Rear Admiral Gene LaRocque (USN, Ret.)
Director, Center for Defense Information
SENIOR PRODUCER:
Sanford Gottlieb
INTERVIEWER & NARRATOR:
Nick Moore
MARKETING & OPERATIONS:
Mark Sugg
PRODUCERS:
Matthew Hansen
Lori McRea
Nick Moore
Daniel Sagalyn
PRINCIPAL ANALYST & SCRIPTWRITER:
Nick Moore
PROGRAM PRODUCER:
Nick Moore
ORIGINATION:
Washington, D.C.
PROGRAM NO.:
503
INITIAL BROADCAST:
6 October 1991
CONDITION OF USE: Credit "AMERICA'S DEFENSE MONITOR"
(Center for Defense Information).
Special Funding for this episode of "AMERICA'S DEFENSE MONITOR"
provided by Ben & Jerry's Ice Cream.
(C) Copyright 1991, Center for Defense Information. All Rights Reserved.
Videotapes also available.
SABETKAZI AKATAYEV
Co-chairman, AZAT Movement
MARTHA OLCOTT
Author, "The Kazakhs"
MUKHTAR SHAKHANOV
Kazakh Writer, Political Leader
OLZHAS SULEIMENOV
Kazakh Poet, Political Leader
The republic of Kazakhstan is emerging from decades of Soviet rule to play a crucial role in the transformation of the former Soviet Union. Kazakhstan's President Nursultan Nazarbayev wields influence second only Gorbachev and Yeltsin as the republics and what remains of a central government scramble to reinvent themselves in the wake of the failed hardliner coup.
With rich natural resources, dozens of different ethnic groups, and a huge military complex that includes the principal Soviet nuclear test site and more long-range nuclear weapons than Britain, France and China combined, Kazakhstan is a rising power.
For the first time on American TV, "AMERICA'S DEFENSE MONITOR" presents an in-depth look at a complex and colorful republic at a pivotal point in its history.
["AMERICA'S DEFENSE MONITOR" program introduction.]
Admiral GENE LaROCQUE: For the past 70 years, most Americans have tended to think of the Soviet Union as one monolithic nation-state. We've begun to realize now that the republics really are separate. One of the most important republics of the Soviet Union is Kazakhstan. It is truly a separate republic: different background, different language and has lots of nuclear weapons. It behooves all of us to pay more attention to Kazakhstan today.
NARRATOR: Hi. We're heading into the Washington, D.C. subway system. I want to show you something.
This is a map over here of the area around the Metro station. It has landmarks and points of interests. If you look closely here, you see that it says "Russian Embassy." Now if I didn't know that this map had been here for years, one might think that the Washington Transit Authority had recognized the independence of the Russian Republic and designated an embassy for it even before that republic had declared its independence. Of course, the fact is that they got the name wrong on the map here because since the country was founded, it's been called the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics or the Soviet Union.
A common mistake, to be sure, and yet a prominent one, seeing as how the Soviet Union was our arch rival for over 40 years and still has thousands of nuclear weapons pointed at us. You'd think we could get their name right. It's sort of like an American going to a foreign country and finding his or her embassy labeled the "Californian Embassy."
But it's still true that when most Americans think of the Soviet Union, they think of Russia. And not without reason, because Russia, with a population and landmass bigger than that of all the other republics combined, was and is the dominant republic. But today we're going to look at one of the most important of the other 14 republics, the Republic of Kazakhstan.
Kazakhstan, where Ghengis Khan swept through as the Mongol Empire drove westward in the 13th Century and where the old Silk Route connected Asia and Europe:
Where to this day in some rural areas they play a sort of combination rugby-polo game with a decapitated sheep as the ball. I was told that originally the victor kept the sheep, but now they wash it and use it again. The game is routed in the Kazakhs' history as nomadic horsemen and livestock breeders.
Where more than 1000 long-range nuclear weapons are based on both missiles and long-range bombers.
Where the huge Aral Sea, which once supported a vital fishing industry, is being destroyed by shortsighted irrigation programs.
And where, in the summer of 1990, a hundred Americans who had heard that the Soviet Union was more than Russia and wanted to find out for themselves jointed a hundred Soviets on a three-week peace walk covering over a thousand miles of Kazakh territory.
But more on that later. Let's look at the map.
This is the former Soviet Union. This is Russia, covering the vast majority of that territory. This is Kazakhstan, four times the size of Texas, the second largest republic after Russia. Kazakhstan is one of five Central Asian republics, the other four being Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tadzhikistan and Kirghizia. At the time we produced this program, Kazakhstan was one of the few republics that had not declared its independence from the old Union.
The failed hardliner coup cut the strings that bound the republics to the central government in Moscow. Now more than 280 million people, occupying territory almost three times the size of the continental United States and possessing an enormous nuclear arsenal, have to create a new country almost from scratch, or, as it were, new countries.
And if we want to understand these people and their new countries better than we understood the old Soviet Union, we'll have to go a little farther than the headlines in the evening news because things are getting a lot more complicated.
As seen on American TV, for years the Soviet Union was reduced to the familiar image of Red Square, which seemed usually to be filled with thousands of troops, tanks, missiles and other military hardware that symbolized the menacing power of America's number one adversary. Now we need a new, different set of images.
Going from the onion domes of St. Basil's church on Red Square, for example, one might see the domes of an Islamic mosque or a yurta, a traditional Kazakh dwelling from their nomadic history.
Now you might ask, "Why Kazakhstan?" "What is so important about Kazakhstan?"
That's a good question for Martha Olcott. Born and bred in Brooklyn, New York, she has written an informative book on Kazakhstan and is a preeminent expert on the republic.
MARTHA OLCOTT: Kazakhstan's an important republic for a number of reasons. It has, they say, the second largest unexploited oil reserve in the world. It certainly will be eventually a major oil producer. It will help reverse the Soviet Union's energy decline. It has coal. It has copper. It is a live-stock producer, a major livestock producer. It's also the third largest grain-producing region in the country. Those are the economic reasons why Kazakhstan is important.
Kazakhstan is also the bridge between Asia and Russia. If Kazakhstan were to leave the Union, then Central Asia would never stay in the Union. I mean, it does bridge Muslim Soviet Union with European Russia.
NARRATOR: The word Kazakh is Turkic in origin and means "a freeman." The word was transformed in Russian and even more in English to describe the Cossacks, who are usually remembered for their feats as cavalry.
Kazakhs historically were nomadic livestock breeders, moving their communities and animals across the open steppe as the seasons dictated. Soviet rule destroyed the nomadic economy with two assaults. The first was Joseph Stalin's drive to abolish private ownership and establish large collective farms in the 1930s. This concept was utterly alien to the Kazakhs, whose identity was inextricably connected to animal ownership and mobility.
Ms. OLCOTT: Kazakhstan suffered worse than any other area of the Soviet Union from collectivization save the Ukraine. You can fight it out who lost more people proportionately during this period. There was terrible famine in Kazakhstan. Hundreds of thousands of Kazakhs migrated aimlessly looking for food, only to settle down to die near railroad stations and settlements. This was really the gravest tragedy in the past two or three hundred years that happened to the Kazakh people.
NARRATOR: The second assault was Khrushchev's Virgin Lands program in the 1950s that encouraged Russian settlers to farm lands in northern Kazakhstan that the Kazakhs has used for migration and grazing.
INTERVIEWER: What do you think that the long-term consequences of that basic disruption of their economy have been?
Ms. OLCOTT: I think there have been two major consequences of it. The first is it seriously diminished the number of Kazakhs. The Kazakhs, until the past decade, numerically don't surpass where there before collectivization. I think that it also really marred Kazakh culture, altered Kazakh culture in a way that would be very hard to recover from. The Kazakhs made the transition from a nomadic people to a settled people so strongly influenced by Russian culture that they lost a lot of their own national culture.
This generation of intellectuals that's now beginning to rule the republic, many of them don't speak their own language fluently or they can't read or write their language. Young Kazakh children growing up in Alma-Ata don't read or write or speak Kazakh. Maybe in that way, you know, that's probably the greatest tragedy, in a sense, of the Soviet period, that it altered the more normal path of modernization that a nomadic people would have by introducing such a highly disruptive path.
NARRATOR: While the native Kazakhs struggle to keep their culture in a completely changed environment, the rest of Kazakhstan was slowly growing and developing. It accumulated one of the most diverse populations in the former USSR, both because of Stalin's mass deportation of what he deemed to be "untrustworthy elements" to Kazakhstan and because of the settlers who arrived there over the years seeking opportunity.
Kazakhstan became a truly multinational republic and, over time, a kind of success story of the peaceful integration of different ethnic groups. Then came the so-called "December events."
Before the other inter-ethnic conflicts that have erupted in the Gorbachev era -- in Baku, Tblisi, Vilnius and elsewhere -- came two days of demonstrations and violence that revealed the fault lines in Kazakhstan's community. In December 1986, a crowd gathered in the capital, Alma-Ata, to protest Gorbachev's appointment of a Russian from outside Kazakhstan to lead the republic. The peaceful protest was violently suppressed, sending out a shock wave that fundamentally changed political life in Kazakhstan. Inter-ethnic harmony could not longer be assumed, it had to be negotiated. And efforts to secure real autonomy for Kazakhstan replaced passive obedience of the center.
Though Kazakhstan is a huge republic, it's population is the fourth largest, after Russia, Ukraine and Uzbekistan. Large portions of Kazakhstan are desert or semi-arid steppe and are lightly inhabited. With almost 17 million people, it's population is about the same as that of Texas.
Kazakhs account for only about 40 percent of the population, because of their decimation during collectivization and because of the massive immigration into the republic. And so, although the calls for autonomy became louder after 1986, the very diversity of the population has kept Kazakhstan from pressing all the way to independence.
Ms. OLCOTT: Kazakhstan is in a unique situation. It is the only republic in the entire Soviet Union where the titular nationality, where the Kazakhs are a minority in their own republic. The Kazakhs now, for the first time, are even a plurality in their republic. They're just under 40 percent of the population, where the Russians have two percent less. But they aren't the majority, they are outnumbered in their republic, so that makes them very vulnerable to charges of nationalism.
I mean, in a sense, they have this tension. They claim rights to that land as their homeland. But in a democratic referenda, they could never produce a majority, let alone a two-thirds majority to secede from the Soviet Union. So, as Kazakhs begin to try to think about how they want to take control of their own homeland, they're constantly confronted with this democratic liability. You know, they can't claim mass support, overwhelming support for the Kazakhization of Kazakhstan.
NARRATOR: Olzhas Suleimenov is a prominent Kazakh poet, politician, and leader of a powerful anti-nuclear movement.
OLZHAS SULEIMENOV (through translator): Our republic is extremely multinational and very complicated. Therefore, we can't take the same path at the Baltic States, which is decisive, but discriminates against a portion of the population. In Kazakhstan, that would give rise to such a social, national and multinational explosion that nothing would be left of the republic.
NARRATOR: While there was a strong central government in Moscow maintaining tight control, the chances of such an explosion were low. But now with the center gutted, age-old differences between Kazakhstan's ethnic groups are becoming more problematic. Nationalist leaders focus attention on the destruction of Kazakhstan at the hands of the old Russian-dominated Soviet Union.
Sabetkazi Akatayev is a co-chairman of the AZAT nationalist movement.
SABETKAZI AKATAYEV (through translator): Our present situation can be compared with that of the Mongol invasion. There is devastation everywhere. The pastureland is drying up. The Aral Sea is nonexistent and we're surrounded by radioactivity. It's devastation in the full sense of the word. Among all this, our Kazakh language, Kazakh culture and Kazakh statehood is all on the same level. They're like archeological specimens or extinct species.
NARRATOR: But exactly how would a Kazakh cultural revival affect the entire population of Kazakhstan? Take just the language, for example. The Kazakh people and their language are Turkic in origin. The Russian people and their language are Slavic, from a different ethnic group and language family. Listen to the difference.
Here's Olzhas Suleimenov speaking Russian:
(Suleimenov speaking Russian.)
And here Mukhtar Shakhanov, in our only interview conducted for this program in Kazakh, who you will meet again later.
(Shakhanov speaking Kazakh.)
NARRATOR: Presently in Kazakhstan, more people speak Russian as their first language than Kazakh, and they aren't eager to change that.
Geography complicates the situation.
The Russian population is generally concentrated in the northern parts of the republic, with Kazakhs constituting a much higher percentage in the south.
Ms. OLCOTT: When there was no real difference between Russia and Kazakhstan, when people in both areas learned only Russian, when the curriculum in schools was identical, it didn't really matter. So you lived in Kazakhstan, so you lived in Russia; you didn't have citizenship for your republic, you just had citizenship for the USSR; these weren't important differences. Now they're going to be important differences.
You know, the good news is that life in Kazakhstan is stable today, that it's a republic with a precarious ethnic balance that has managed through skilled leadership and somewhat better economic conditions than the country as a whole to keep holding together and moving forward. The bad news is that it could be a temporary or a tentative solution, that what holds Kazakhstan together is the rest of the country around it holding together and the ability to keep their economy afloat.
Kazakhstan is neither Russia nor Central Asia. And if we get a world that divides between Russia and Central Asia, it will have to figure out who it is or what it is. Is it an entity that can survive?
NARRATOR: An official here at the State Department, speaking anonymously, told "AMERICA'S DEFENSE MONITOR" that the possibility of Kazakhstan splitting into a Russian half in the north and a Kazakh half in the south was a matter of real concern to the United States. As long as Kazakhstan plays a unifying role connecting Central Asia to Russia, tensions are eased. If Kazakhstan did split, the possibility of hostile confrontation between Central Asia and Russia would increase.
Kazakhstan does have lot going for it. It has rich mineral resources; coal in the east, oil on the Caspian Sea. There's grain in the north, corn, sugar beets and livestock in the center, along with the principal Soviet space center. The capital, Alma-Ata, lies at the foot of a beautiful mountain range, home of a famous winter sports complex. A prominent German bank ranked Kazakhstan third of all the republics in economic potential, behind Ukraine and Russia.
Militarily, Kazakhstan is the home of numerous test sites for both nuclear and chemical weapons. There are two long-range nuclear missile deployments and one long-range bomber base. There are mostly likely short-range nuclear weapons, as well. The border with China has been a great concern for Soviet leaders and near it are positioned four motorized infantry divisions and a tank division.
The person in charge of managing this complex republic is its president, Nursultan Nazarbayev. His star has been rising, and along with Gorbachev and Yeltsin, he has been instrumental in shaping policy during the post-coup transition. He recently worked with Yeltsin to try to resolve the conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan. Before that, he sat at Gorbachev's right hand during the START Treaty summit in Moscow.
As Nazarbayev has enlarged the profile of Kazakhstan in the Soviet Union and the world, contacts between Kazakhstan and the US have been increasing.
When US Secretary of State James Baker visited Kazakhstan shortly after the coup, a colleague of mine passed me this newspaper report. It tells of a Kazakh couple who saw Baker swishing past in his limousine as they were headed to a maternity hospital to have a baby. In honor of the secretary of state, the couple, Abai and Sandugash Kulmagambetov, named their newborn son James.
And as I mentioned before, even some ordinary American citizens have visited Kazakhstan. During the worst years of the cold war, a cottage industry sprung up of Peace Cruises, Peace Walks, and the like. The idea is to get lots of citizens from both countries together to learn about each other and dispel their stereotypes.
They saw a lot of the landscape. They ate a lot of food. This was a bag lunch, Soviet-style.
INTERVIEWER: It looks like you've got a week's worth of groceries.
KATHERINE EMERSON: It's quite a bit of food.
NARRATOR: They witnessed traditional Kazakh singing and dancing, and some that wasn't so traditional.
They participated in a number of anti-nuclear testing rallies.
The trip ended at Semipalatinsk, where the principal Soviet nuclear test site operated until October 1989. Olzhas Suleimenov's Nevada-Semipalatinsk Movement has gathered massive support from a broad range of the population, successfully pressuring the government to stop nuclear testing at Semipalatinsk. This site will probably be converted to a scientific center.
But despite the talk of peace and the end of nuclear testing at Semipalatinsk, Kazakhstan isn't out of the nuclear woods yet. Kazakhstan's nuclear missiles and bombers may pose a much bigger problem.
A month after the coup, President Nazarbayev commented that he wanted to keep Kazakhstan's nuclear weapons in Kazakhstan, not move them to Russia, as Boris Yeltsin had suggested.
We spoke to Martha Olcott again when she had just returned from the former Soviet Union before she testified on these issues before a Senate committee.
Ms. OLCOTT: Nazarbayev's recent statement about his desire to keep nuclear weapons in the republic, I think it's good evidence of the kind of confusion that now prevails about what should be the fate of the Soviet nuclear arsenal. A lot of the talk, as you travel through the republics these days, is about the fears of Russia taking over the nuclear arsenal, the entire nuclear arsenal of the Soviet Union. And there's concern throughout the republics that this will mean an overwhelmingly powerful Russia. Whether Nazarbayev really wants Kazakhstan to have a nuclear arsenal or whether he's using this as a bargaining chip, I think is really an important question.
NARRATOR: In fact, while in Washington, D.C., Olzhas Suleimenov, a close associate of Nazarbayev's, told "AMERICA'S DEFENSE MONITOR" that Kazakhstan would keep its nuclear weapons until such weapons were reduced in all the republics that had them.
Mr. SULEIMENOV (through translator): Mr. Nazarbayev's declaration was made in that interview after Mr. Yeltsin's declaration, in which he communicated to the world his desire to bring back to Russia all nuclear weapons located in other republics; that is, in Kazakhstan, Ukraine and Byelorussia. This remark of his caused great concern among many people, including President Nazarbayev. I read about his statement in the paper, according to which he expressed the belief that as the Union collapses, no single republic should be allowed to increase its strength through nuclear weapons. He does not want any republic -- in this case, Russia -- to become a new super-nuclear power.
We know that rightist forces, reactionary forces are strong in Russia and that if, God forbid, Yeltsin should be taken from power and democracy should fail there, the rightist forces could take power and, with nuclear weapons, could create on the ruins of the old evil empire a new evil empire.
NARRATOR: President Bush's decision to cut some short-range nuclear weapons could lead to further cuts in long-range weapons that would ease tensions in the republics. Preoccupied with their economies, republic leaders like Yeltsin and Nazarbayev are most likely ready to make deals.
It remains to be seen if President Bush will continue to press forward in redefining our relationship with the former Soviet Union. The US administration continues to oppose a comprehensive nuclear test ban treaty, a measure that Gorbachev, Yeltsin and Nazarbayev have all advocated.
Kazakhstan will continue to be especially vulnerable to the forces unleashed by the failed coup. Despite the serious problems the republic faces, most of Kazakhstan's politicians are optimistic.
Mukhtar Shakhanov, who we heard earlier, is a revered Kazakh writer and political leader.
MUKHTAR SHAKHANOV (through translator): As a Kazakh, I want to say that our nation has survived many difficulties and has suffered much. But now we've acquired our sovereignty and now I can say I really feel as if I'm in my native land. But still, we have a lot of problems before our nation, before our republic, and I believe that in the future we will solve these problems.
NARRATOR: So far, Kazakhstan has been able to maintain a precarious balance. And while
continued tensions could lead to a violent split in the republic, if these people have their way, the
Kazakhstan of the future will provide a more hopeful model, a model of a complex, multi-ethnic
republic that develops, lives, works and stays together.
[End of broadcast.]
CONDITION OF USE: Credit "AMERICA'S DEFENSE MONITOR"
(Center for Defense Information.)
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