Almaty had already risen in 1986, it was the way to the dissolution of the Soviet Moloch
“A group of students, incited by nationalist elements, took to the streets of Almaty expressing their disapproval … Vandals, parasites and other antisocial people took advantage of the situation for illegal actions against the representatives of law and order. They set fire to a grocery store and private cars, and insulted citizens … ». This dispatch from the official Tass agency was not written yesterday, it was struck on December 17, 1986, when the first protest in Perestroika Square broke out in the central square of Almaty – now named after the Republic, then it bore the name of Leonid Brezhnev – against the appointment of a Russian leader who had never set foot in Kazakhstan. The demonstration was repressed by force: a still unknown number of dead, hundreds of wounded, thousands of arrested.
Glasnost was in its infancy, and very little was said about the protest. Today, in Russia not many remember it, but in Kazakhstan it is celebrated as the Zheltoksan, the December uprising, the founding event of independence. It was the first revolt of a colony against Moscow, which sent a Russian commissioner to a republic of a different language, ethnicity, history and religion, to block the rise of the very Nursultan Nazarbaev who would become the “father of the nation”. It was the first of a series of errors by Mikhail Gorbachev in underestimating the desire for autonomy of the provinces, and in overestimating the strength of the Soviet melting pot, which led to the collapse of the USSR five years later.
Now Moscow is rejoicing at the sending of Russian soldiers to put down the revolt, and the head of the RT channel Margarita Simonyan, enthusiastically tweets the conditions of Kazakhstan’s return to the fold: return to the Cyrillic alphabet and total Russification, recognition of the Crimea annexed by Ukraine and “fraternal” foreign policy. He makes fun of Kazakhstan’s “ridiculous independence” and extends the warning to “all the other fourteen”, that is, all the former Soviet states, including the three Baltic states that have now joined the EU. It may be a provocation to attract likes, but expressed by the influential head of Russian state propaganda it expresses a mood of revenge present in the Kremlin. As Aleksandr Lukashenko expressed it, who yesterday declared that “Kazakhstan could not be given away, given to NATO, like Ukraine”, as if it were an object. As Putinian deputy Biysultan Khamzaev puts it, proposing a referendum to the Duma to annex Kazakhstan to Russia, and social networks full of videos of Russian paràs promising to “fuck the Kazakhs”. It is the exultation of those who have learned nothing, and if Vladimir Putin considers the end of the USSR a “geopolitical catastrophe”, for its hypothetical re-foundation the Moscow propagandists propose a Russian supremacist colonialism even more embellished by the proletarian internationalism of the communists.
Tokaev has broken an inviolable taboo for 30 years of independence: do not call the Russians to help. It was the great miscalculation committed by Putin in 2014 in Eastern Ukraine, where the allies of former president Viktor Yanukovych did not accept the Kremlin’s offers of help, forcing him to import the leaders of the “Donbass rebels” from Moscow. A simple calculation of risk and benefit: the history of the Warsaw Pact, the only military alliance that has attacked only its own members, teaches that the Moscow tanks are then reluctant to go home, and even Lukashenko has not (so far ) never invited.
It is not yet clear what danger Tokaev considered so enormous that he signed an imperial bill with Putin. However, it has just shown that it does not have a strong grip on its country, ruled by an elite with “multi-vector” international ties and inhabited by a people who have not shown any nostalgia. Putinian propaganda dreams of a new USSR, but rebuilding a new empire with a group of dictators in the throes of a nervous breakdown will not be easy.
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