The Landscape of Kazakh Memory Work: Three Historical Frameworks (still) Shaping Perception of Russian and Soviet Eras

• In Event: Post-Imperial Reckonings: Decolonization, Memory, and Russian Influence

Abstract

Memory work involves not only elevating some histories, but elevating frameworks through which those histories are made meaningful in the present. This paper examines three aspects of historical representation of the Kazakh past and its relationship to Russia and the Soviet Union that inform and structure a contested landscape for contemporary Kazakh memory work. The first aspect of salient contemporary historical representation involves the relationship between the Russian Empire and the subsequent Soviet Union. While much contemporary scholarship and public opinion understands the Soviet Union as an empire, the relationship between the two successive political regimes, including the Bolsheviks’ imperial reconstruction, is not persuasively or squarely addressed in the broad interdisciplinary scholarship. Secondly, the paper examines the Soviet projections of their political project as being anti-imperialist. This claim, along with the “affirmative action” nationalities policy, long shaped scholars’ and the global public’s perception of the legitimacy of Soviet rule of the non-Russian republics, including Kazakhstan. The paper critically deconstructs aspects of this Soviet self-representation in light of its practice as well as in terms of chauvinistic elements of its ideology regarding Central Asia. Finally, the paper builds on critiques by Kassymbekova and others regarding the relationship between Soviet modernization and imperial / colonial rule. The widespread representation that modernizing projects are inherently non-imperial or non-colonial creates obstacles for critical memory projects directly or indirectly relating to the former.

Author

• Erich Steinman, Pitzer College