Distortion of history causes enormous damage, the historian is sure

We speak with Gulnar Kendirbay via Zoom—she lives in the United States and has been teaching at the Harriman Institute and the history department of Columbia University in New York for almost 20 years.

Gulnar is a native of Almaty, studied at the Faculty of Philosophy at Lomonosov Moscow State University, and received two PhD degrees in Hungary and Germany. Kendirbay is the author of the books “Earth and People. Russian colonization of the Kazakh steppe" (2002) and "Russian Practices of Governance in Eurasia. Frontier Power Dynamics, Sixteenth Century to Nineteenth Century" (“Russian management practice in Eurasia. Power dynamics on the outskirts in the 16th–19th centuries”, 2020). Her research interests include the social and intellectual history of Central Asia: colonialism, nationalism, ethnicity, Islam, nomadism. All these concepts today appear almost more often than in scientific literature in media publications and comments on social networks. And the old conflicts that flare up between countries and peoples in the Caucasus, the Middle East, and at the junction of Europe and Asia add to the confidence that humanity is walking in the same historical circle. Therefore, Gulnar Kendirbay’s first question is about the role of history in modern politics.

F: Simply put, do the history textbooks they studied in influence the decisions of today's leaders?

– As a historian, I and many of my colleagues can say that, alas, politicians do not need history. All the conflicts that you mention are a consequence of the fact that history, historical facts are ignored or interpreted in such a way as to first of all justify all conflicts, one’s political ambitions, etc. And history textbooks are rewritten in order to use them in political, ideological purposes.

This has always been the case: history began as a court science, as the history of great commanders, rulers, dynasties, such as the Shahnameh (Iranian epic - F). When someone writes the history of a people, he, wittingly or unwittingly, uses a selective approach. History as a field of knowledge, as a science, is subject to politicization and ideologization; the adaptation of facts to the agenda has become ingrained in the “body” of historical knowledge.

For example, Soviet historians had to find in the past exploiters and exploited, inequality, class struggle; declare the Russian Empire a “prison of nations” to justify the Bolsheviks coming to power. In fact, the Russian Empire, like the Soviet Union, were very complex, contradictory phenomena. And dividing everything into black and white not only simplifies the entire historical reality, but also leads to these conflicts. It is very difficult to understand what happened in history - complex, contradictory, new facts appear all the time that do not fit into the overall picture. But the more complex this picture is, the closer it is to reality.

Of course, it's easy to navigate when you're told who your friend is and who your enemy is. But this simplification ultimately plays a bad role. To simplify is to deprive future generations of the true story.

I always tell students: history is not about the past, it is about the future, because if you don't know where you came from, how can you know where you are going and where you are now?

F: Many people are sure that they know their past. For example, that the Kazakh khans are descendants of Genghis Khan...

– When I read that Genghis Khan was a Kazakh, I don’t see patriotism in this. I see this as willful blindness, brainwashing. This does not do politicians any credit. To tell the younger generation of Kazakhs that they descended from Genghis Khan (which is absolutely not true) is to deprive them of their own real history, instead of, on the contrary, equipping them with the complexity of history, awakening in them an interest in learning more.

There is no place in history for theses that must be accepted without any criticism.

F: Does this mean that there can be no objectivity in historical science? What are the criteria for historical truth?

– The historical truth is that history is constantly changing. The objectivity of history lies in this constant variability. For example, modern Egyptians have nothing to do with the Egyptians who built the pyramids. Egypt has changed so many times during this time: it was both Christian and Muslim, was conquered by the French, and became a colony. For modern Egyptians to associate themselves with those Egyptians is the same as if I associate myself with the ancient Mongols or Turks from the Turkic Khaganate. I cannot say that the ancient Turks were not my ancestors. But there are so many differences between the Kazakhs and the Turks that they are two completely different peoples.

And not only the ancient Turks, even the Kazakhs of the early 20th century - their mentality and self-awareness were completely different from those of me, a person of the 21st century. Our people have gone through such cataclysms! Take collectivization, 1930s. More than a third of the Kazakh people were destroyed - and demographer Makash Tatimov determined the number of the Kazakh population that decreased during the years of collectivization as 42%. More recent studies estimate this reduction at 39%. And not only Kazakhs - among the victims there were Russians, Armenians, and Jews - there was no division there, it cannot be said that other nationalities destroyed the Kazakhs. And after half of my people were destroyed, especially the intelligentsia, after the “mental apparatus” of the people was destroyed, how can I say that what remains is my Kazakh nation? The remaining generation had to adapt in order to survive. People had to go through all stages of socialization in the Soviet Union: Soviet schools, the Russian language, settling down.

I want to emphasize that the most important content of the traditional Kazakh mentality was nomadism: to be a Kazakh meant to be a nomad.

It is clear that settling has made significant changes in everyday life, and, consequently, the content of the Kazakh mentality. In this one can see a significant difference in the implementation of collectivization among the settled nationalities of the USSR and the nomadic ones (and it was carried out on an all-Union scale).

In the 1930s, the overwhelming number of Kazakhs were nomadic or semi-nomadic, continuing their traditional way of life, and this was considered, from the point of view of Marxism-Leninism, the Stone Age! How could nomads be tolerated in a Soviet country? Therefore, those who settled down were already different people. With a different self-awareness, with opportunistic instincts - because they had to survive in this situation. Those Kazakhs who were there before the genocide and who remained are two different peoples - in the sense of self-awareness, in the sense of speech. For example, I cannot speak Kazakh the way those Kazakhs spoke. It was a very rich Kazakh language, replete with proverbs, sayings, and historical references.

Every nation is constantly transforming. It would be absolutely unfair and incorrect to associate modern Germans with the Nazis. Even the tribes living in the tropical forests of Brazil are not the same as they were at the beginning of the twentieth century. The nomads of Mongolia continue to roam, but they have adapted to use new technologies, and they are clearly not the Mongols of the era of Genghis Khan. Modern Mongols are a product of the Soviet regime; they also went through collectivization and purges.

F: Why is the historical past often a dividing factor rather than a unifying factor in Kazakhstan? For example, the founding of cities: some consider the planting of urban culture a blessing, others see this as an invasion of the ancestral Kazakh lands. What should be written in history textbooks so that the past becomes not a source of conflict, but a basis for unification?

– Nomads have actually been building cities throughout their history, but this is not widely mentioned in textbooks. All khans had, if not a city in the traditional sense of sedentary societies, at least a settlement which was needed not as a center of power, but as a center of craft production and trade. For example, the Kazakh khans chose Tashkent for these purposes, where they spent some time of the year, mainly winter.

Ogedei Khan, who succeeded Genghis Khan, built the city of Karakorum, which became the capital of the Mongol Empire. The rest of the khans did the same - either used existing cities, or built their own. In Siberia, before the Golden Horde, before the Mongol invasion, there were settlements where production existed: they made weapons and household utensils. If we take Scythian gold, where was it produced? In such workshops. Or take the capital of the Siberian Khanate, the city of Isker - it existed before the collapse of the Golden Horde. The founder of the Golden Horde, Khan Batu, also built a city - the famous Sarai.

The Mongols established a system of postal stations to facilitate trade along the Silk Road. These stations - “pits” - were a kind of caravanserais, where traders, traveling with their caravans, could rest, change horses and camels. Trades were also held there with the local population - usually nomads.

Thus, for nomads, urban culture and a sedentary way of life in general were not something unknown or alien. On the contrary, they constantly sought a symbiosis between nomadic and sedentary production. We know that the nomads could not survive in the steppes, say, without clothing, but they themselves did not weave fabrics, although, of course, they tanned skins. They needed metallurgical products - the same cauldrons. Nomads were vitally interested in constantly exchanging with settled settlements. If they were denied the opportunity to trade in a city, they would simply conquer it.

F: How does this relate to modern Semey, Almaty, Astana?

– These cities were built on the sites of ancient urban settlements. In fact, the Russian authorities understood very well that it was necessary to build a fortress where something already existed. In 1854, the Semirechensk Cossacks founded a village on the site of an ancient settlement, which was called Almaty. This made sense because the ancient people knew where to establish a city where it would survive. I will add that the problem of settling some fortresses continued to exist at the beginning of the twentieth century.

The history of the city of Orenburg is interesting - exceptions to the rules. It was built at the request of Abulkhair Khan. He sent a letter to Empress Anna Ioannovna: “Please build us a city.” Orenburg was unfortunately built in a location without an ancient settlement, leading to frequent flooding.The city was moved several times until it eventually ended up where it stands today. Nuraly, the eldest son of Abulkhair, who replaced him, similarly asked to open trading posts along the Syr Darya, which he called “city”.

So the simplistic rhetoric of “they came, took our lands, colonized, settled” shows ignorance of history and simply a lack of curiosity. There is no point in talking about the colonization of Kazakhstan, especially in the era of Abulkhair - in fact, it was mutual cooperation, an alliance, in the process of which Kazakhstan became part of the Russian Empire. If you look at how relations between Kazakhstan and Russia developed, then there was no colonization in the general sense of the word: there was no settlement of the territories by a huge number of Russian aliens.

Soviet historiography usually emphasizes the so-called military Cossack colonization as the initial stage of the colonization of Kazakh lands. But it was put on a systematic basis only starting from the 60s of the 19th century. And even at this time, the government was faced with problems of populating the fortresses and providing their population with food and fodder. Peasants from Russian provinces were forced to enroll as Cossacks and sent to the steppe.

If we look at the statistics of colonization, the resettlement of Russian and Ukrainian peasants from the European part of Russia to Kazakhstan began in the last decade of the 19th century. Previously, peasants, on the contrary, were kept and not allowed to move, because they knew that this could lead to conflicts with the local population.

The resettlement authority was created only in 1896, that is, 20 years before the fall of the Russian Empire, and in fact the settlement of the Kazakh territories began in 1905, with the construction of one of the stages of the Trans-Siberian Railway, and only those areas where peasants could survive. And 80–85% of the territory of Kazakhstan is generally unsuitable for agriculture. There, apart from a nomadic way of life, no farming is possible, no farming is possible. Alikhan Bokeikhanov (politician and ethnographer, one of the founders of the Alash movement - F) participated in statistical expeditions and found out that a fairly compact area is suitable for settling peasants, where it is really possible to engage in farming, and in other places the fertile layer is very thin. He wrote that the winds constantly blow away this layer, causing soil erosion. Under such conditions, especially when there were no technical devices, what kind of colonization can we talk about?

You see what can happen when historical reality is distorted or people remain in the dark. Then, as you said, the historical past often divides rather than unites people, and this causes enormous damage.

I believe that scientists should have a civic position, especially those involved in the humanities, including historians. They must take a civic stance in how they paint history, how they teach, and what they teach to the next generation.

F: As far as I understand, today in Kazakhstan the word “colonization” is understood not as the period of tsarism, but as the Soviet era. When most of the population stopped speaking Kazakh, customs, traditions, holidays were forgotten - even Nauryz...

– It’s easy to explain why this term “colonization” suddenly became so popular - to improve the image of the current government, the image of the “liberator.” The Bolsheviks did the same thing when they talked about the “prison of nations.” Now, state ideologists, aiming to consolidate their position, apply this term to the previous regime. Again, the black and white approach is being adopted - now in order to completely denigrate the Soviet past, to present it as a “prison of nations.”

But what is behind this? It's a purely ideological approach, stemming from a lack of understanding about the true nature of the Soviet Union. Yes, there was, of course, a lack of freedom, and dictatorship, and a one-party system, etc. But, on the other hand, there was one hundred percent universal education, there was free healthcare for everyone without exception. Again, the reality was very contradictory, and this is very difficult to reconcile. Yes, the social sciences were very ideological and under great control, but the natural sciences - physics, mathematics, chemistry - developed, Soviet scientists received the Nobel Prize.

Urbanization of Kazakhstan took place during the Soviet era. All oil fields were discovered by Moscow scientists. All engineers, the so-called white collar workers, were sent by Moscow to Kazakhstan. Claiming all this as colonization unfortunately oversimplifies the entire complex situation.

 

Indeed, the Kazakhs switched to Russian, but let's consider the development of the Kazakh literary language - after all, it did not exist as a literary language. Literature took the form of oral folklore, for example, epic tales - amazingly rich, amazingly colorful, imaginative. But there was no prose as such at all. The Kazakh language joined the world literary language through the Russian language. All our writers studied at Moscow and Leningrad universities, including Olzhas Suleimenov, Mukhtar Auezov, all of them were created as writers in Soviet times.

In everyday life, many, especially urban Kazakhs, switched to the Russian language, but this was not just the imposition of the Russian language, it was a necessity, because through the Russian language they learned and acquired knowledge. Abai, in his famous “Words of Edification,” wrote that the Russian language is our bridge to European knowledge. That through the Russian language we can learn everything that civilized Europe has accumulated over centuries of existence. He himself went to Semipalatinsk and taught himself Russian, asking the librarian, an exiled Narodnaya Volya member, to give him Russian lessons. And Akhmet Baitursynov wrote in an article from 1914: “We are standing before a fork in the road: where should we go? Either we will learn the Russian language, or we will follow the Muslim path and use the Arabic alphabet, accept Eastern poetry, the Eastern tradition of the literary language.”

During the Soviet Union, the Russian language became a lingua franca, that is, a language of communication, like English is now. And I think this is an acquisition. The Russian language is no longer the language of the Russian people. Russian is my language, just like Kazakh. Olzhas Suleimenov writes his poems in Russian, for him the Russian language is a means of expressing Kazakh thoughts, Kazakh dreams. It's not good or bad, it's a fact. As English is not only the language of the Anglo-Saxons, there is, for example, Indian English, it has its own history and its own culture.

This is a very narrow-minded approach - to associate a language with any one ethnicity: if I switched to another language, then it means I betrayed my people. On the contrary, I enrich him, as Olzhas Suleimenov did. Those who claim the opposite actually care not about Kazakh culture, not about the Kazakh future, but about their political status, their privileges, their interests. My opinion: let there be not bilingualism in Kazakhstan, but trilingualism, five-lingualism - this will only bring benefits.