A HISTORY OF INNER ASIA

Independent Central Asian Republics 285
hoods, whether urban (Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan) or both
urban and rural (Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan), several generations have
been able to function without any attempt to learn the natives’ language,
a situation further reinforced by the Central Asians’ own indispensable
study of Russian.For the time being, compromise seems to be the
answer, with the provision that the next generation of Russians will have
mastered the language of the respective republic through obligatory
inclusion in school curricula.A graver, almost unique problem is posed
by the Russian and Ukrainian minority in Kazakhstan.Much of the
republic’s northern belt along Russia’s European and Siberian frontier
has become a de facto Russian territory because of the movement of settlers
that began in the late eighteenth century and continued into the
Khrushchev era.Both the predominance of the Slavic population in this
belt, and its contiguity with Russia herself, beg the inevitable question of
whether this part of Kazakhstan should not receive special treatment, or
even be separated from the republic and join the Russian Federation.It
led to a disagreement between the presidents of the two countries,
Yeltsin and Nazarbaev, in 1992; the tension has since subsided without,
however, having been quite resolved.The question resurfaced during the
Russian electoral campaign of 1993, when such nationalists as
Zhirinovskiy (and, in a more traditional vein, Solzhenitsyn), called for
annexation of the Slavic-populated belt by Russia, and the Kazakh
President retorted that such an act would resemble Hitler’s annexation
of the Sudeten region of former Czechoslovakia.One of the symptoms
of the Kazakhs’ nervousness about these northern territories is the transferral
of the government’s seat to Aqmola (Akmolinsk in Russian), for the
ostensible reason that this city is less excentrically located than Almaty,
but probably also because it symbolically stakes out Kazakh authority
over the heavily Russian-populated northern belt of the republic.A
glance at the map shows that Aqmola, though less excentric than Almaty,
does not lie in the geographical center of the republic but rather near the
Russian border.Places like Zhezkazgan should have been preferable if
centrality was the goal.The Kazakh name means “white tomb,” and the
city grew up around a military fort built there in 1830 shortly after the
Russian penetration into the area.In 1961 its name was changed to
Tselinograd (a Russian word translatable as “Virgin Soil Town”), to celebrate
the agricultural expansion campaign with the concomitant
arrival of the last wave of Slavic settlers.This renaming was also forced
on the Kazakhs (thus the entry “Tselinograd,” not “Aqmola,” in the
Qazaq Sovet Entsiklopediasy).It was only with Kazakhstan’s independence