The Kazakhstani Soviet not? Reading Nazarbayev’s Kazakhstani-ness through Brezhnev’s Soviet people

ABSTRACT

Rather than interpreting President Nursultan Nazarbayev’s nation-building model of Kazakhstani-ness as a balance between civic and ethnic forms of nation-building, we show that Kazakhstani-ness was styled on Leonid Brezhnev’s supranational modern identity of the Soviet People. We explore three similarities by comparing rulers’ discursive aspirational statements (rather than historical policy trajectories) in a single case study of Kazakhstan. Both discursive models were based on teleological supranational state ideology, both were depicted as modern and advanced, and both modelled the new identity on the language and culture of ethnic majority. We used thematic discourse analysis in over 50 government documents and speeches of leaders to illustrate our argument. This case presents bigger lessons for regime’s power of defining the national membership in post-Soviet Kazakhstan and beyond.

KEYWORDS:

• Soviet People
• Kazakhstani-ness
• nation-building model
• Brezhnev
• Nazarbayev

Acknowledgements

The authors sincerely thank the journal editor and two anonymous reviewers for providing valuable comments and suggestions. We also express our gratitude to the participants at the 2019 CESS Workshop on the ‘Sovietness in Nation-building Strategies of Central Asian States’.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.