Battlefields of Ethnic Symbols. Public Space and Post-Soviet Identity Formation from a Minority Perspective

Abstract

This article provides an analysis of interdependencies between post-Soviet Erinnerungspolitik in public space and the individual perception of urban reconfigurations by ethnic Germans in Kazakhstan. Applying a qualitative social-geographic approach the author examines determinants of the process of ethnic symbolisation of real and imagined places. Individual biography and the extent of Soviet socialisation are factors shaping the personal perception of symbolic landscapes. From the perspective of the individual, space reflects the power distribution within society and hence, impacts on individual identity formation. Depending on the dominance of internal as opposed to external identification, the (perceived) changing ethnicised landscape of cities potentially fuels ethnic tension.

Notes

I would like to especially thank all interview partners in Germany and Kazakhstan for sharing their personal histories with me. Natalia Weisshaar, Andrea Gawrich, Rut Gollan, Günter Heinritz and two anonymous referees as well as participants at the Changing Europe Summer School in Warsaw and the War and Our World Conference in Manchester have made helpful comments and constructive suggestions and thus contributed to improving this research. I am also grateful to Barbara Dietz for making available the survey data collected by the Institute of Eastern European Studies, Regensburg. Responsibility for all errors remains mine.

The mass emigration of minority members in the 1990s which will be discussed below partially refutes this official version, as no truly civic state should be willing to tolerate such an exodus of citizens.

A similar monument in Astana, Kazakhstan, was removed in 1997 in order to reshape the future capital city. However, despite some local protests, the population did not violently contest the removal.

The survey was carried out by the Institute for Eastern European Studies, Regensburg (formerly Munich) (Sample size: 506); for details see Dietz (1995).

A notable recent exception is Gill (2008) who focuses on the changing role of a single symbol during the post-Soviet regime change.

See e.g. Kaiser (2002) for a comprehensive analysis of how spatial ideologies contribute to the making and reproduction of the concept of homelands.

The interviews with two young women (Maria, 23, and Larissa, 26) revealed that internal identification can also rely on the perceived personal duty to transmit (as mothers) the historical ethnic ties into the next generation. For full details of interviewees, please see Table A1.

For more details see the methodological appendix below and Danzer (2005).

It has to be noted that previously communist political leaders occasionally make explicit use of Islam in their national projects which was already reflected in the steady growth in the number of mosques between 1989 (44) and 1996 (600). For details see Kolstø (2000, p. 73).

Possibly, believers may also be more likely to obey the commandment of charity.

For details see Danzer (2008).

Individuals of all three groups had held the German nationality according to their Soviet passports and were principally entitled to become citizens of the Federal Republic of Germany according to German law under articles §4, §7 or §8 of the Bundesvertriebenengesetz (Danzer 2005).

President Nazarbaev had stated that the choice of Astana as Kazakhstan's capital was the result of hundreds of years of search by his nation (Nazarbajev 2002).

It has to be noted that in the aforementioned survey among Germans in Kazakhstan in 1994, 55.3% stated that the economic situation was one of the major push factors in their migration decision, while 23.7% cited the wish to live in a better national setting.

On the contrary, one might expect that opinion about symbolic landscapes that are still experienced on a daily basis (in the Kazakhstan sample) would be stronger than opinion about symbols perceived some years before migration (in the Germany sample).

This perception is widespread throughout all the post-Soviet space, as noted by one of the anonymous referees of this article.