SOCIALISM AND THE EQUALITY OF NATIONS: KAZAKHSTAN

The objective of self-determination: equality of all nations. This means ending exploitation. Lenin's dispute with Stalin over autonomy vs. union of equal republics. Kazakhstan and the virgin lands program. Effect of development on nationalities. Leader of Kazakh party removed, replaced by Russian. No shortage of Kazakh cadres. Was Kunayev's removal because of political differences? Rebellion in Alma-Ata. Kunayev's speech to 27th Party Congress. Perestroika vs. big development projects. Accusations of corruption, favoritism. Great Russian dominance in Politburo. Harmonizing economic centralism with democratic rights for nationalities.

In one of his very last introductions to the Communist Manifesto (written February 1, 1893, for the Italian edition), Frederick Engels wrote that

. . . in any country the rule of the bourgeoisie is impossible without national independence. Therefore, the Revolution of 1848 had to bring in its train the unity and autonomy of the nations that had lacked them up to then. . . .

Without restoring autonomy and unity to each nation, it will be impossible to achieve the international union of the proletariat, or the peaceful and intelligent cooperation of these nations toward common aims.¹

Earlier, in the Communist Manifesto itself, written by Marx and Engels in 1848, the two young authors wrote:

In proportion as the exploitation of one individual by another is put an end to, the exploitation of one nation by another will also be put an end to. In proportion as the antagonism between classes within the nation vanishes, the hostility between one nation and another will come to an end.²

Kazakhstan is one of the 15 republics, officially called the Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic. It is the second largest republic in area in the USSR and the fourth largest in population. As of January 1, 1986, it had more than 16 million people. It is a vast stretch of land, very rich in minerals and other raw materials, including chromite ores, copper, lead, zinc, silver and tungsten. The Baikonur space launching station is located on its broad plains. To get an idea of the vastness and diversity of the land, Minnesotans pride themselves on being the state with 10,000 lakes, but Kazakhstan has 48,000 lakes! Kazakhstan today is the USSR's major granary. It harvests 40 times more grain than in 1922. In 1987, for instance, 27.4 million tons of grain were harvested in the republic.⁴ Nevertheless, Kazakhstan is generally thought of in the West as a poor, backward Asiatic republic and is only occasionally referred to when discussing the USSR.

Even Khrushchev in his memoirs⁵ is forgetful of the Kazakhs when he writes about his famous "virgin lands" campaign in Kazakhstan, its successes and difficulties.

You can imagine the difficulties that the Virgin Lands campaign posed for a family which had to be picked up and moved from the home where it had lived for generations. It was a great hardship for them, but we had to resettle many such families--Ukrainians, Belorussians and Russians--thousands of kilometers from the graves of their ancestors. Enormous material expenditures went into the resettlement campaign. Among other things, we had to give credit loans and financial aid to the youths who went out to build settlements in the Virgin Lands. We became convinced that we shouldn't set up collective farms out there; a collective farm is an artificial organization; that is, it's not a real community, and it would have been too expensive to resettle people on collective farms. Therefore we decided on the alternative of state farms. While I was in the leadership, our cheapest bread was grown by state farms on the Virgin Lands.⁶

What is striking about Khrushchev's description of the hardships of resettlement and the successes of converting Kazakh land into the principal granary of the USSR is that there is no mention of the indigenous Kazakh people.

The Medvedev brothers, Roy A. and Zhores, in their account of Khrushchev,⁷ give a critical evaluation of Khrushchev's agricultural policies, and dwell much on the virgin lands campaign. But here again, their concern is all with Khrushchev and his factional opponents, the success and failures of the agricultural campaign in Kazakhstan, but not so much as a word about the participation of the Kazakh people or what their leaders said, thought or did.

Of course, the virgin lands campaign concerned areas within the socialist state of Kazakhstan that had been mostly unpopulated. Still, one wonders how they could avoid mentioning the role played by the Kazakh people in the campaign, which must have vitally affected them. It is of course true that Kazakhstan, like most of the republics of the USSR, has innumerable nationalities. The native population in 1970 was composed of 4,234,000 Kazakhs. However, there were also substantial numbers of Russians (5,522,000) in the republic, primarily in the virgin lands of northern Kazakhstan and in the cities. There were also 842,000 Ukrainians, 288,000 Tatars, 260,000 Uzbeks, 188,000 Belorussians and 121,000 Uighurs, living in the valley of the upper Ili river. In addition there were 82,000 Koreans, primarily in the Alma-Ata and Kzil-Ord oblasts, and 70,000 Dungans from Middle Asia.⁸

From these figures alone, one can see the great complexity of the national question in Kazakhstan, and for that matter throughout the USSR, with its more than 100 nationalities.

The policy of the czarist government toward Kazakhstan was a colonialist one, aimed, as The Great Soviet Encyclopedia says, at "the russification of the Kazakh people and hindering the development of its national economy and culture."⁹ The migration policies of czarism speeded the disintegration of the communal lands (auls), which were seized by the czarist administration. Wherever the czarist autocracy was able to, it enlisted the support of the bais (feudal rulers) in plundering the peasant masses.

If the words cultural revolution are to be applied anywhere in their broadest definition, it's here in Kazakhstan. The Bolsheviks not only brought about a political transformation and a social revolution, in that they overthrew the old feudal-encrusted regime upon which czarist autocracy rested, but they completely wiped out illiteracy, which had affected over 90 percent of the population. The Revolution brought about a renaissance of native arts, music and theater, and also brought with it the great social and cultural achievements of the Soviet Union. It opened up an era of scientific and industrial development. It transformed the countryside. An area that had generally been nomadic and pastoral became a land with advanced industry and a very rich and diversified agriculture.

Before the Bolshevik Revolution, and early into the 20th century, Kazakhstan's economy served as a raw material base, not only for czarist Russia but also for the English, French and--yes--the U.S. It is true that most enterprises were small, but foreign capital dominated in mining and oil drilling, begun as early as 1911.

By 1971, there were almost 5 million people employed in the economy of the republic. More than a million worked in industry; more than half a million in construction; almost a million in agriculture; half a million in transportation and communication. Women made up 47 percent of the industrial and office workers. Socialist industrialization transformed the rural areas as well as the urban population centers and set Kazakhstan on the road to further socialist construction.

One must bear in mind the difference between the czarist policy of forced "russification" and the great increase in settlement of all parts of the Soviet Union after the Revolution. The latter basically grew out of the needs of socialist construction and the limitations imposed by frequent harvest failures in parts of the USSR due to drought and the general harshness of the weather.

Having said all this, and taking note of the hostile attitude of the imperialist countries and their ideologues, it is necessary to review the national question as it presents itself in the contemporary period. Some generalizations ought to be made, for instance, about the Soviet Socialist Republic of Kazakhstan, even though it may have its unique features, as do all the republics and nationalities.

For instance, on December 17, 1986, both Pravda and Izvestia carried a Tass dispatch from Alma-Ata, the capital of Kazakhstan, saying that "A plenary session of the Kazakhstan Communist Party Central Committee was held today to consider an organizational question." There would be nothing unusual in a plenary session of the Central Committee taking up organizational questions. However, the next sentence went on to say: "The plenary session relieved D. A. Kunayev of his duties as First Secretary of the republic Communist Party Central Committee in connection with his retirement on pension."

Of course, the Central Committee has a legal and political right to relieve its first secretary, the leader of the Party, and elect a new one. This can hardly be called an organizational question, however. Nevertheless, this might pass muster, so to speak, were it not for the fact that this organizational change was made in connection with then retiring him on pension. Was there a dispute about the magnitude of the pension that was involved? Was the retirement voluntary or, after serving 14 years as the leader of the Kazakh Communist Party, was he ousted?

Of course, even if it was a political move disguised as organizational for diplomatic purposes, it is still entirely within the province of the Central Committee to deal with its cadres as it sees fit, in accordance with socialist norms and constitutional provisions.

It is the next paragraph which gives one pause before dismissing the whole matter, whether it be political or organizational, as of only secondary importance. "G. V. Kolbin, a member of the CPSU Central Committee, who had been working as First Secretary of the Ulyanovsk Province Party Committee, was elected First Secretary of the Kazakhstan Communist Party Central Committee." And further on, "G. P. Razumovsky, Secretary of the CPSU Central Committee, took part in the work of the plenary session."

The official biography of Dinmukhamed Akhmedovich Kunayev,¹⁰ the dismissed first secretary, explains that he is a Kazakh born in Alma-Ata some 78 years ago. The son of an office worker, he became a machinist, later a chief engineer of a mine, then director of the Ridder Mine Administration, then vice chairman of the Council of Ministers of the Kazakh SSR, and later president of the Academy of Sciences of the Kazakh SSR. He became a candidate member of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the CPSU in 1966 and later a full member.

Some of his published works deal with the theory and practice of open-pit exploitation of deposits. He investigated and introduced efficient methods of cutting ore at mines in Kazakhstan. He has also been awarded three Orders of Lenin, the Order of the Red Banner of Labor and various medals.

His replacement, G. V. Kolbin, is a Russian, not a Kazakh. He too has a distinguished career in the Soviet Communist Party. But those who follow the national question and are sensitive to organizational questions that involve personnel changes would have cause to be concerned about the implications of this change.

One could dismiss it all by asserting the obvious, that Russians are now the most numerous nationality in the Kazakh SSR. However, Kolbin is not a Russian who settled in the Kazakh SSR, not one of those youths who came years ago to join one of the state farms. He, like Kunayev, is a graduate of a polytechnical institute, but in Sverdlovsk, not in Kazakhstan. He is a cadre who has been sent in from the center, and that has considerable significance.

The Central Committee has the juridical right to appoint or elect whatever secretary it wants. It must be noted, however, that for the center to send in cadres today is not the same as in the early Bolshevik period, when the provinces and the less developed nationalities clamored for the center to send more cadres. In those early days, the cadres were sorely needed as educators and industrializers. Sixty years later, there are now hundreds of thousands of cadres in Kazakhstan. Whole new generations have been brought up and educated in the spirit of socialism. Industry is much more advanced, and it is a scientific-military technological center. (When U.S. Secretary of Defense Carlucci visited the USSR recently in connection with his inspection tour of Soviet military installations, he went to one in Kazakhstan.)

It thus becomes a question how this dismissal is read, first by the mass of the people in Kazakhstan, and by the Kazakh population in neighboring areas, as well as by the general public opinion in the USSR. There were about six million Kazakhs in the USSR as of 1986, of whom 5.7 million lived in the Kazakh SSR. Some lived in the Uzbek SSR, the Turkmen SSR, the Kirghiz SSR, the Tadzhik SSR and some areas of the Russian SFSR.

From the point of view of making the kind of judgment that the Kazakhstan Central Committee is said to have made in relieving Kunayev of his post, it is good to remember that there are also Kazakhs in the Peoples Republic of China, in the Mongolian Peoples Republic, and--not to be forgotten in the current situation--in Afghanistan. They all speak the Kazakh language. All of this, it seems to us, would give one pause before making such a rash decision. It's not a question of procedure but of the political propriety of exercising such authority.

Finally, the question arises as to whether all this was not done under pressure from the Gorbachev administration. As we noted earlier, G.P. Razumovsky, the secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, also took part in this session. So we have two very high-ranking members of the Party actively participating in the decisions of a union republic central committee, in deliberations which are generally the exclusive province of the central committee of the union republic. Later, another member of the Politburo, M.S. Solomentsev, chairman of the CPSU Central Committee's Control Commission, was also there. The Control Commission, we should remember, deals with disciplinary and personnel matters as well as security problems. Altogether, three top-ranking members of the Central Committee were involved in a very critical decision which again would normally be the province of the Kazakhstan Central Committee.

A careful examination of this development in the light of the national question should have created hesitation before making such a decision. To be justified, it would have to involve a genuine imperative having serious significance for the whole country. As it was, all that was told to the public was that it was an organizational question involving retirement and pension.

However, in December 1986 the readers of Pravda got a new view in a report from Alma-Ata.

Instigated by nationalistic elements, a group of young students took to the streets in Alma-Ata yesterday evening and this afternoon to voice disapproval of the plenary session of the Kazakhstan Communist Party Central Committee decision. Hooligan, parasitic, and other anti-social individuals took advantage of the situation to commit unlawful actions with respect to representatives of law and order as well as to set fire to a food store and private automobiles and to commit insulting actions against citizens of the city.¹¹

What was the urgency which impelled the Gorbachev administration to make this drastic personnel change? The imperialist press, to the extent they covered it, implied that Kunayev was a Brezhnev supporter, a so-called conservative who would not follow the new line of restructuring (perestroika) of the Gorbachev administration. Assuming that that's correct, it is scarcely a reason for such flagrant intervention in the political process of a union republic, independent and equal under the constitution of the USSR.

A speech made by Kunayev at the 27th Party Congress, as reported in Pravda and Izvestia, shows that he supported the general line of the congress. His speech, however, is not distinguished by overwhelming enthusiasm for the reforms. He did, moreover, make some pointed criticisms which could be interpreted as going to the essence of the orientation of the new governing administration.

The Gorbachev administration stands for restructuring the national economy by intensive methods of development and making active use of scientific and technical progress. In particular, it is opposed to new big projects that involve heavy capital investment. This has been said time and again by representatives of the Soviet government, especially economists like A.G. Aganbegyan, Nikolai Shmelyov and Leonid Abalkin. Kunayev, however, had some points of criticism which showed that as far as Kazakhstan goes, he was looking in another direction.

A mighty fuel and power base for the country is being created in Ekibastuz. From there, electric power will travel along unique power bridges to the Urals and western Siberia. However, one must say that the commissioning of new capacities in the coal industry and the creation of a number of power stations that are called upon to provide very cheap electric power, not only to Kazakhstan, continues to be a bottleneck.¹²

These shortcomings are explained by the fact that the USSR Ministry of Power and Electrification is doing a poor job of strengthening capacities and expanding the base of its construction organizations in the republic, which has an extremely negative effect on the overall state of affairs.¹³ [Our emphasis--S.M.]