ripple effects of Russia’s war have thrown Kazakhstani-Russian identity into sharp relief.

Who gets to be Kazakh(stani)?

By Colleen Wood

In the two weeks after Vladimir Putin announced Russia’s mobilization, some 200,000 Russian citizens fled to Kazakhstan. By October 4, more than 70,000 had received personal identification numbers, enabling them to work and live in the country long-term. 

For Kazakhstan’s Russian community, this influx of draft dodgers has forced a reckoning with the language they use to describe their political belonging and identity. Seeking to capture the difference between these new arrivals and local ethnic Russians, Kazakhstan’s Internet users began producing memes and TikTok trends. 

Alexey Skalozubov posted a meme contrasting russkie Russians (i.e. Russians from Russia) with orys — using the Kazakh word for “Russian” to refer to his compatriots of Russian heritage. The meme depicted a strong, qymyz-drinking Shiba Inu as a representation of “tolerant” Kazakh-Russians who “know three languages,” alongside a weaker character representing “chauvinist” Russians from Russia who are either “dying in Putin’s war” or “buying tickets to Georgia.”

Meanwhile, merch distinguishing Kazakhstani Russians from those who had just come across the border began popping up online. One Instagram store offered t-shirts emblazoned with “Men mestnyi oryspyn,” a bilingual announcement that the wearer is a local Russian and not someone evading the draft. The t-shirt producer declined to tell The Beet how many shirts have been sold, underscoring that “this is merely a joke.”

But sometimes a joke is not just a joke. While memes and graphic t-shirts may seem silly and frivolous, jokes in authoritarian Kazakhstan often serve as vehicles for political communication. Comedy not only provides relief from the weight of ordinary life, but, as cultural theorists have argued, also does important ideological work by challenging social and political conventions.

Skalozubov, who is of Russian heritage, says he got a lot of flack for his post, even though “it was just sarcasm.” His embrace of the orys identity, however, is entirely sincere. In March 2022, shortly after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, he founded a conversation club for Kazakh learners in Almaty called Batyl Bol! (“Be Bold!” in Kazakh). In the months since, clubs under the same name have cropped up in cities across Kazakhstan. 

Having grown up in a small city in the largely Russian-speaking Akmola region of northern Kazakhstan, Skalozubov studied with a Kazakh tutor for some time after moving to Almaty for work, but he didn’t like the format. “It was rote repetition of words, sentences, texts — the same as in school,” he told The Beet. “It was not a conversation.” With this in mind, he wants Batyl Bol to be a space where people can practice real-life language skills. “Going to the store, buying things, talking with colleagues and friends [in Kazakh] — it brings a lot of joy,” Skalozubov explained. 

Some 300 people signed up for the Almaty club’s first session back in March, and Skalozubov is thrilled that there’s been sustained interest. There’s a wide range of fluency among participants, says Skalozubov. And he’s particularly touched by the number of recently arrived Russian citizens who have joined the club. This includes Bashkirs, Tatars, and Azeris whose languages share Turkic roots with Kazakh, as well as ethnic Russians who “want to express their respect and to get better acquainted with the culture of the people who warmly welcomed and helped them.” 

Acts of solidarity

Language and identity have consistently been central concerns in Kazakhstan’s political culture. Social scientists reason that this is because independent Kazakhstan emerged from the Soviet Union’s collapse without an outright ethnic majority. According to the 1989 census, ethnic Kazakhs made up 40 percent of the population, slightly outnumbering Russians for the first time since the 1920s. The demographic balance resulted from waves of Russian in-migration; the deportation of Chechens, Germans, and Koreans to Kazakhstan; and the catastrophic death tolls resulting from Moscow’s forced settlement of nomads in the 1920s and the Kazakh famine of 1930–33, which killed 1.5 million people.

Soviet-era policies also suppressed the Kazakh language and culture. “During the Soviet period, all Kazakhs were expected to know Russian but no Russian was expected to know the Kazakh language,” Botakoz Kassymbekova, an assistant professor of modern history at the University of Basel, told The Beet. Whereas 98.5 percent of Kazakhs claimed Kazakh as their “mother tongue” in 1989, less than one percent of Russians professed to know any Kazakh. 

Back then, “Russian proficiency was considered a marker of your civilizational level,” Kassymbekova explained. This ethnolinguistic hierarchy has shifted somewhat since Kazakhstan became independent. “In general, the country has become a lot more Kazakh-speaking, compared to what it was 10, 15, let alone 20 years ago,” said Aziz Burkhanov, an associate professor at Nazarbayev University whose research focuses on nationalism and identity. 

This is partially the result of demographic changes. Approximately two million ethnic Russians left Kazakhstan in the 1990s, and Astana encouraged the repatriation of the Kazakh diaspora. Kazakhstan’s government has also taken measures to promote Kazakh as a national language through schooling and requirements for public service. But Burkhanov says there has been a shift in mindset, as well. While people previously associated Kazakh with poetry and early literary culture, mass media like contemporary music, podcasts, and cinema have made the language attractive to a broader audience. Accordingly, there has been an uptick in interest and resources for learning Kazakh online in recent years. 

Russia’s war against Ukraine has only fueled this trend. For Russian speakers in Kazakhstan — and ethnic Russians in particular — learning Kazakh has become a way of displaying civic loyalty. Kassymbekova sees local Russians’ efforts to learn Kazakh “as acts of solidarity on the most intimate level.” “Kazakhs celebrate Russians (or other ethnic groups) who speak Kazakh or identify themselves as Kazakhs because these acts refute past colonial oppression,” she said. 

‘Russians are the fourth jüz’

Journalists have pounced on stories about ethnic Russians learning and using the Kazakh language, but it’s not entirely clear if this is indicative of a widespread embrace of Kazakh identity in civic terms. According to Burkhanov, many Russians are “living physically in Kazakhstan but mentally are very connected to Russia, especially in the northern part of the country.” (Kazakhstan’s northern provinces have historically been home to higher proportions of ethnic Russians — a demographic detail that has spurred concerns over secession.)

Lukpan Akhmedyarov, an investigative journalist and human rights defender, says Russians in Kazakhstan are “in their own information bubble” thanks to satellite broadcasting from across the border, which Astana has struggled for years to restrict. 

Even so, Akhmedyarov maintains that there’s a discernible difference in the value systems of Russians who live in Kazakhstan and those from the Russian Federation. In particular, he emphasizes tolerance as a central characteristic of Kazakhstan’s Russian population. For example, a study conducted in early 2020 found that ethnic Russians in Kazakhstan were more willing to have friends who speak another language – 84 percent compared to 64.7 percent of ethnic Kazakhs.

Tolerance will play an important role in building an inclusive political and cultural future in Kazakhstan, Kassymbekova told The Beet. She expects it will take sustained civic engagement and uncomfortable conversations to make “Kazakhness” “an attractive political and cultural identity.”

For now, even the terminology remains contentious. In English, one way to pay verbal homage to Kazakhstan’s multiethnic population is to use the term “Kazakhstani,” which functionally breaks the Soviet association between language and national boundaries. But for Assel Bitavarova, a PhD candidate and researcher at Hokkaido University, “the term ‘Kazakhstani’ has always sounded unnatural, inorganic.” 

Skalozubov told The Beet that he personally prefers “Kazakh,” since it was historically not an ethnic term but a territorial one. He credits his worldview to his family. “Since childhood, my mother would tell me, ‘You live in Kazakhstan, so you need to learn Kazakh,’” he recalled. “You need it to understand people, to have a common language, and to find friends.”  

Bitavarova pointed to the old joke that “Russians are the fourth jüz” (the jüzes are the regional clusters of ancestral clans that make up Kazakh society; there are three). In turn, Skalozubov says he is met with “warm enthusiasm and happiness” when he introduces himself as a Kazakh from the Russian jüz. 

The jüz joke might not be as controversial as Skalozubov’s meme that pitted russkie against orys, but both speak to a wider attempt to grapple with what it means to be Kazakh today. 

“The Russian war of aggression against Ukraine showed how values of democracy and civic engagement can unite people of different backgrounds and overcome heavy colonial legacies,” Kassymbekova underscored. “Kazakh Russians play a pivotal role in post-colonial healing and a decolonized future, just as those who identify themselves as Kazakhs do.”

That’s all for this week, thanks for reading! 

For more on developments in Kazakhstan, check out The Beet’s analysis of the snap presidential election set to take place this weekend. Until next time,

Eilish