"United but Separate: The Failure of korenizatsiia in the Red Army during World War II".docx (original) (raw)
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After the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, the Soviet leadership fully mobilized Kazakhstan's populations for war. Communist Party and government officials in Moscow and Almaty responded to this crisis by conscripting ethnic Kazakhs into the Red Army, mobilizing the republic's industrial workers and collective farmers for intensified production, and waging a grandiose propaganda campaign designed to instill Soviet patriotism in these soldiers and laborers. During the war, Soviet authorities also deported large Soviet German and North Caucasian populations to Kazakhstan, where local Party and government officials forced them to eke out a desperate existence on the Gulag's "special-settlements." This dissertation is the first English-language study that analyzes these wartime mobilizational campaigns inside Kazakhstan. Drawing on a wide range of previously unexamined archival holdings in Kazakhstan and Moscow, published documentary collections, Soviet newspapers, and memoirs, the dissertation argues that mobilization catalyzed the integration of the republic's population into Soviet military, economic, and ideological institutions. As a direct result of this integration, the republic's Kazakh population acquired a much stronger Soviet identity, but the boundaries of Kazakhstan's ethnic hierarchy became more pronounced and the republic's status as a raw materials base for Russia became more firmly entrenched.
Saeculum: Journal of World History, 2023
The article delves into the origins of independent Kazakhstan by looking at the critical yet underexplored years between Stalin’s death and the collapse of the USSR. The ambiguity surrounding the memory of this period functions as the article’s point of departure. Endeavoring to understand that ambiguity, the article steers clear of reified binaries of ‘Soviet’ and ‘anti-Soviet,’ ‘authentic’ and ‘foreign,’ ‘national’ and ‘imperial.’ Instead, it regards this ambiguity as reflecting a holistic, if contradictory, experience of Kazakhstan as part of the Soviet Union. The tendencies that could schematically be interpreted as either deepening Kazakhstan’s colonial status or, on the contrary, as promoting the Kazakh national consciousness and a sense of agency were all direct by-products and spin-offs of the entangled social, economic, and cultural transformations and the accompanying changes in power relations between the Soviet metropole and the no-less Soviet periphery. The article is divided into four parts. First, it examines the economic developments, which brought about profound reorientation in the republic’s economic landscape. Secondly, the article analyses demographic changes attesting to the gradual recovery of Kazakhs from the devastation of famine and war. The process of cultural Kazakhization is explored in Part 3 of the article. Finally, the article investigates three episodes of overt resistance, which, while evidencing a growing national self-confidence among the Kazakhs, also revealed the persistence of their Soviet allegiances. Placed side by side, these episodes bring to the surface the evolving nature of the Soviet project in the Kazakh Republic with its contradictions and consequential shifts.