...With Kazakh nationalism having become mostly the purview of the
anti-Russia opposition here, the government has had to use other avenues to
promote a coherent national identity. That is no small challenge in this
country of 17 million people who span 80 different ethnicities and nearly as
many religions - a direct legacy of the Soviet Union's use of Kazakhstan as
a holding pen for prisoners, dissidents and people who did not fit in the
Russian mainstream...

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/31/world/asia/31kazakhstan.html?_r=1&oref=slo
gin&ref=world&pagewanted=print


December 31, 2006
Politics, Economics and Time Bury Memories of the Kazakh Gulag
By ILAN GREENBERG

KARAGANDA, Kazakhstan - Maria Sadina hunched over fading pictures of her
parents, ethnic Germans who were deported in 1941 from the Volga region in
Russia to one of Karaganda's many gulag camps.

Ms. Sadina's father was imprisoned for praising the quality of a German-made
tractor, and for a decade he worked as a slave laborer in the nearby coal
mines. Her mother was sent to the Karaganda gulag simply for her German
heritage.

They had married and reared their daughter, Ms. Sadina, in a two-room brick
house so low to the ground that visitors must bend over to avoid hitting the
ceiling. Ms. Sadina, now a grandmother, continues to live in the same house,
the walls now appearing to crumble, tending the same garden her parents once
harvested to survive.

She pointed to the neighbors' homes through her kitchen window. "These
people are all children of the gulag," she said. "Nobody talks about it
anymore. Nobody even wants to look at their pictures anymore."

The gulags once spread over the Kazakhstan steppe like a thick wreath.
Eleven sprawling camps with names like Alzhir, a Russian acronym for the
Akmolinsk Camp for Wives of Traitors of the Motherland, housed hundreds of
thousands of prisoners and their families. The camps, built shortly after
the creation of the Soviet Union, were partly emptied to provide soldiers
and workers during World War II and were eventually closed, although not
dismantled, after Stalin died in 1953.

In Kazakhstan today, a large percentage of people have parents or
grandparents whose life trajectories were savagely rewired by deportation
and imprisonment in the camps. But memories of the gulags are dying, fading
like Ms. Sadina's photos.

"For younger generations the gulag is uninteresting," said Arest Savchak, a
61-year-old teacher whose parents and grandparents were exiled to Karaganda
as political prisoners for the crime of supporting Ukrainian nationalism.
"After the collapse of the Soviet Union, when we entered market economy, the
values and the views of people have changed. Unless the gulag can be linked
to the present time, it is meaningless."

For many Karaganda youngsters, the oppression the gulags stand for does not
register. "This was just a village for miners," said Sasha Talabaev, 12, who
was riding a bicycle through the heart of what was one of the gulags. Some
of the reasons for a quick and collective forgetting are obvious. The
memories, after all, are painful. And since the fall of the Soviet Union and
Kazakhstan's independence in 1991, there are more pleasant things to focus
on.

Growing affluence is one of them. The economy is growing at about 10 percent
a year, and with the aid of oil, the country has developed a sophisticated
middle class and has nurtured to maturation a regional banking center. Its
once dour towns have metastasized into modern cities.

But there are political aspects to a sidestepping of Kazakhstan's recent
history, too, often born out of the government's determination to stay
friendly with Russia.

To sustain support for a pro-Russia foreign policy, "the Kazakhstan state
has gone to great lengths to construct an ideology for its nation-state that
glosses over its colonial and neo-colonial history with Russia," Sean R.
Roberts, a researcher in Central Asia affairs at Georgetown University,
wrote on Dec. 19 in his Web log about the region.

Although those efforts have not added up to a blanket ban on public
remembrances of the gulags, the government has instead chosen to ignore the
issue. And it has used its control of the education system to keep texts
from dwelling on the topic.

In a more pointed example of control, the government forbade large-scale
remembrances of a violent uprising in Almaty, the capital, that took place
in December 1986. As many as 40,000 ethnic Kazakhs poured into Almaty's
central square then to protest Mikhail S. Gorbachev's firing of the chief of
the Kazakh Soviet state. Soviet security forces are estimated to have killed
at least 200 protesters on the square.

The rebellion was a watershed for Kazakh identity. It resonated too strongly
for the government to ignore this year, so in October, President Nursultan
A. Nazarbayev quietly dedicated a statue to commemorate the event. But the
gesture received little coverage in the Kazakh press, which is closely
monitored and controlled by the government.

Opposition leaders and several thousand nationalists hoped to use the statue
as a gathering point for an antigovernment rally on the anniversary, but the
government moved swiftly to crush preparations for it.

With Kazakh nationalism having become mostly the purview of the anti-Russia
opposition here, the government has had to use other avenues to promote a
coherent national identity. That is no small challenge in this country of 17
million people who span 80 different ethnicities and nearly as many
religions - a direct legacy of the Soviet Union's use of Kazakhstan as a
holding pen for prisoners, dissidents and people who did not fit in the
Russian mainstream.

Popular culture has been one tool of choice, especially through the
government-financed movie studio KazakhFilm, which has a near monopoly on
the country's film industry. This year the studio released its biggest hit
yet, a historical piece called "Nomad" that delved into distant history,
telling the little-known story of an ancient battle to give an uplifting
view of Kazakh identity. The film, a $34.5 million production, broke
box-office records in Kazakhstan, grossing more than $1 million here and
also doing well in Russia.

Despite the huge expense of such historical movies, KazakhFilm plans more.
But the company's chief executive, Talgat Temenov, says that none will be
set in the 20th century.

"The Kazakh people have a tragic history, but with a movie like 'Nomad,'
people can feel a sense of pride," he said. "Film is an art and should not
be a political tool, but at the same time we need to respect what history
can do to people's psychology."

Steven A. Barnes, an assistant professor of history at George Mason
University who has studied the gulags in Karaganda, insists that history's
relevance to society is exactly why remembering Kazakhstan's painful gulag
past is so important.

"In the post-Soviet space, the trip from remembering to forgetting has been
remarkably swift," he said. "Perhaps such public forgetting would seem less
problematic if not for the fact that it enables strong, authoritarian rule
that clamps down on basic human rights like freedom of speech and the right
of assembly."