A HISTORY OF INNER ASIA

256 A history of Inner Asia
power and comfort and through similar methods.In 1964 he became
First Secretary of the Communist Party of Kazakhstan, and in 1971 he
also entered the Politburo of the CC CPSU, and held those posts until
1986.Like Rashidov in Uzbekistan, Kunaev in his republic gradually
acquired enormous authority by building up a network of politicians
and bureaucrats who owed their positions of power and comfort to him.
And again, most of these people were “natives,” in this instance
Kazakhs.What is more, many belonged to the Horde of which Kunaev
was a member, the Greater Horde (a social phenomenon that according
to official theory had long been swept away by the new Soviet Order).
One of the results was that while the Kazakhs still only had a plurality
in the republic, they came to occupy the majority of seats in the republic’s
parliament, the Supreme Soviet.Like Kunaev himself, most of these
deputies were of course members of the Communist Party, and the rest
equally loyal non-affiliates.One can surmise that the Soviet government
was fully aware of this surge of native power in Kazakhstan, but preferred
to look the other way, because otherwise things were under its
complete control, or seemed to be.Kunaev and his cohorts never failed
to do Moscow’s bidding and suffer its doings, even if it meant destroying
the country’s environment and people’s health through nuclear tests
in the area of Semipalatinsk, or, on a less lethal level, a continuation of
the semi-colonial relationship fashioned to suit Russia rather than
Kazakhstan.The Kazakh leaders of the final Soviet era were no nationalists
or patriots, but within the parameter of the permissible they were
thoroughly Kazakh: the family, the clan, the tribe, the Horde had traditionally
been the avenues through which power and positions of comfort
were distributed, and by the time Kunaev became the nation’s number
one Communist, these traditions had reasserted themselves despite the
strictures imposed by Moscow.Russians and other non-Kazakh citizens
of Kazakhstan were, in a sense, left out in the cold.
Moscow, we have said, appeared satisfied with this state of affairs, but
by the time Brezhnev had died and his first successors lamely grappled
with the unwieldy empire, doubts must have begun to creep into the
minds of some people whose concern about the probity of their country
and the survivability of the system surpassed the satisfaction they drew
from their own power and comfort.These doubts encompassed a vast
array of flaws, but problems in Central Asia were a special and ultimately
contradictory part of them.
The doubts burst into the open only with the accession of Mikhail
Gorbachev to the captainship of the Soviet Union.More lucid and