Amidst a growing literature on Kazakhstan’s nation-building, Diana Kudaibergen’s book, written following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine and the shock of Bloody January in 2022, stands out for its deeply personal and heartfelt account of what it means to be Kazakhstani today.
At once an insider and an outsider, a native Kazakhstani of multicultural heritage and a UK-based sociologist, Kudaibergen brings personal context, active engagement, and academic perspective to the subject. Her lucid and reflective tone conveys the trauma of Soviet-forced settlement of nomads, the disillusionment with Soviet modernity, Nursultan Nazarbaev’s promise of a prosperous and peaceful multiethnic Kazakhstan, the shocks of the Zhanaozen killings in 2011, Bloody January in 2022, and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. This narrative will resonate not only in Kazakhstan but across Central Asia.
By the author’s own admission, the book is a “modest, reflective exploration of complex events and the life of identity,” without hoping to “find definitive answers” (xiii). Describing the Nazarbaev era as a continuation of Soviet colonial rule, she dismantles stolid official and elite narratives and notes: “Kazakhstani is not a monolith or nationalistic project” (9), rather, “it is a project of political subjectivity, away from the imperialist, colonial and authoritarian legacies of the Soviet period … to be decided not by the political elites, but its citizens” (11). The book articulates the vision of a decolonized democratic Kazakhstan held by Gen-Z, who refuse to be defined by Soviet legacy.
Chapter 1 sets the framework by describing Soviet rule as a racialized regime and depicts the trauma of asharshylyk, the famine of 1932–33, which killed over a third of the Kazakh population. Unlike the public commemoration of holodomor in Ukraine, asharshylyk is still subsumed under the category of “Stalinist crimes,” which divests the Soviet rulers of any culpability. She introduces key terms: Kimdik, as a Kazakh term signifying identity, Qazaq to convey the correct pronunciation and transliteration from the Latin alphabet in place of the Cyrillic-derived “Kazakh” and Q-art, Q-pop as decolonial markers.
Chapter 2 offers a counter-regime narrative of the violence inflicted during the December 1986 Alma-Ata protests by their own elites conspiring with Moscow. Rejecting the view of the protests as calls for “indigenization,” she depicts them as resistance to the entrenched racial hierarchies embedded in “settler colonial policies,” reproduced through “Nazarbaevite coloniality.”
Chapter 3 uses survey and focus group data to trace the transformation of Russian identity in Kazakhstan. Kudaibergen refers to Kazakhstani Russians as “our Russians” to distinguish them from Russians in Russia or elsewhere, and as a “fourth zhuz” to metaphorically integrate them into the tripartite Kazakh zhuz structure. The refuge sought in Kazakhstan by many young Russians fleeing Vladimir Putin’s mobilization has unsettled established notions of Russianness and its ties to the Russian state. In stark contrast to Soviet era settlers, Kudaibergen views these relokanty as adapting to Kazakhstani culture and reshaping what Russian identity means beyond Russia’s borders.
Chapter 4 deconstructs the widespread slurs mankurt and mambet as emanating from a racialized Soviet developmental hierarchy: mankurt as the urban, Russified Kazakh, severed from language and memory, and mambet as the rural Kazakh, considered “uncivilized” due to a poor grasp of Russian. While it offers absorbing reflections, the chapter sometimes overstates its claims by inferring too much. Casting the mambet as subaltern—both insufficiently “liberated” and “refusing to be colonised” (122)—assigns them agency and volition when structural constraints were paramount. The faith that grassroots nation-building can heal such divisions underestimates the profound socio-economic differences among Kazakhs. While these slurs and stereotypes reflect racialized colonial hierarchies, they are also discursive tools of everyday boundary-making to solidify groupness.
Having rebuffed Nazarbaev’s futureless trope of the “eternal nation” and other top-down slogans, Ch. 5 focuses on the peaceful citizens carrying banners biz qarapayim halyqpyz (“we are ordinary people”), as they took to the streets in January 2022 in deep solidarity (147). The chapter is a cogent depiction of how the Kassym-Jomart Tokayev regime has missed opportunities to implement reforms, instead institutionalizing violence and exacerbating the gulf between state and society. It is indeed time for an insider to tell the world of the personal entanglements, silences, and disenchantments of the Soviet and independent-era generations. However, the Soviet system was more complex. The Soviet project was not about turning non-Russians into ethnic Russians (121), nor was “Soviet internationalism a project of making everyone Russian first” (90). It looked to preserve and manipulate ethnic difference, and not everyone resisted being Soviet.
Finally, a democratic, multiethnic Kazakhstan may not eradicate ethnicity-based grievances in an age of populism and social media hype. Kudaibergen’s strength lies in narrating these entanglements with candor while insisting on the necessity of de-Nazarbaevification as a precondition for deeper de-Sovietization and decolonization.
