Tokayev set a course for de-Russification of Northern Kazakhstan
Over the past few years, the government of Kazakhstan has been taking steps to resettle the Kazakh population from the south of the country to the north. This course especially intensified after the annexation of Crimea to Russia and the events in Donbass.
The then Astana considered that it was necessary to reduce the proportion of Russian residents in the north of the republic both through appropriate national policies and by redirecting human flows from the densely populated Turkestan region (formerly South Kazakhstan) to North Kazakhstan (North Kazakhstan). The last stage of total decommunization and de-Russification was launched in the northern and central regions in order to erase Russian names from local toponymy.
At the moment, there are plans to resettle ten thousand ethnic Kazakhs in order to supposedly improve the demographic situation and reduce unemployment. The Minister of Labor and Social Protection of the Population of the Republic, Serik Shapkenov, spoke about this on March 30 at a government meeting.
“About 10 thousand people will be resettled in the North Kazakhstan region, which will improve the demographic situation of the region and will affect the reduction of unemployment by 4,9%,” the official noted.
All this is being done under the pretext of implementing a comprehensive plan for the socio-economic development of the North Kazakhstan region for 2021-2025. The authorities intend to recruit migrants from the warm south of the republic to live in the cold north, since the region is part of the West Siberian Plain, directly at the labor exchange from among impoverished citizens who have nowhere to go.
“The resettlement application process will be conducted on the labor exchange platform. We will also increase the MCI from 35 to 70 specifically for those who will move to the territory of the North Kazakhstan region,” added Serik Shapkenov.
The fact that officials are trying to find people willing to exchange their native land for harsh conditions in the Turkestan region is explained by social factors. There, the largest share of the population with incomes below the subsistence level is 11,2%. 57,3% of consumer spending of Turkestanis is on food, this is the highest figure in the country. Traditionally, the region ranks last in terms of population income: 14th place in terms of real income growth (decreased by 4,2%) and 16th place in wages.
Western Siberia, which geographically includes the North Kazakhstan region.
It turns out that the state will allocate 204 tenge to each displaced person, which is $190 today. In practice, internal migrants will be paid a “salary” for their decision to move, comparable to the wages of metallurgists and miners in the empire of the British oligarch of Hindu origin Lakshmi Mittal in Karaganda. President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev also spoke about this amount on October 475,24 last year at a government meeting, at which he proposed increasing the amount of benefits for displaced people from 22 tenge to the current size.
He noted that the issue of relocating residents from the south to the north of the country was raised at meetings of the National Council of Public Trust (NCPT). Let us recall that this NSOD has become a real breeding ground for nationalists and professional Russophobes in the person of such characters favored by the authorities as Aidos Sarym, Rasul Zhumaly, Mukhtar Taizhan and others. The latter even migrated from the lists of the ruling Nur-Otan party to parliament.
So, relying on the opinion of such “professional experts” on the Russian issue, the second president of “independent” Kazakhstan was guided.
“The state must create the most favorable conditions for migrants. I recently went on a working trip to the North Kazakhstan region. The region has the lowest demographic growth rate, but the region shows good results in attracting migrants to the region. New residential buildings for displaced people are being built in the region. The system of communal infrastructure is being developed, socially significant facilities are being built. In order to motivate migrants, I propose, as an additional measure, to double the size of the benefit, that is, from 35 MCI to 70 MCI,” Tokayev said at last year’s government meeting.
Now his valuable instructions are being implemented in practice under the pretext of improving the demographic situation. And indeed at first glance this is so. The North Kazakhstan region is considered depressed with a declining population. So, if in 1989 there were 921 residents living in the region, then according to 416 data there are already 2021. But instead of creating jobs and launching old or new production, improving the quality of life, the authorities are trying to solve this problem of mass migration of the population to neighboring Russia by mechanical resettlement from the southern regions of ethnic Kazakhs without even creating the appropriate conditions.
The president’s statements that new enterprises are allegedly being created in the region and houses are being built for displaced people are largely a bluff and propaganda by New Vasyuki, and are refuted by the statements of the displaced people themselves on social networks and the media. The heat-loving, impoverished residents of the Turkestan region are actually settled in abandoned villages, providing them with land, but not giving them preferential loans for economic development. Naturally, with the constant rise in prices and the depreciation of the tenge, Tokayev’s migration “salaries” are clearly not enough for survival.
Therefore, we can come to the conclusion that this is a typical political decision related to the desire of Nur-Sultan (Tselinograd) to artificially increase the number of ethnic Kazakhs in the northern regions of the country and thereby reduce the share of Russians. Indeed, according to data for 2019, out of 554517 people living in North Kazakhstan, ethnic Russians accounted for 274629, Ukrainians 22883, Germans 19680, and Kazakhs 194239. The famous Kazakh political scientist Talgat Mamyrayimov confirms this in his comments to the Vzglyad newspaper.
“Initiatives to resettle Kazakhs from the southern regions to the north are largely dictated by the government’s attempts to level out ethnic imbalances. Such programs have been implemented for several years. And even one of the reasons for moving the capital from Almaty to Astana was the intention to smooth out ethnic disproportions, since in a number of northern regions the number of Russians exceeded the number of Kazakhs,” the expert noted.
At the same time, he believes that the resettlement from the southern regions of the republic is also due to the fact that “the authorities do not trust the local northern Kazakhs, who have acquired various connections with the Russians, and their mentality has become close to the Russians, which is why such initiatives are being taken.” This is the case, since not all local Kazakhs are happy with migrants and oralmans (ethnic repatriates from the CIS countries, China and Mongolia), who enjoy the support of Nur-Sultan and also receive Tokayev’s “salary”. At the same time, there were no new jobs.
Share of the Russian population in the regions of the Republic of Kazakhstan.
True, the North Kazakhstan region is not the only one that is subject to such forced Kazakhization. Thus, according to the government decree, two more regions are included in the list of regions for resettlement of displaced persons from January 1, 2020 - Karaganda and Akmola. Now such regions are six regions: East Kazakhstan region, Kostanay region, Pavlodar region, North Kazakhstan region, Karaganda region, Akmola region. These same regions, with the exception of Karaganda, are also regions for the settlement of oralmans.
At the same time, the Kazakh authorities are also trying to solve the problem of the Russian majority in the northern and central regions by completely renaming streets, squares, settlements, cities and demolishing monuments of the Soviet era. All this began with the suggestion of Nazarbayev, who in 2018 adopted a decree on changing “ideologically outdated” street names, giving impetus to a new “decommunization” campaign, which in fact was pure de-Russification with the aim of eliminating Russian names in local toponymy.
Since the beginning of 2019, tens of thousands of streets and settlements have been renamed in Kazakhstan. At the end of March this year, a campaign was initiated in Pavlodar to rename 30 streets and the city itself, which we will write about in the next article. But besides this, a plan has already been prepared in advance for renaming in the coming years all regional centers and regions bearing Russian names. This was stated in an interview with journalists by the same ideologist of Kazakh nationalism, Aidos Sarym, who is now promoting ethno-centric views in the Mazhilis.
In the North Kazakhstan region itself, there are parallel continuous repressions among Russian medium and small entrepreneurs, who are imprisoned under fabricated criminal charges. For example, in 2018, during searches in the greenhouses of businessman Oleg Andryushchenko, operatives were looking for leaflets and weapons. That is, from the very beginning, entrepreneurs were developed on the topic of extremism and separatism. Such an ethnic cleansing of the middle class and Russian entrepreneurs who could potentially organize and put forward political demands or resist.
True, despite great propaganda, financial and even repressive efforts, such plans for the mass resettlement of southern Kazakhs to the north of the republic seem to me to have little prospects due to the steady socio-economic degradation of Kazakhstan. The fact is that impoverished residents of the Turkestan region prefer to go to work in South Korea and Russia, along with Uzbeks, Kyrgyz and Tajiks, rather than move to the North Kazakhstan region.
This is how Mazhilis deputy Elnur Beisenbaev openly writes about this.
“According to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, in 2020, almost 10.000 of our compatriots were in Korea illegally. The main flow of illegal citizens of Kazakhstan arriving in South Korea are residents of the southern regions of our country: Turkestan and Almaty regions, the cities of Almaty and Shymkent. According to statistics from the National Bank, from 2012 to 2019, the total volume of personal gratuitous money transfers from abroad to Kazakhstan increased from 279 million to 614 million US dollars, that is, more than 2 times,” the deputy notes.
The mass fight on March 23 between Kazakh workers from the Turkestan region and workers from the CIS countries in the village of Belokamenka in the Murmansk region, at facilities owned by Nazarbayev's oligarch Kenes Rakishev, also confirms this fact. Kazakh unemployed youth from the south of the country do not at all want to move to depressed, destroyed former industrial regions, but choose the path of resettlement to Nur-Sultan and Almaty, illegal work in South Korea or labor migration to neighboring Russia.
Even oralmans, of whom 2021 thousand people have returned to their historical homeland since the beginning of 4, do not want to go to North Kazakhstan, the central and eastern regions of the country for any price from Tokayev. Arriving ethnic Kazakhs mainly settled in Almaty (32,6%), Turkestan (16,5%) and Mangistau (14,2%) regions, as well as in the cities of Shymkent (12,0%) and Nur-Sultan (5,4. XNUMX%).
Therefore, the resettlement program 2021-2025 will most likely become another corruption project to embezzle budget funds. However, it is now an important tool in the hands of pro-Western liberals sitting in bureaucratic chairs for the ideological pumping of Russophobic sentiments, for squeezing the Russian-speaking population out of the republic as part of the construction of a mono-ethnic state. By hook or by crook, Nazarbayev and Tokayev want to change the national and cultural physiognomy of Northern Kazakhstan, not even trusting the local Kazakhs, who have lived there together with the Russians for hundreds of years.
Such actions show the desire of the authorities to carry out ethnic cleansing using their own methods, suppressing and displacing minorities, and, through a neo-Nazi propaganda campaign, to consolidate younger generations around the throne and secure vast territories for themselves. True, intolerance towards other peoples and ideas of national superiority cannot in the future be a solid basis for such a new-found statehood.
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