Why Kazakhstan may be next on Putin's list
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Interesting article.
I spent quite a bit of time in Kazakhstan in the 90s. Was there for over two months in 2007. It’s a huge country only slightly smaller in land mass than the the US lower 48. Much the country is a sparsely populated arid wasteland; the southwest regions that produce oil and gas and the dead Aral Sea basin can only be described as an environmental Hiroshima.
The northern portions of the country were until Stalin, part of Russia. Much of population in the North are either Russian, Russian speaking and assimilated Ukrainians or Muslim Tatars. Since independence ethnic Kazakhs have been moving into the north in numbers so that in urban centres like Pavlodar it is now close to a 50/50 split between Slav and Kazakh. In the 1990s Astana was proclaimed the nation’s capital and the seat of government moved from he south easterly located Almaty to the north. The move was in large part to offset fears of future Russian revanchist efforts. The Kazakh government has remained cautious about its minority Russian population and has avoided alienating it linguistically or culturally. The result is that so far there has been minimal discontent among the ethnic Russian.
The Kazakh regime is careful not to antagonise the Kremlin. I would say its relationship with Moscow is similar to the relationship between Janos Kadar’s Hungary and the USSR. Hungary enjoyed a much more open (by communist standards) economy than other Warsaw Pact states but the fundamental supremacy of the Communist Party remained the polity of the Hungarian state. Brezhnev and company had no issue with that arrangement. In fact it welcomed the consumer goods and agriculture products Hungary was able supply the decrepit and supply impoverished Soviet consumer market. I vividly recall the huge queues that would form outside Moscow food markets whenever a shipment of Hungarian processed food products happened to appear on the shelves.
As is I therefore I don’t really see Putin wanting any time soon to retake the northern territories formerly a part of Russia. Likewise the rest of the country. Even he really doesn’t want or need 14 million more resentful Sunni Muslims in the Russian Federation.
