#11
Moscow Times
November 30, 2001
Hurry Up and Wait
By Nonna Chernyakova and Russell Working
ALMATY, Kazakhstan -- When Valentina Nikitina arrived at the Russian Embassy in Almaty, she was hoping to fill out a few forms, receive Russian citizenship, and join her relatives in Russia's Altai republic.
But the crowd outside the embassy informed her that the waiting list for citizenship had more than 2,000 names on it already. It would be four years or so before she could pack her bags for Russia.
"I have no job, and my girl is 16, but she has no chance of attending a university because we have no money," said Nikitina, 51. "My husband is a pilot, but he was laid off. My son is deeply depressed because he can't find work. We have no future here." Nikitina burst into tears.
Nikitina is one of 5 million ethnic Russians who make up one-third of Kazakhstan's population. Some 20 million Russians now live in the former Soviet republics of Central Asia. Isolated from their ancestral homeland by the breakup of the Soviet Union a decade ago, many now want to return.
But while the Kremlin says these potential immigrants would help to offset Russia's negative population growth, bureaucratic delays -- exacerbated by the recent abolition of the Nationalities and Migration Ministry -- could prevent them from moving to Russia for many years to come.
President Vladimir Putin has publicly declared the need to attract Russians back to Russia. "If the current trend continues, the survival of the nation will be at risk," he said in July, speaking of Russia's declining population. "We are faced with the very real threat of becoming an aging nation."
Putin has sounded this warning with regularity. Last November, at a meeting of Siberian federal district directors, Putin said that Russia's shrinking population made it important to attract immigrants from the former Soviet republics. "Immigration could provide us with an ideal opportunity to attract more manpower," he said. Putin mentioned that Russia thus far had not formulated a clear immigration policy, but in this sphere, the state "may and must regulate the process."
Such pronouncements make it all the harder to understand Putin's recent decision to disband the Nationalities and Migration Ministry, transferring its responsibilities to the Interior, Foreign and Economic Development and Trade ministries. The Interior Ministry took over migration issues, but the change took bureaucrats by surprise, leading to disruptions in dealing with applicants for Russian citizenship.
Russia has long been gripped by a growing demographic crisis. The Soviet Union lost 20 million lives in World War II and sacrificed tens of millions of its citizens in Stalin's prison camps. More recently emigration, a high abortion rate and an increasing number of one-child families has left the nation with a population that is shrinking by 1 million people per year, the Moscow newspaper Trud recently reported.
The Russian Embassy in Kazakhstan, located in the old capital of Almaty, has placed its own obstacles in the path of citizenship seekers. Applicants complained that not a single application had been approved in August.
"They usually accept 20 people a month [as citizens]," said Pyotr Demenok, a 63-year-old applicant. "But in August, the line was standing still." Georgy Naumenko, the embassy's press attache, refused to comment. Reached by phone he said, "We just follow the Russian laws," before hanging up.
Russian officials are equally curt with applicants. Recently, one official spent a morning and two afternoons haranguing the frustrated people who had gathered outside the embassy's gate. "Yesterday, you were all screaming out here, and the consul came out and canceled interviews for citizenship cases on Mondays and Wednesday afternoons," he said. Over the course of several hours he spared a civil word only for non-Russians -- citizens of Ukraine and the United States who were seeking short-term tourist or business visas.
The stories sometimes resemble parodies of Russian bureaucracy. Flyora Azhnakina, 56, became a Russian citizen in 1995, but officials forgot to put the required stamp in her son's birth certificate. The boy has turned 14, and now she can't take him to Russia.
"Now they say he must become a Kazakh citizen first, when he turns 16, and then apply for Russian citizenship," she said. "So we'll have to sit here for four years."
Even Russian citizens have trouble helping relatives stranded abroad. Galina Saratovtseva, a Moscow resident, came to Almaty to help her only remaining relative get Russian citizenship. Her uncle, 82-year-old Ivan Shevchenko, is a World War II veteran and an invalid who has lived in Kazakhstan since 1948. She has spent four months gathering his papers.
"I want to take him with me because here in Kazakhstan nobody cares about war veterans," Saratovtseva said. "All the benefits they had before have been canceled. My uncle fell down at the market and broke his legs, and for three weeks he couldn't get medical help. Only his neighbors came and helped him."
The Russian Embassy wasn't much help, either. The law states that citizenship might be granted for special merits, but it doesn't specify what those merits are. "They told me that being a war veteran is not a special merit," Saratovtseva said. "I'm outraged."
Russia's involvement in Kazakhstan stretches back centuries. Tsarist troops first conquered Kazakhstan in the early 1700s, and by the Soviet era, Russians, Ukrainians and Belarussians comprised half the population of a land five times the size of France that sprawls along Russia's southern flank.
The emigration of Russians from Kazakhstan began in earnest in 1993, soon after the fall of the Soviet Union, and reached its peak the next year, when 300,000 Russians left. About 250,000 left Kazakhstan in 1998 and 1999, officials say.
Amangueldy Aitaly, a deputy in the lower chamber of the Kazakh parliament who is working to reform the country's citizenship laws, said Kazakhstan has all the problems of a multinational state. Owing to the country's economic woes, some 2 million people have already left Kazakhstan, he said.
"After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the greater part of the population fell on hard times," he said. "During the last 10 years, even ethnic Kazakhs -- 86,000 of them -- have left Kazakhstan and settled in the border areas of Russia."
Aitaly said that Kazakhs also move to Russia because the retirement age is lower there -- 55 for women, versus 58 in Kazakhstan, and 60 for men, versus 63. Most of the Russians who are leaving were involved in the military and lived in army towns that began dying off in 1991.
Many applicants say one of the most pressing reasons for the mass emigration of Russians is the status of the Russian language. While Kazakh is enshrined as the state language, there is no law granting Russian any official status. Most Kazakhs speak Russian as a second language, but the list of government jobs for which Kazakh is required grows every year. Since the start of 2000, the government has required that all paperwork be done in Kazakh.
The Kazakh-language requirement has also limited the rights of other ethnic minorities, who tend to study Russian, not Kazakh, as a second language. A linguistic commission examines candidates for their knowledge of Kazakh before they can seek federal jobs or run in elections. In the September 1999 election, only ethnic Kazakhs were elected as senators, allowing the senate subsequently to pass a law restricting the rights of non-Kazakh citizens.
Aitaly says Soviet disrespect for the Kazakh language and culture created the current problems for Russians. "During the Soviet era there was a policy of one-way internationalism, when only one language was honored -- Russian," he said. "Kazakhs were being assimilated into Russian society. Russians were not ready for the current Kazakh nationalist and religious renaissance."
Many Russian activists insist, on the other hand, that the Kazakh government is purposely excluding Russian culture from the country. Alexander Yakovlev, chairman of the Regional Society of Slavic Culture in Ust-Kamenogorsk, said Russians feel uncertain about their future because education in Russian is on the wane. This might surprise visitors to Almaty, where almost anyone stopped at random in the street can speak Russian. But the curriculum is Kazakh, Yakovlev insists.
"They have completely distorted history, and now our children learn that Russians were invaders in Kazakhstan," he said.
Aitaly argues that this is not far from the truth. "Colonization of the country did happen," he said. "But we always perceived the double-headed eagle, the symbol of Russia, as having tsarism as one head, with the other as a simple Russian man. When we talk about the first head, we recall severe repression of the national liberation movement. Three hundred uprisings were cruelly suppressed. The second head is the average Russian with whom we lived side by side. The Kazakh taught the Russian how to raise livestock, and the Russian in turn taught us how to grow wheat."
Yakovlev said his society seeks to promote Russian culture and education, and the authorities have tried to close it repeatedly under different pretexts. Yakovlev has been trying to open a Slavic cultural center in the local "house of friendship," which has opened its doors to other civic organizations, but so far he has been turned down.
Yakovlev is a member of a nationwide Slavic movement called Lad, or Harmony. Lad's leader, Alexander Shushanikov, was kicked out of Kazakhstan earlier this year, Yakovlev said. Shushanikov had been receiving threats, and last February was beaten severely by two unknown assailants outside his apartment. Local Russians believe he was attacked because of his work in support of Russian culture. The tax police broke into his office and confiscated computers and office equipment, saying he had failed to pay duty on children's textbooks sent by Moscow Mayor Yury Luzhkov.
Yakovlev is pessimistic about the future of Russians in Kazakhstan. "Whenever they put a Kazakh director in charge of a company, he starts firing Russians," he said.
Aitaly says that he is aware of examples of day-to-day nationalism. "Russians think Kazakhs are stealing jobs from them, while Kazakhs think that without Russians they would be more likely to find work. All of this results from the current job shortage. If there were enough jobs to go around, nobody would be complaining. This is not government policy."
The facts suggest that Russians face various forms of discrimination in Kazakhstan. In an analytical bulletin published in October 2000, the Institute of Commonwealth of Independent States Studies noted that educational problems are widespread in Kazakhstan. The Kazakh and Russian systems differ so drastically now that Russian-style schools and universities should be opened in Kazakhstan, the report concluded.
Branch campuses of some Russian universities in Kazakhstan were trying to close this gap, but they were closed down last year for failing to obtain a Kazakh operating license. The universities complained that in order to obtain the license, they would have had to adopt Kazakh standards, thereby flouting their original goal of providing a Russian-style education to their students. They contended that the real reason behind the closures was unfair competition from Kazakh universities. In Pavlodar, for example, the city's chief prosecutor demanded on local television that campuses of Russian universities conform to the norms of Kazakh education on pain of having their diplomas declared invalid in Kazakhstan.
And the controversy does not stop at the schoolhouse door. A group of Russian citizens was convicted in Ust-Kamenogorsk in June of last year for planning a coup in Kazakhstan's industrial heartland close to the Russian border. Local law enforcement discovered a small cache of weapons in the home of one of the suspects. The group received up to 18 years in prison. But the Russian consul and representatives of human rights organizations believe that the trial was tainted by violations of Kazakh law. Relatives of the accused appealed to Vladimir Putin, asking him to extradite the convicts to Russia.
"The charges were entirely trumped up. It was a show trial," Yakovlev said.
Human Rights Watch reported that in July, the Kazakh Supreme Court upheld administrative regulations allowing police the right to attend meetings of all nongovernmental organizations, without providing for judicial or other review of police actions.
The organization stated in its 2001 report: "This ruling was sure to have a chilling effect on freedom of assembly, already restricted by Kazakh authorities, who continued to fine members of the pensioners' movement Pokoleniye, or Generation, for monthly public demonstrations. The Almaty city government granted permission for opposition forces to hold a demonstration on March 30, although attacks on the homes of the rally's leaders suggested state-sponsored interference."
Yet some Russians say the tensions might be overcome. Yury Bunakov, chairman of the Russian Community in Kazakhstan, created his organization in 1992. The first four years were a real struggle. "There was open animosity toward us," Bunakov said. "They didn't let us speak publicly." The group works to unify ethnic Russians, and President Putin's visit to the capital, Astana, last year highlighted the concerns of Kazakhstan's Russians. Putin met with activists from Russian organizations and heard their complaints.
"He didn't promise us a wonderful life," Bunakov said. "He just wanted to listen."
And Bunakov said that Kazakh authorities are becoming more willing to acknowledge the role of Russians in their country's history. "The euphoria of independence is coming to an end, and the authorities are starting to realize that it was Russians who created Kazakhstan," he said.
Russians can play a greater economic role in the country, Bunakov said. They could attract capital from Russia in the same way that South Korea invests in businesses owned by ethnic Koreans in Kazakhstan. Koreans were originally shipped from the Primorye region to Kazakhstan by Stalin, and many returned to the Far East after 1991. Now that flow has slowed, and Koreans in Kazakhstan enjoy support from their historic homeland as they open restaurants, businesses and stores. Bunakov's organization has been working with the Moscow government in trying to attract investors and bank loans.
"With money coming in, people will feel Russia's support, and the Kazakh authorities will have to pay attention to us," Bunakov said.
Some Kazakhs share Bunakov's optimism. Aitaly disagrees with the Russian government's position on the necessity of attracting Russians back to Russia.
"I do not completely understand Putin's position on so-called Russian-language people," Aitaly said. "We all speak Russian perfectly. It is not correct to call them 'foreign fellow countrymen.' If they are foreign, they are not countrymen. Right now they are calling for additional emigration from Kazakhstan. They should appeal to people and ask them to stay where they are, to improve our life together and to share our common hardships."
Nonna Chernyakova and Russell Working are freelance journalists based in Cyprus.
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