"Not all Kazakh culture fell into the patterns by which a nation was produced"

Interview with Alima Bisenova

Kazakhstan has a long and difficult relationship with Russia. During the Soviet Union, the republic became one of the bridgeheads for the formation of a nation. The creation of a new, Soviet culture of Kazakhs took place against the backdrop of hunger, repression and environmental colonialism. How do these processes perceive these processes now? And what becomes - or can it become a new Kazakh identity? We talked about this with the researcher Alima Bisenova, an assistant professor at the Department of Sociology and Anthropology of Nazarbayev University.

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History and creation of the Kazakh nation

What was the history of Kazakhstan before joining the Soviet Union? How was it told and preserved?

Before the Sovietization, the history of Kazakhstan was diverse. Each khanate justified its legitimacy, so there was a multiplicity of history. By the end of the XIX - beginning of the 20th century, Kazakh intellectuals, who often received a Muslim education, began to systematize this knowledge: they recorded the stories of places, told who studied from whom, how the khanates developed. Sources such as the chronicle of Genghis-Nama or the works of Rashid ad-Din were also used, where the chronology of rulers and events was recorded.

The tradition was oral, mixed. The strongholds were recorded, and something else was supplemented in oral stories, legends about the origin of childbirth, known to the personalities of the ancestors, ancestors and the most important events. And later, the history of the European type came, when all this converges together, in some general teleology, which can now be called the history of Kazakhs as a single nation.

And what has changed with the beginning of Sovietization?

The Sovietization of the 1920s-it was like that, about the flowering and development of national cultures. There is a book by Adib Khalid “Creation of Uzbekistan”, where it is well described how intellectuals were drawn into the processes of rooting: collecting folklore, production of new works, compiling textbooks for education, which has become massive.

Credinization is the political and cultural campaign of Soviet power in the 1920s and early 1930s. On the national policy of the rooting, the authorities created national-territorial autonomies, prepared and promoted representatives of local nationalities to leading positions, introduced local languages ​​into office work, education, and the media. In the late 1930s, the policy of rooting was rolled up, and its noticeable participants were repressed.

In the 1930s, ideologization began. The party says, appoints how to write. The Book of Francin Hirsch “The Empire of Nations” well shows how scattered social groups in the USSR should have become nations. The Kazakhs were already more or less collected-in the sense of imagination-a nation due to the preservation of history, connections, understanding of their space. Although, of course, the difference between the north and south, the west and east of Kazakhstan was huge, they were part of different administrative formations of the Russian Empire. The West of Kazakhstan was part of the Orenburg region, the east of Kazakhstan-to the West Siberian governorship. Turkestan was part of the military general general.

The “collecting” of the nation in the 1930s took place within the framework of the general ideology: there should be so many autonomous nations at the union level. And when the Kazakhs received the Union Republic in 1936, nation -playing on Soviet patterns began. And the Soviet project was like this: people are a territory, historical community and language. Since it was necessary to connect the people with the territory, autochthonousness appeared: we have always been here and will always be. They began to write history according to the Marxist-Leninist formation parameters: primitive communal system, slavery, feudalism, and so on.

The Kazakhs, the Buryats, the Mongols and many others were nomadic society. How to represent it in this paradigm? What classes? Who is the class struggle with? For example, in the Kazakh tradition it was not customary to talk about khans badly, and now they have begun to describe them as satraps that exploited ordinary people. Not that we had no critical attitude to khans or to anyone, but such a division into classes was planted. Moreover, often people who did this, wrote texts, themselves were from the highest, intellectual class-of course, Baysko-Khan.

I am just reading the “empire of the positive action” of Terry Martin now, and he describes how the Soviet Union wanted to attach people to the territory, to avoid enclaves beyond its borders. For the authorities, it was a concession to local nationalisms in order to calm them down and eventually move from the national, ethnic to the class system, to the victory of the proletariat. But then times changed. Did people have an alternative idea of ​​Kazakhstan in the Stalin era, which they preferred not to voice?

Yes, absolutely. We have an article “The pressure of metropolis and the quiet nationalism of academic practices” that knowledge, about the family, for example, was not visible to Soviet party leaders and editors of history on history. They would be called remnants. People hid old books on the Turk , told each other a story orally. This knowledge was intimate and very important for people, and of course, the Soviet government could not get into such an intimate sphere.

Large debates go about which proportion to apply to each phenomenon. On the one hand, there was a modernization of culture, the creation of a nation, they grabbed some people like Dina Nurpeisova -a woman 75 years old, she is so powerful, always sits in Turkish, with a large turban, and they record it everywhere. The same Jambul Dzhabaev , who was 80 years old and who did not speak Russian-he became a convenient object of representation of the classical East. On the other hand, all the copyright that did not fall into this framework, everything related to religion, of course, was prohibited.

Now there are a lot of debate: how original is this culture and how fabricated it is? Even many transfers literally fabricated: they added that people in the Kazakh language did not speak. Even the musical instruments were redone! Asian peoples were supposed to fit under Soviet (and in the root of European) standards, what should be a musical instrument (with iron strings), what an orchestra should be. Our costume was initially not very different from the clothes of nomadic Uzbeks who went on horses: a robe, a red-green chapan, small heels in women and men. But it was necessary to create the difference, because nation -playing is also about the difference: this is Kazakh costume, this is Uzbek, this one is Kyrgyz. We still do not stop debate, how much the folk costume theatrical costume is. But this theatricality still lives. If you come to a large cultural event in Kazakhstan, you will see it.

The Kazakh intelligentsia participated in the process, of course. Our poets were assigned literary secretaries to Jambul. Then other poets who did not know Kazakh at all wrote whole poems. For cultural production, by the way, they paid well. There is evidence of how the author of the “first Kazakh folk operas” Evgeny Brusilovsky asked Saken Seyfullin , then the Prime Minister, very large amounts.

Everything was not black or white, there is no such thing that we are only victims. The Kazakhs were communists, they were also involved in this one -sided cultural production. But not all Kazakh culture could fall into these patterns by which a nation was produced.

Repression and hunger: what can be the memory of a difficult legacy

Kazakhstan has always served as a place of exile, deportations since tsarist times. How does it all see this from the Kazakh prospect? And what do they say about this now?

Of course, this is a lot about this, it has been well investigated. 30 kilometers from Astana was A.L.Zh.I.r. - Akmola camp of wives of traitors of the homeland. Now his buildings have become a museum of memory. Karlag, one of the most significant camps of the Gulag, was also in Kazakhstan. These were Soviet penitentiary infrastructures in our territory, an ominous period of history. Then, in the 1950s, they began to close, and the infrastructure-to switch to peaceful rails. And it was a huge infrastructure, all these sharashki, the "sharashkin of the office."

“Sharashki” is special research and design design bureaus in the USSR at the NKVD prisons, where repressed engineers, scientists and specialists worked; They have been created since the late 1920s and were especially widespread in the 1930-1940s. In Kazakhstan, as in other regions, such institutions existed under the camps of the Gulag, in particular in Karaganda and Alma-Ata, where prisoners-industrialists, geologists or farmers were involved in the development of projects for mining, metallurgy and agriculture. On the one hand, the conditions in sharashki were better than in ordinary camps (for example, food and the ability to work by profession), on the other hand, it remained forced labor under protection, in isolation and constant fear of a new term.

All this is well described, like people who dispossessed in the 1920s, they themselves fell under cleaning, then the people who cleaned were faced with other cleaning and so on. The absolute totalitarianism of the Soviet Union is now often remembered as order. But when you start reading, you understand that there was no order, there was totalitarian chaos. A very complex process when the revolution chokes in its own blood.

And all this happened against the backdrop of the most large migration processes.

We recently discussed with colleagues that virgin lands were the most large -scale migration project from west to east. For 10 years, two and a half million people came to Kazakhstan. It was the ideology of production, development. The Kazakhs themselves belonged to nature, to the steppe completely different. The plowing of huge territories, followed by erosion from this extensive agriculture, then rollback is a very large -scale process.

Kazakhstan accepted everything, accepted, accepted people from everywhere, mainly from the Soviet Union and Russia. This began with the Stolypin reforms of the beginning of the 20th century. And in the 1970s, an outflow began: people left who were brought by force, or workers from large construction projects. It continues in the 1980s, in the 1990s. One and a half million people left, but the same amount came: they were repatriates from China, Mongolia, Uzbekistan.

The last migration from Russia after mobilization is, of course, also an interesting phenomenon. Recently, the writer Guzel Yakhina gave an interview that he now lives in Kazakhstan, and said that from Asia she sees the world differently, that this completely reformatted her. And that she understood her Eurocentricity.

And how is this difficult Soviet heritage now? And to its material part: monuments, architecture?

It seems to me that there is no radical attitude towards Soviet monuments. This is the European fashion - monuments in the squares, in the city center. For Kazakhs, the memory is arranged differently. I recently wrote a post that the monument to Asharshylyku, hunger ... They call it “porn” - according to memorial objects, in Soviet abandonment. And there are such things in the camps. I understand that the message should be “Never Again” [Never again. - Per. Ed. ] so that we look at how it was there, and never created this again. But I do not know ... I have never been to Karlag, but it seems to me that I will not create this, without even going there without seeing all this horror.

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It seems to me that memory does not have to take this form. But how they talked about Asharshlykh in our family, how they were going - they no longer had any living creatures, nothing - and they simply walked on foot to the railway to the Chelyabinsk region. And these stories cause me the most lively thrill, it really was, I know for sure. How they came there, to this station, in what a humiliated, hungry state.

Asharshylyk

In 1921-1922, the first famine erupted in Kazakhstan on the territory of the RSFSR, including in Kazakhstan. The consequences of the Civil War and the extensions, which aggravated against the backdrop of crop failure and herbs and the follow -up of the cattle, exacerbated it. In the 1930s, the tragedy repeated. Forced collectivization, confiscation of livestock and unrealistic plans for bakery led to the deaths of more than two million people. The inhabitants of Kazakhstan were massively removed from places and lingered, for example, at railway stations, where an epidemic of infectious diseases, especially the abdominal typhoid, began due to a large accumulation of people.

And people tell it, and people remember it. There is a wonderful book “Silent steppe” by Muhamet Shayakhmetov, family stories are often recorded and published. I heard a lot of them after Dastarkhan, in intimate, private conversations. This is worse than terrible monuments than to go to the Gulag, to watch something there and be impressed. Probably, there should be places of memory, it is important for people whose parents were sitting there, grandfathers, grandmothers. But it seems to me that there should be different modes of memory.

Is there a discrepancy between home history and how the official discourse sounds?

This is an important discussion issue. As an anthropologist, I see that this suffering can become part of the ideological filling. For example, in Eastern Europe - "And the Nazis tormented us, and the Communists tormented us." But so far everything is going differently.

There is a popular memory, and no one will forget, no matter how much Russia crushes. And such pressure, of course, is. I would like that we have this multiplicity. Still, the state is not as powerful as the Soviet Union was and as Russia now, our ideological machine does not work so hard. And this car is even trying to find a balance in order to observe different interests, to combine narratives. For example, I am conducting my own weekly program “Cultural Context” on the state television channel. It impresses me that votes like mine can be publicly present in our ideological field. And it seems to me that we should not lose this freedom, to preserve many things.

We are not that we completely deny the Soviet past, we processed it and just move on. What was, it was, there are different formats, how to talk about it, how to remember this. But it is important how we now want to live - in the city or on the ground, in the village, how we want to work, what sources of energy will be. And this acquisition of subjectivity is very important.

Local identity and equality of the city and village

By the way, I am always reading your posts about my own economy, horses. Is there any tension in what a woman is told, especially from the academy?

No, I don't think. We have a lot of people who were in the corporate sector, worked in banks, and then they threw everyone and left to breed herds in the Kostanay region. I even write an article about this Russian [from the word Rural - “rural”, “rustic”. - approx. Ed. ].

In Kazakhstan, we are not so far from the village. My parents are from the village. I am the first generation that was born in the city, many moved to the city to study. This is the Soviet division into the city and the village, where the city was the space of modernity and the future, and the village was backward, aul. But in fact, there are many advantages in the village, starting with land ownership. This is more important than another property that you may have, this is the value, and our ancestors always understood this. Therefore, their resistance to colonization has always been about the Earth: they take our land, they oust us what they did with the ground?

I see colleagues around me, who also moved to the village. They studied in America, and now they are far away. The first 30 years after the Soviet Union, we had intense globalization. People drove everywhere, studied. But you cannot understand the whole world and accept the whole world, you need to concentrate somewhere. World experience can be partially perceived: something is suitable, something will never suit us. We have another landscape, another climate, another culture. And it seems to me that understanding your own place in the world comes to us, at least to me. I am sitting in my village, and I am connected with the whole world thanks to the Internet. And why not? Why can't someone else sit in his village like that? Why should we all come to Astana, to Moscow or somewhere else? It seems to me that you can live like that. Why not?

I just wanted to ask a question: what if before Kazakhstan's knowledge, Kazakhstani science had a direct connection with Moscow? I often see Kazakhstani researchers in European conferences, Nazarbayev University often appears. What place on the post -colonial card does Kazakhstan occupy? I see an orientation both to the West and the Geographical East. The fact that you are now in Hong Kong say a lot.

In this regard, we are slightly different from Russia, our intelligentsia differs, let’s say, from the Russian intelligentsia. In 2022, I was invited to Petersburg, and I felt how it hurt people: they went to Finland, to Europe, to other countries, and now they were cut off. And I thought: what if this happened to me? And, it seems, I would be fine. Well, I will not go to the USA or to Germany. I can go to Dubai, I can go to Hong Kong. Мне как-то не дали визу в Европу, и ладно. Меня часто приглашают на постколониальные конференции, но я чувствую, что у них там своя повестка, у меня — своя, и я не хочу участвовать в собраниях, где я буду «деколониальным образом».

Тема деколонизации широко обсуждается с 2022 года. И контекст, в котором это происходит, меня беспокоит. Я вижу, что за разговорами о деколонизации встает штандарт второй половины XX века, когда борьба основана на принципах локального национализма. Как проходит эта дискуссия в Казахстане?

Да, для нас деколонизация значит становление собственной, локальной субъектности. Это необязательно должно быть именно национализмом. Мы можем жить в своем ауле и быть таким же субъектом, как кто-то из Москвы или Нью-Йорка. Главное — наше место не должно быть второстепенным. Я приехала в Гонконг, где все прекрасно, но я, наверное, не смогу здесь жить: мне не подходит еда, здесь ужасно жарко. А многие наши студенты живут, работают — и это замечательно, когда мир открыт.

Деколонизация, как я ее понимаю, — это нахождение собственной субъектности, ее валоризация, придание ценности другим локальностям, которые были поставлены в периферийную, второстепенную позицию. Необязательно нам всем в клетушках 40-этажных жить. Хотя, например, для Гонконга это нормально. Но и здесь есть какие-то деревушки. И я считаю, что это локальное многообразие должно присутствовать, и люди, которые приезжают из каких-то центров, не должны доминировать с точки зрения идеологии или повестки.

Экономика: уголь, атомные станции и зеленый водород

Казахстан во многом был для Советского Союза ресурсной республикой. И мне интересно, что с этим происходит сейчас. Повлияли ли на эту экономику санкции, которые наложили на Россию? Когда логистика, например, пошла через Казахстан.

Да, мы в некотором роде стали бенефициарами, хотя не предвидели и не хотели этого таким путем. В том числе с точки зрения людей: к нам стали приезжать из России, скажем так, представители креативного класса — с капиталом, с технологиями. Мы очень близки, Казахстан — самая русскоговорящая республика бывшего Советского Союза. Поэтому, наверное, у нас удобно. У нас, в принципе, здорово, более-менее свободно. Я думаю, что это хорошо, когда люди хотят сюда переехать.

Но экономически нельзя сказать, что мы ориентированы на Россию. У нас есть выход на другие рынки и своя развитая индустрия: овцеводство, коневодство. Мы производим конину как мясо, и мы ее едим. Наши фрукты получают свой вкус из-за выраженной сезонности. Можно назвать это пищевым национализмом. Для нас коневодство — это в том числе экологическая повестка. Выращивание крупного рогатого скота на деле отличается от картинки коровы на лугу, а наши лошади действительно пасутся круглогодично на подножном корму. И это больше подходит нашему климату, где нет воды, потому что для выращивания коров нужно много воды, и они производят очень много метана в процессе пищеварения. А лошади и воды пьют меньше, и метана в несколько раз меньше выделяют.

То же самое касается энергии. Сейчас на нас давят, говорят, что мы должны поставить атомную электростанцию. Уже принято решение. Я живу в ауле, где мы топим углем. И две тонны угля стоят 100 долларов. На зиму для моего дома хватает шести тонн. Теперь мне говорят, что уголь — это плохо. Надо мне там какие-то ветряные источники ставить, что-то еще. В то же время благодаря советской индустриализации мы производим очень много угля. Что мы должны делать? Мы должны забросить весь наш уголь и перейти на другие энергоносители? Наверное, будет лучше этот уголь перерабатывать, очищать и все же использовать, потому что он у нас уже есть. Почему мы должны экспортировать газ из России? Все это надо переосмысливать с точки зрения локальности. Те же самые ветряные мельницы, которые стоят в Германии, у нас ломаются, хотя сейчас и придумывают новые лопасти для нашего климата.

Я думаю, мы не должны бездумно, некритически заимствовать идеологии, в том числе экологические и энергетические. Мы должны понимать, что у нас происходит, какой у нас ландшафт, какая погода, что с землей, что с водой, что с энергоносителями.

А кто давит на Казахстан с электростанциями?

Много кто давит. Но мы пытаемся выбрать, сейчас — между Францией и Южной Кореей. Возможно, это будет какой-то консорциум.

Я думаю, что есть и внешнее, и внутреннее давление. Я не против атомной электростанции. У нас есть физики и специалисты по энергетике, и важно, чтобы мы сами разбирались в этих вопросах. Чтобы не было такого, что Россия стоит атомную станцию и никого туда не пускает, как это произошло с Байконуром. Чтобы это было с нашим управлением, чтобы мы понимали, как производится энергия, куда она уходит и как нейтрализуют отходы и так далее.

Например, есть проблема с водой. В Казахстане почти нет рек, которые начинаются у нас и заканчиваются у нас. Урал пересыхает, и, возможно, скоро не будет аксиомой, что Урал и Волга впадают в Каспийское море. Степные речки часто пересыхают.

Собственно, поэтому меня и поразила история о зеленом водороде: Казахстан собирается экспортировать водород, произведенный методом электролиза воды.

Да, да, да. Мы экспортируем воду, которой у нас и так нет. Об этом я и говорю: мы должны исходить из локальности, понимать, что у нас есть, чего у нас нет, что выгодно для нас, — и избавиться от глобальных формул, понимать, из чего исходят другие идеологии, в том числе и экологические.