The Archaeology of Nationalizing Regimes in the Post-Soviet Space

Abstract

The article focuses on the nature of nationalizing regimes and nationalist narratives in post-Soviet Kazakhstan and Latvia, both of which have significant Russian-speaking minority populations. In addressing the evolution of these regimes, the article examines the differences between the more nationalistic trend in Latvia and the more ambiguous identity projects in Kazakhstan and the reasons why these two tendencies have persisted. Movements, parties, and elites have changed over time, altering the political competition, but not the agenda of the nationalistic groups seeking power within the regime. The article proposes to study the winning and losing political groups through the prism of the nationalizing regimes—the ideational and decision-making framework of nation-building that guides and controls the dominant discourses about the nation.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I am grateful to comments and suggestions provided by David Lane, Prajakti Kalra, Sally N. Cummings, Hazem Kandil, and Thomas Jeffrey Miley, Tomohiko Uyama, and Natsuko Oka. Two anonymous reviewers provided much needed comments and I thank them for their attentive reading and encouragement. Parts of this research were presented at seminars in Cambridge in 2011, 2012, 2014, and 2015 and virtually in Makuhari, Japan, in August 2015 respectively and I thank all participants for their insightful comments and questions. I also want to thank my colleagues, mentors, and friends at the University of Latvia’s Department of Sociology, where I was based during my fieldwork in Latvia. I am grateful to Alice Nemcova and OSCE Secretariat staff for assisting me during the archival research on OSCE and CoE documentation.

FUNDING

Research and extended field trips for this article were generously funded by the University of Cambridge Overseas Trust Fieldwork Fund, University of Cambridge Department of Sociology Fieldwork Fund, Trinity Hall Graduate Fund, University of Central Asia, CEELBAS Grant for Researcher-in-Residence at OSCE (2013), and a CEELBAS fellowship to study abroad (Latvian language acquisition).

Notes

^1. Kazakhstan and Latvia were the only two post-Soviet countries where a Russian-speaking “minority” (defined here as excluding indigenous people who are Russian-speaking) constituted a majority or close to majority proportion to the titular ethnic groups—almost 40 per cent in Kazakhstan and around 38 per cent in Latvia in 1989— but they were not the only countries with large Russian-speaking enclaves. Estonia and Ukraine came close, with 30 percent in Estonia and 22 percent in Ukraine. See Laitin 1998.

^2. The power elites have the most power in decision-making and in determining the limit and the frameworks of national ideology or ideologies. The power elites are thus “composed of men [and women] whose positions enable them to transcend the ordinary environments of ordinary men and women; they are in positions to make decisions having major consequences” (Mills 2000, 3.).

^3. Anonymous interview with a former member of the power elite, in a series of interviews between August 2012 and September 2013 in Almaty, Kazakhstan.

^4. Adamson 1980; Hoare 1978; Forgacs 1988; March 2003.

^5. Anonymous, interview with a former member of the power elite (these power elites had the most power in decision-making and in determining the limit and the frameworks of the national ideology or ideologies) under Nazarbayev’s transition, August 22, 2012, Kazakhstan.

^6. In his 1990 publication, the famous Soviet Latvian writer and chairman of the Latvian Writers Union, Janis Peters, mentions one of the slogans at the time—“Migrants Are Latvia’s Chernobyl”—which, according to him, was a “sign of a very low culture bordering on cynical racism” (Peters 1990,17).

^7. The OSCE Mission to Latvia’s repository of confidential reports on the 1993–1994 Saeima (parliament) includes discussions about the citizenship law and the quota-based system of naturalization, specifically outlining this argument of the far right parties like LNNK and TB (back then still separate movements) which simply opposed even the possibility of naturalization without advanced proficiency in Latvian. Their initial proposal was to accept no more than 0.1 percent of the non-citizen population, in order not to endanger the Latvian core of the new polity. See also Horowitz 1993 and Aasland 2002 on democracy and exclusion in divided societies, and Kruma 2013 on access to electoral rights in Latvia.

^8. The Wordsmith software programs were used to identify these words and selections.

^9. During nineteen months of fieldwork I collected more than 150 interviews with political elites in Latvia and Kazakhstan using the snowballing sample.

^10. Data on non-citizens drawn from the OSCE and Latvian Citizenship and Naturalization Board reports, and direct numbers quoted from OSCE document Reference No.: 376/97/L.

^11. Naturalization Board data for 1996.

^12. From author’s interview with a pro-Russian activist in Riga, August 2013.

^13. Anna story in Diena, August 6, 1997.

¹⁴ From the Naturalization Board of the Republic of Latvia reports and OSCE Mission to Latvia reports.

^15. These domains were top priority for the OSCE’s High Commissioner on National Minorities, Max van der Stoel, in recommendations and long-term negotiations with Latvian elites.

^16. The TB/LNNK expressed the most stringent position regarding the policy on Latvian language acquisition by non-Latvian ethnic minorities during the naturalization process and in the educational reform. The OSCE mission statements reveal that the TB/LNNK fraction in the parliament consistently opposed the idea of allowing Russian-speaking high school students to waive the language test during the naturalization process and present their school exams in the Latvian state language instead.

^17. The majority of those applications were, however, made outside the window system: for the first three years, 81 percent of applications were for extraordinary naturalization (the spouse or child of a citizen); 11 percent were made by window 1 (16–20), 5.5 per cent by window 2 (21–25), and 2.5 per cent for window 3 (26–30).

^18. Author’s interview with a parliamentary leader from the Vienotiba (Unity) party, Riga, May 2013.

^19. Baltic Barometer (Rose 1997) results.

^20. Author’s interview with Brigita Zepa in Riga, February 2013.

^21. From author’s interview with a pro-Russian activist, Riga, August 2013.

^22. From author’s interviews in Riga, February–May 2013, and OSCE Secretariat archival data consulted in October–December 2013.

^23. The Baltic post-Soviet postcolonialism narrative dismissed the vast industrialization of the country during the Soviet period, which brought the economic development to Latvia and contributed to its privatization in the 1990s. See Nissinen 1999.

^24. From the archival data on the discussions in the Ideological Committee under the President’s Administration, Republic of Kazakhstan, Presidential Archive, Fond 5N, Almaty, Kazakhstan.

^25. Ibid.

^26. Constitution of the Republic of Kazakhstan, 1993 (abolished in connection with the adoption of the new constitution on August 30, 1995).

^27. Third paragraph of Article 4 of the 1993 constitution stated: “All citizens of the Republic who were forced to leave the territory of the Republic as well as Kazakhs living in other states are recognized for the right of citizenship of the Republic of Kazakhstan along with the citizenship of other states if it is not contrary to the laws of the State of which they are part.”

^28. Constitution of the Republic of Kazakhstan, August 30, 1995.

^29. Author’s interview with one of the leaders of the Kazakh national-patriot movement, January 2013, in Almaty, Kazakhstan.

^30. See Sarym 2015.

^31. Brubaker 1994, 2011.

^32. Author’s August 2012 interview with Pyotr Svoik, opposition politician whose article “Russian Is the State Language in Kazakhstan” in summer 2012 created a lot of controversies in Kazakhstani society.

^33. Abdigaliev, “Yazikovaya politika v Kazakhstane” (Language Policy in Kazakhstan), in Abdygaliev 2007. In an interview with the author (September 2014, Almaty, Kazakhstan), Berik Abdigaliev voiced this opinion again, recounting that, “for more than twenty years of independence the regime only achieved language divisions where many Russian-speaking people do not speak and are not able to understand and communicate in the Kazakh language.” To Abdigaliev this situation presented a threat to the future stable development of Kazakhstan as a unified society.

^34. Abdigaliev 2007, 238.

^35. Elsewhere I use this concept of contemporary Kazakhstan’s ideology as compartmentalized ideology to identify a technique that employs a controlled ambiguity of a discursive field of identities issued and used by the regime. In this manner, two opposing identities—Kazakhstani (civic and depoliticized ethnic identity under the state-belonging identity) and Kazakh (predominantly ethnic, calling for legitimation via primordialism) —are used interchangeably, based on the audiences and contexts in which these messages and discourses are addressed by the regime and by President Nazarbayev himself.

^36. In December 2011, on the eve of the independence day celebration (the twentieth anniversary), a six-month-long labor conflict involving oil workers resulted in bloodshed after unknown demonstrators attacked the main square. This became one of the most murky as well as violent incidents in post-1991 Kazakhstan.

^37. National-Patriot Opinion Leader 2’s interview with the author in January 2013, Almaty, Kazakhstan.

^38. Sarym 2015.

^39. See the “anti-heptyl” movement website http://antigeptil.com. It is a rather spontaneous movement with no clear present leadership, which is identified with provocative manifestations against Russia’s position and inaccurate calculations of rocket launches from the Baikonur cosmodrome that have resulted in spills of the toxic substance heptyl. For further discussions on the Baikonur disputes, see Ganga 2014.

^40. Author’s interview with a leader of the parliamentary fraction of the Ak Zhol (Bright Path) party, August 2012, Almaty, Kazakhstan. The interview source, who wished to remain anonymous, stated that “the regime started making systematic mistakes in terms of political rumors about lending land to China, demonstrating that it is no longer capable producing new ideas or sustaining its quasi-ideology.”

^41. National-Patriot Opinion Leader 2’s interview with the author in January 2013, Almaty, Kazakhstan.

^42. Author’s interview with a leader from the parliamentary fraction of the Ak Zhol party, August 2012, Almaty, Kazakhstan.

Additional information

Funding

Research and extended field trips for this article were generously funded by the University of Cambridge Overseas Trust Fieldwork Fund, University of Cambridge Department of Sociology Fieldwork Fund, Trinity Hall Graduate Fund, University of Central Asia, CEELBAS Grant for Researcher-in-Residence at OSCE (2013), and a CEELBAS fellowship to study abroad (Latvian language acquisition).