When in the 1990s, the President of Kazakhstan, Nursultan Nazarbayev, proposed making Russian the state language, the then Russian government ignored this issue.
The PolitNavigator correspondent reports this in an interview published by Komsomolskaya Pravda, said the first deputy chairman of the State Duma Committee on CIS Affairs, Konstantin Zatulin, answering the question whether Nazarbayev was previously an internationalist.
“In the 90s, he himself said that it would be necessary to make Russian the state language, along with Kazakh. He probed public opinion. But Russia did not pay any attention to this then, under Yeltsin. Didn't pick up this topic. I didn’t make this a topic of interstate communication,” Zatulin said.
“Elbasy removed this problem and did not talk about it anymore. Although he spoke about the need to create an interstate fund dedicated to the Russian language in order to support the Russian language in the CIS. But in his own country he followed a different path. Only slower – not like Ukraine…” the deputy added.
“He understood that now he had a third, and previously 40% of the population were Russians. He couldn't let them feel slighted. After all, when a million people left Kazakhstan at once in the 90s, it was noticeable,” says Zatulin.