A HISTORY OF INNER ASIA

Central Asia becomes independent 261
began to be restored.What had not been expected, however, was the
Kazakhs’ reaction.In December 1986 great numbers of protesters,
mainly young people, gathered on the main square of Almaty and
staged demonstrations against Kolbin and what was viewed as an assault
on their nationality.The Soviet state still wielded enough power (glasnost
was only just starting) to carry out a crackdown on the demonstrators
Some people were killed (as usual, official and unofficial figures differ),
many others were arrested, and peace was restored.What Kolbin did
not and probably could not do, however, was to pass beyond the
identifiable and legally definable “corruption” or mass demonstrations
and tackle the fait accompli of a largely “Kazakhized” legislature and
political-bureaucratic infrastructure, and a Kazakh public no longer
afraid of the KGB.Far from bowing to Gorbachev’s demands of scaling
down their ethnic resurgence, they accelerated it, and by 1989 Moscow
surrendered: it recalled Gennadiy Kolbin and replaced him with the
Kazakh Nursultan Nazarbaev, and stood by helpless as it watched
the Kazakh Supreme Soviet pass a motion proclaiming Kazakh to be
the official language of the republic.This motion was chiefly theoretical,
for even its authors knew that in most situations of public life Russian
would for the time being remain the only viable medium of communication,
but its symbolic and long-range importance was undeniable.
Meanwhile perestroika and glasnost gained their own momentum at the
center of the USSR and all over the empire, forging ahead far beyond
what Gorbachev had wished or expected.By 1990, the destinies of
Central Asia began to be fashioned more along the Baltic Sea or in
Ukraine than on its home ground.Spearheaded by the three Baltic
republics, the drive for independence burst forth among the non-
Russian members of the Union with an intensity that baffled Gorbachev
and carried the rest along.The process was consummated by the end of
1991, when all the five republics of Central Asia, almost against the will
of their political elites, were fully independent states, left to their own
devices how to fashion their future.
The first stage of this process occurred in 1989 and 1990 with the
proclamation, by the legislature of each republic, of its respective idiom
as the official language, and, by three of the five, of their sovereignty:
Turkmenistan on 22 August, Tajikistan on 25 August, Kazakhstan on 25
October 1990.
The second stage came in March 1991, when a referendum was held
throughout the Soviet Union whether to preserve its existing structure,
to modify it, or to dissolve it.Each of the five Central Asian republics