Tag: Kazakhstan

Central Asia and Russia(n): Is It Farewell?

Excerpt from “Tashkent: The End of An Era” (Mark Weil, 1996). A full, subtitled copy of the film can been seen here.

Recent trends in world politics have led several analysts to emphasize the idea of the retreat or recession of Russian power abroad. Yet few have commented on a key aspect of this retreat, namely the growing movement across Central Asia to unseat the Russian language from its position, often enshrined in law, as an official language on a par with the native tongue. Trends across the region demonstrate state action to diminish the role of the Russian language, growing political discussion of the issue, or socio-economic trends working to reduce the hegemony of the Russian language. These trends also display both Russia’s mounting anxiety about such trends and its increasingly visible inability to reverse or stop them.

BACKGROUND

Russia’s recent reversals in Syria, Venezuela, the Caucasus and potentially Iran have triggered a flood of articles proclaiming the retreat of Russian power. However, none of these writings noticed the parallel ongoing dethronement of the Russian language from its previous eminence in Central Asia. Nevertheless, this epochal development, like Russia’s aforementioned geostrategic defeats, possesses profound political as well as cultural significance.  Given the importance of linguistic policies in the Tsarist, Soviet, and now post-Soviet regimes, the retreat of the Russian language from a position of linguistic-political primacy in Central Asia signifies major political and cultural transformations.

Specifically, Kazakhstan’s new constitution subtly but overtly downgrades the status of Russian as an official language. Article 9 of the new constitution establishes Kazakh as the dominant language of the country, relegating Russian to the status of an official language used by the government “alongside” Kazakh. This new constitution obtained massive public support although much of it was probably engineered from above, forcing Putin to congratulate President Tokayev on its ratification.  However, those congratulatory remarks, as Tokayev and his team well know, probably came through clenched teeth and were preceded by much Russian public criticism of Kazakhstan’s language policies.

An analysis of Russian press perspectives on the return of Kazakhstan’s Latin alphabet, originally introduced in the 1920’s, from the Cyrillicization of the alphabet during the height of Stalinism, displays a politicized perspective where this process is seen as a repudiation of a Russian orientation in favor of a Turkic-Western one. Insofar as Turkey and Western powers like the EU and the U.S. have stepped up their presence and interest in Kazakhstan and Central Asia as a whole, this politicized perspective sees language and alphabet policies as manifestations of the growing regional presence of those parties at Moscow’s expense. Thus, Russian press coverage warns Central Asian audiences against alleged foreign plots of an imperialist nature.

Russian media also minimize or deny the agency of Kazakhstan and other Central Asian states in formulating and then executing their own alphabet and language policies while implicitly and often overtly extolling the superior, imperial role of Russia’s language and culture as a vehicle for connecting Central Asia with modern civilization and culture. In other words, much of this literature reflects an imperial echo with deep roots in late Tsarist and then Soviet imperial policies that Russian elites seek to preserve.

IMPLICATIONS

Kazakhstan’s assertion of its linguistic sovereignty challenges the Russian dream of maintaining its cultural-political hegemony over Central Asia because it is losing the means to enforce that claim on Kazakhstan and because Astana’s example is being replicated across Central Asia, e.g. in Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan. In Uzbekistan, as a 2024 paper makes clear, Russian must coexist if not compete with Uzbek and Tajik while English, a global lingua franca, is rapidly gaining on it as well. In Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan’s example has simultaneously stimulated debates on emulating its language policy.

Predictably the Russian government, sensing another threat to its receding hegemonic pretensions, has reacted strongly. On March 19, its embassy in Bishkek forcefully demanded that Kyrgyzstan’s government suppress “provocative statements of certain public figures” about the place of Russian in Kyrgyz society. The statement also complains about “language patrols” where vigilantes purportedly try to intimidate people to stop speaking Russian and speak only Kyrgyz. The embassy deemed such calls incitement to ethnic hatred and a threat to Russo-Kyrgyz strategic partnership and, in a conscious echo of Soviet propaganda, “deep alliance between our fraternal peoples and countries – Russia and Kyrgyzstan.”

This atavistic employment of Soviet tropes is no accident. Whereas Lenin’s language policies, likely inspired by his father’s work in teaching Orthodoxy to Muslims, wagered that teaching socialism would lead Soviet Muslims to socialism; Stalin decisively imposed Russification by giving the Russian language primacy and Cyrillicizing Central Asian alphabets. Putin’s consistent attacks on Lenin’s nationality policies, many of which stemmed from an appreciation of socio-political realities during the early Soviet period, reflect his clear preference for the centralizing, Stalinist, and more openly imperialist policies of Stalin and his successors.

Nevertheless, a generation after independence and having devoted much effort to fostering large-scale national identification among their populations, Central Asian leaders are openly moving to assert not just their foreign policy sovereignty, but also their linguistic nationalism. The use of Russian across Central Asia will likely remain pervasive because of the benefits it offers in economic relations with Russian and possibly Central Asian entities. However, Russian will not be the only regional lingua franca or the language of Russian imperial hegemony either in the Caucasus or in Central Asia. Since we can readily imagine a similar outcome in Ukraine due to Russia’s war against the country, which underlies many of the causes for the retreat of Russian hegemony, the trends discernible in Central Asia go far beyond its borders.

CONCLUSIONS

Even as the Russian government is currently discussing legislation allowing it to intervene anywhere abroad on behalf of its citizens, Central Asian developments presage the ongoing erosion of Russian cultural and thus political power. The whole idea of the “Russkii Mir” (Russian World) based on speakers of the Russian language that furnishes a pretext for interventions abroad is rapidly falling to pieces. From Tsarist and Soviet times, Russian authorities consistently regarded Russian as the sole “civilized” and therefore hegemonic language of the empire and often sought to enforce that hegemony by coercion. Those days are visibly ending as Central Asian governments are, with increasing confidence, asserting their own native tongues while also opening up to greater economic-cultural interaction with other countries. While Russian will not disappear in Central Asia; it is being decentered and increasingly deprived of its superior legal-political standing.

This process is clearly linked to the global recession of Russian power even as Russia fights to retain its erstwhile imperial and global great power status. For its rulers, expression of that status through all the forms of cultural power, e.g. alphabets and languages, was a critical component of empire. Yet what we see today, despite Moscow’s threats or even forceful efforts to arrest or reverse that decline, is an imperial sunset that evidently cannot be stopped either in culture or in hard power.

AUTHOR’S BIO

Stephen Blank is a Senior Fellow with the Foreign Policy Research Institute, www.fpri.org.

Source: Stephen Blank, “The Retreat of the Russian Language from Central Asia,” Central Asia-Caucasus Analyst, 23 April 2026

When anthropology researcher Ashley McDermott was doing fieldwork in Kyrgyzstan a few years ago, she says many people voiced the same concern: children were losing touch with their indigenous language. The Central Asian country of 7 million people was under Russian control for a century until 1991, but Kyrgyz (pronounced kur-giz) survived and remains widely spoken among adults.

McDermott, a doctoral student at the University of Michigan, says she also heard that some kids in rural villages where Kyrgyz dominated had spontaneously learned to speak Russian. The adults largely blamed a singular force: YouTube.

McDermott and a team of five researchers across four universities in the US and Kyrgyzstan have released new research they believe proves the fears about YouTube’s influence are valid. The group simulated user behavior on YouTube and collected nearly 11,000 unique search results and video recommendations.

What they found is that Kyrgyz-language searches for popular kid interests such as cartoons, fairy tales, and mermaids often did not yield content in Kyrgyz. Even after watching ten children’s videos featuring Kyrgyz speech to demonstrate a strong desire for it, the simulated users received fewer Kyrgyz-language recommendations for what to watch next than, surprisingly, bots showing no language preference at all. The findings show YouTube prioritizes Russian-language content over Kyrgyz-language videos, especially when searching or browsing children’s topics, according to the researchers.

“Kyrgyz children are algorithmically constructed as audiences for Russian content,” Nel Escher, a coauthor who is a postdoctoral scholar at UC Berkeley, said during a presentation at the school last week. “There is no good way to be a Kyrgyz-speaking kid on YouTube.”

McDermott recalls one frustrated Kyrgyzstani mother in 2023 explaining that she paid the internet bill a day late each month to regularly have one day without internet and, thus, YouTube at home.

YouTube, which has “committed to amplifying indigenous voices,” did not respond to WIRED’s requests for comment. The researchers are attempting to meet with YouTube’s parental controls team to discuss the potential for language filters, according to Escher.

The researchers say their work is the latest to show how online platforms can reinforce colonial culture and influence offline behavior. Under Soviet control, people in Kyrgyzstan had to learn Russian to succeed. Today, many adults are fluent in both Russian and Kyrgyz, with Russian remaining important for commerce. Kids are required to learn at least some Kyrgyz in school. But many spend several hours a day online, and watching YouTube is the leading activity, McDermott says. Quoting from Russian language videos is common, whether creators’ refrains like “Let’s do a challenge,” adaptations of American words such as “cringe,” or parroting accents and syntax.

In one of the researchers’ experiments, they searched for several subjects which are spelled the same in Russian and Kyrgyz, including Harry Potter and Minecraft. The results were predominantly Russian. Overall, just 2.7 percent of the videos the research team analyzed appeared to even include ethnically Kyrgyz people.

YouTube “socializes youth to view Russian as the default language of entertainment and technology and to view Kyrgyz as uninteresting,” the researchers wrote in a self-published paper accepted to a social computing conference scheduled for October.

The researchers say there is ample Kyrgyz-language children’s content for YouTube to promote. In 2024, the 35th-most viewed channel on YouTube across the world was D Billions, a Kyrgyzstan-based children-focused content studio with a dedicated Kyrgyz-language channel that has nearly 1 million subscribers.

Azamat Duishenov, head of the program management office for D Billions, tells WIRED that their team believes Kyrgyz content helps promote the language. Duishenov suspects YouTube may find it worthwhile to err toward recommending content in Russian because Russian speakers outnumber Kyrgyz ones.

The researchers suggest potential remedies to parents such as creating playlists of Kyrgyz-language content or sharing devices with their children. When the researchers simulated adult users watching non-kid’s content in Kyrgyz, they received predominantly Kyrgyz-language recommendations. Then, when kids later used the same device, they experienced a moderate uptick in exposure to Kyrgyz-language videos, despite younger users gravitating toward Russian content during their sessions.

Source: Paresh Dave, “This Indigenous Language Survived Russian Occupation. Can It Survive YouTube?” Wired, 1 May 2026

The Hidden Face of the Confessional Empire: Islamophobia in Russia | A book talk by Paolo Sartori

Thursday, May 7, 2026 | 12:00 PM — 1:15 PM CT

Online

Please join the East Asia Research Forum as they host a Zoom talk with Paolo Sartori.

Description:

In May 1854, the Russian imperial authorities arrested Ishan Muhammad Sharif Mansurov on suspicion of conspiratorial activities. The investigation, which lasted about nine years, sparked a media frenzy and rumors of possible mass unrest in the Kazakh steppe on religious grounds, and drew public attention, including from ruling circles. Why was the figure of the Sufi Mansurov of such interest to the colonial administration, and what danger did he pose? What knowledge did government officials possess regarding Sufism in the Kazakh steppe at that time? By analysing the documentary traces left by the Mansurov case, I offer a set of reflections on the relationship between the Russian confessional state and Islamophobia.

Speaker Bio:

Paolo Sartori (PhD 2006) is Distinguished Fellow of the Austrian Academy of Sciences where he presides over the Committee for the Study of Islam in Central Eurasia. He is the author of A Soviet Sultanate: Islam in Socialist Uzbekistan (1943-1991) and, more recently he has guest-edited a theme issue on Russian Colonialism for the Slavic Review.

Please register for this online event.

Source: PlanIt Purple Events Calendar (Northwestern University)

My guest today was born in 1991, the same year as the independent states of Central Asia. A few years ago, he set out to explore what’s happened in the former Soviet republics since the collapse of the USSR, and whether they have flourished over the last 35 years without the “big brother” Russia.

His book, Farewell to Russia: A journey through the former USSR, has just been published in the UK and the US. His name is Joe Luc Barnes, and you might also recognise his voice from our audio documentaries. In this episode, we talk about his book, travelling and living in Central Asia, and the (often problematic) craft of travel writing.

Source: Agnieszka Pikulicka, “Episode 33: Lessons on independence from the former Soviet republics,” Turan Tales, 18 March 2026

Mark Weil, who has died aged 55 after being stabbed on his way home from a rehearsal, was the founder and director of the first independent theatre in the Soviet Union – the Ilkhom, in the Uzbek capital, Tashkent. To this day, the Ilkhom remains the only venue for original, uncensored drama in a country where freedom of expression is severely limited. An extraordinary man, he created an artistic space in which people could ask questions and explore their experience.

Born in Tashkent, Mark was not an Uzbek but a Russian Jew, part of the world of central Asian Russians that is now disappearing. Russian-speaking, but with much of the style and gentleness of Asia, these people were insiders, but often with the outsider’s powers of perception. Russian traders had first come south to central Asia during the Arab empires (a cross-cultural theme that Mark loved) but the Russian presence really took off in the Soviet era. An intellectual, nonconformist scene began to grow. Solzhenitsyn’s time in Tashkent (in 1953) became Cancer Ward. Mikhail Bulgakov’s widow managed to hide the manuscript of The Master and Margarita until it was safe to publish.

This eclectic, offbeat world was Mark’s heritage. He studied drama in Moscow and St Petersburg in the early 1970s, but returned to take his MA in history and artistic theory in Tashkent in 1974. In 1976, he opened the Russian-speaking Ilkhom – the word means “inspiration” in Uzbek – with a piece of improvisation that came straight from central Asian street culture, called Makharaboz-76 (Clown 76). Throughout the Brezhnev era, he staged the debuts of young playwrights at the Ilkhom, the only theatre in the Soviet Union that had no state funding.

After the collapse of the USSR and birth of the new country of Uzbekistan, Mark made contacts with foreign theatre groups, thrilled to meet experimental, thoughtful people from all over the world. The Ilkhom company took its shows to France, Germany and Italy. In 1988, he visited Seattle and held workshops at US universities. But along with new freedoms came disappointments. President Islam Karimov’s rule became ever more authoritarian.

Most Russian-speaking intellectuals queued for Russian passports and got out. Mark did not. “This is my city, I was born here, and I will never leave,” he often said. But he never courted collision with the authorities. He simply got on with his work.

In the 1990s, Mark set about a huge project close to his heart, a documentary history of Tashkent. He hunted down and restored lost archive of the city, and added his own footage. Laughing wryly, he told me how he went out to film part of the medieval quarter that was being ripped down and built over with flats. “I was just standing quietly, filming, when the foreman saw me. With no warning, the shovel swivelled round and tipped its load over my camera and tripod, and broke it.”

With the government denouncing “foreign” entertainment, the Ilkhom produced Brecht (a constant in the repertoire) and Gozzi (1992). It put on a musical version of John Steinbeck’s Tortilla Flat (1996). It staged Edward Albee’s Zoo Stories (2005). It examined the forbidden theme of homosexuality through the short stories of the Uzbek writer Abdullah Kadiri. Mark relied heavily on foreign partnerships, including the British Council, to fund these ventures, but money was extremely tight. The actors worked for almost nothing.

Disaster struck Uzbekistan in May 2005, when thousands gathered to call for jobs and a better life in the ancient eastern city of Andijan. The army moved in and shot dead about 500 people, almost all of them unarmed. The government denied this account – it said it had scotched an Islamic uprising – but refused an international inquiry. It then closed down many foreign agencies, while others left in protest. For the Ilkhom, its vital sources of funding were reduced still further.

Mark was attacked on his way home from the dress rehearsal of Aeschylus’s tragedy, the Oresteia. It was to have been a triumphal start of a new season, in the bleakest times, and he was thrilled by the production and its exploration of revenge and the rule of law. He is survived by his wife Tatyana and daughters, Julia and Aleksandra. His death has not been reported in Uzbekistan.

· Mark Yakovlevich Weil, theatre director, born January 25 1952; died September 7 2007

Source: Monica Whitlock, “Mark Weil,” Guardian, 10 October 2007

Asylum Seekers

Yulia Yemelyanova. Source: The Insider

Kazakh authorities have granted Russia’s request to extradite activist Yulia Yemelyanova, a former employee of the late Alexei Navalny’s Petersburg office. According to the Russian opposition-in-exile’s Anti-War Committee, Kazakhstan violated its own protocols in making the decision to extradite Yemelyanova, as the Russian activist’s application for asylum is still under review in the country.

This past October, Kazakhstan’s Prosecutor General’s Office had guaranteed that extradition requests would not be considered until all administrative procedures related to obtaining asylum were completed. Yemelyanova’s defense intends to appeal the extradition decision to the country’s Supreme Court.

Yemelyanova was detained on Aug. 31, 2025, at Almaty airport while in transit to a third country. She has been held in pretrial detention ever since. In Russia, she is being prosecuted for theft (Part 2, Article 158 of the Criminal Code) in connection with a 2021 incident in which she allegedly stole a mobile phone from a taxi driver. Yemelyanova’s defense calls the case fabricated. It was sent to court in July 2022, by which time the activist had already left Russia.

Yemelyanova is the fourth Russian asylum seeker since late January to be handed a deportation decision from Kazakh officials. The others are Chechen Mansur Movlaev, an open critic of Ramzan Kadyrov; Crimean resident Oleksandr Kachkurkin, who is facing treason charges in Russia; and Yevgeny Korobov, an officer who deserted from the Russian army.

Source: “Kazakhstan moves to extradite former employee of Navalny’s St. Petersburg office to Russia,” The Insider, 11 February 2026

Dmytro Kulyk with his wife Oksana and daughter Elina. Source: Daily Beast

A Ukrainian dad escaped Vladimir Putin’s drone and missile attacks back home only to be grabbed by a band of ICE stooges in a Walmart parking lot in Minneapolis.

“I hoped I would find peace in America. I’ve done everything the government required, I don’t understand why I am behind bars,” Dmytro Kulyk told the Daily Beast from the Kandiyohi County Jail in Willmar, Minnesota.

The 39-year-old father was getting a pickup order at a Walmart in Maple Grove when he found himself surrounded by immigration agents last month. He’d been working as a delivery driver to make ends meet, while also supporting his family by doing roofing work.

Kulyk legally entered the U.S. in late 2023 along with his wife, 38, and daughter, who’s now 5. The family was sponsored by U.S. citizens as part of the Uniting 4 Ukraine program, a humanitarian program set up in April 2022 to allow Ukrainians fleeing Russia’s war to live and work in the U.S. on “parole.”

Once the initial two-year parole period expires, entrants can file for re-parole to remain in the country longer. That’s exactly what Kulyk says he did. His wife and daughter’s applications were approved. But his remained pending.

He said he was putting groceries in his car on Jan. 1 when he was approached by three ICE agents.

“I explained to the ICE officers that the war was killing people, that my wife had a disability, that it was violence, terrorism which we had escaped from but one of them began to laugh,” Kulyk told The Daily Beast. “I asked why he was laughing and I was told that he was pro-Russian, wanted Russia to win the war.”

DHS and ICE did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

He can’t understand why he’s been treated like a criminal. He did everything by the book, he says–paying taxes and filing his immigration paperwork on time, working multiple jobs to take care of his family. He had no criminal record to speak of.

His immigration attorney, Julia Bikbova, suggested his re-parole application may have intentionally been stalled to provide immigration authorities with a pretext to deport him.

“Our government, our Homeland Security, promised Ukrainians to protect them during the war. There are approximately 280,000 Ukrainians on U4U, Uniting for Ukraine program in the United States, including the Kulyk family,” she told the Daily Beast.

“My client did everything the government required him to do: on June 5 he applied for the re-parole and his wife paid $2,040 of fees for her and child’s granted applications. His wife and daughter have recently received their re-paroles but he has not, his application is pending.

“ICE detained him as ‘illegal’ and began deportation proceedings: This is a sick way of forcing a man with a clean criminal record to become unlawful in the U.S. by delaying the review of his application, which the very same authority had requested to file.”

Kulyk is now terrified he’ll be sent to the frontlines to fight Vladimir Putin’s troops if he is deported back home. He and his family endured relentless Russian attacks before finally deciding to flee their home in the Odesa region in 2023. When they saw ruins on their own street in Chornomorsk, they called their friends in Texas and asked for help, leading to their enrollment in the U4U program thanks to having U.S. citizens as sponsors.

Kulyk now can’t stop worrying about his wife, Oksana, and daughter, Elina.

“I am worried they can drag my wife and kid out of our home,” he told The Daily Beast, adding that he wanted to appeal directly to American authorities to make them understand he’d done nothing wrong.

“Please hear me: I came to America to escape the war, to pray in church and work hard. But now my heartbroken and sick wife has lost over 10 pounds since ICE arrested me on January 1. She’s been panicking, and my little daughter has been crying without me every night – this is unjust,” he said.

Oksana says she’s been too “terrified and lost” to leave home while her husband is locked up, afraid that immigration agents might return for the rest of the family.

“I am too scared to drive my 5-year-old daughter to school in my husband’s car. I’m terrified ICE will detain me and our daughter will end up alone,” she told The Daily Beast. “This is just as scary as the war in Ukraine, except now we don’t have Dmytro with us. Our daughter Elina cries herself to sleep with her cat plushie. She says the toy is daddy.”

Most Ukrainian refugees are women and children but some men have also left the country for various reasons. Kulyk was granted a permit to leave in order to care for a family member with a medical condition.

But Kulyk is not the only Ukrainian refugee to be swept up in the Trump administration’s controversial immigration crackdown.

Nearly 1,000 miles away, in Philadelphia, Zhanna was poring over messages in a group chat of 349 other refugees called “Ukrainians in Detention.” She joined the group last month, when her friends Andrii and Yaroslav ended up in detention. Although Bartosh has legal Temporary Protected Status, she stopped going to the office and now works from home.

“ICE rounds up men who buy tools or work in construction, so every day I call my husband, a construction worker, to check if he is OK. Even when the war started in Ukraine and we had to escape abroad, the same morning I wasn’t as stressed as I am now,” she told the Daily Beast. “In our chat I read that all arrestees are men, that at least five of them have signed up for self-deportation… but where is there to go now? Europe is also deporting Ukrainians. Our TPS is good until October but we want to understand, are we really legal in the United States, or is it time to pack up our suitcases again?”

Immigration attorneys count about 300 cases of detained Ukrainians across the United States and up to 150 refugees deported to Ukraine, Bikbova said.

“Most of the arrested Ukrainians are men, the majority of them have a clean criminal record but as we see in Kulyk’s case, they are equated to people who jumped the border, broke the law,” attorney Bikbova told the Daily Beast. “Behind every deported man, there are crying women and children, left without support. For some mysterious reason, we see male Ukrainian refugees being arrested and put on airplanes. If he gets deported, my client Kulyk will most certainly go to the front.”

Trump’s administration has also been deporting Russian asylum seekers. According to a report by Current Times, more than 50,000 Russians have fled the war and political repression to the U.S. since February 2022. Journalist Ilya Azar has been covering the deportations for Novaya Gazeta.

“They send out 40-60 people on each plane. There have been five airplanes,” Azar told the Daily Beast on Tuesday. The deportation planes transit to Russia through Egypt, and Russian security services meet the deported citizens. Azar’s report noted that “all men received draft notices” upon their arrival in December.

Source: Anna Nemtsova, “Laughing ICE Goons Seize Dad Who Fled Ukraine War at Walmart,” Daily Beast, 12 February 2026. The emphasis, above, is mine. \\\\\TRR

Georgy Avaliani. Source: Mediazona

German authorities last week denied asylum to 47-year-old engineer Georgy Avaliani, who deserted from the front line in 2022. His wife and two children were rejected alongside him.

“There is no reason to believe that, upon returning to the Russian Federation, they would face a high probability of persecution or serious harm,” wrote an official from the Federal Office for Migration and Refugees (BAMF), despite Avaliani’s account of being tortured after fleeing the front.

Mediazona has reviewed BAMF decisions in Avaliani’s case and those of other deserters, discovering that officials are producing boilerplate documents that repeat one another almost word for word. In justifying the refusals, the German agency argues, for instance, that mobilisation in Russia was intended to “strengthen the armed forces” rather than repress dissent, and therefore cannot be considered political persecution. They further say that mobilisation has effectively ended because Vladimir Putin announced it—verbally.

When describing potential punishments for deserters, officials cite not the criminal code but an administrative article regarding failure to comply with military registration duties. They even specify that the maximum penalty is a fine of €302.

Most notably, in every decision examined, BAMF cites Mediazona’s own article from 2023, “Evading > refusing > fleeing. A year of mobilization in Russia through trials and verdicts”, as evidence that mobilised men face little more than a fine. That article noted that, at the time of publication, failing to respond to a summons did not yet carry a heavy penalty. While the situation has since changed—an eventuality the original article warned about—the original reference remains in the German files.

Relying on information from that article is also fundamentally flawed because BAMF applies it to people already wanted under serious criminal charges for desertion or abandoning their unit. In its rulings, the agency ignores the severity of these consequences, lumping deserters in with those who simply left Russia when mobilisation was first announced. This is exactly what happened to Georgy Avaliani.

A year in a refugee camp

Avaliani, an engineer, arrived in Germany with his wife, Oksana, and their two children on January 26, 2025. By then Georgy, who was drafted shortly after mobilisation began and later deserted, had been on a federal wanted list for over six months.

The family was granted asylum-seeker status without an initial investigation into the specifics of their escape. Like other applicants, they were placed in temporary housing: a small portacabin with two bunk beds at the former Tempelhof airport site. Their journey to Germany had been arduous. On January 18, Georgy, who had managed to leave Russia before his name appeared on the wanted list, met his wife and children in Bosnia. From there, they travelled to the Croatian border and requested asylum.

In Croatia, the asylum process is largely a formality; in practice, obtaining protection there is nearly impossible. Consequently, many migrants use it only as an entry point into the EU before heading to countries with functioning reception systems. The Avalianis did the same. After a preliminary registration in Croatia, they spent a week travelling to Berlin.

For nearly a year, the family was cramped in a camp with 2,000 other applicants. Finally, just before the start of 2026, they were moved to a hostel in western Berlin. But Georgy’s hopes of integration (he had been diligently learning German and hoped to return to engineering) were soon shuttered. On January 16, just two weeks after their move, BAMF rejected the entire family’s asylum claim.

Avaliani intends to appeal. If he fails, the family must leave Germany within 30 days or face deportation to Russia, where Georgy faces up to 10 years in prison for abandoning his unit during a period of mobilisation. Despite having clear evidence of persecution, the German authorities have ignored his claims.

The two escapes of Private Avaliani

Before the war, Georgy Avaliani was a well-paid engineer at the Moscow water utility, Mosvodokanal. He had no plans to leave Russia. Shortly before the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, he even enrolled in a seminary to pursue a religious education.

Georgy had never served in the army due to a heart condition. However, following the “partial mobilisation” announcement, he received a summons on October 6, 2022. At the time, his three children were minors; by law, as the father of a large family, he should have been exempt. The couple tried to contest the draft through the military enlistment office and the prosecutor’s office but failed. Georgy chose not to go into hiding, unwilling to abandon his family.

After a medical commission in November, he was sent to a training camp in the Moscow region and then to the occupied Svatove district of the Luhansk region. His unit was stationed in the village of Novoselivske, 20 km from the front line. After a few days, noticing the chaos within the unit, Avaliani decided to slip away, gambling that no one would notice his absence. He reached a nearby road and hitched a ride to the village of Troitske, a gathering point for mobilised men.

Part of a local hospital had been turned into a shelter for soldiers with nowhere else to go—some had lost their units, others were waiting to withdraw their pay, and some were recovering from wounds.

While staying there, Georgy met another mobilised soldier. They shared the same grim impression of the front and a desperate desire to return home. They found three others who felt the same and hired a taxi driver to take them to a spot where they could cross the border on foot.

After the driver dropped them off, the group split up. Along the way, Avaliani and his companion heard a helicopter. Georgy later told journalists and BAMF officials that the second group had been gunned down from the air. While there is no independent confirmation of this, Avaliani and the other man survived only to be detained in an abandoned village.

There is little doubt Georgy made this journey on foot; “Goodbye to Arms”, a project that assists deserters, thoroughly verified his route. Alexei Alshansky, a coordinator for the organisation, says the helicopter story is the only detail rights activists have been unable to confirm.

Following his capture, Avaliani was thrown into “a basement” for 10 days. He says he was beaten repeatedly and subjected to mock executions. Mediazona has previously reported on this location, known as the Zaitsevo Centre for the Detention of Servicemen, based on the testimony of another deserter, Sergei Savchenko. Volunteers from “Goodbye to Arms” identified the site in the occupied village of Rassypne by comparing testimonies with video footage.

From the basement, Georgy was sent to an assault unit. Two days later, an ammunition dump near their position exploded. Avaliani suffered a concussion and a heart attack. He was sent to a distribution point where he befriended the doctor issuing referrals. The medic sent him to a hospital inside Russia, hinting that he could just as easily head straight for Moscow instead of the ward.

Avaliani did exactly that. After reuniting with his family, he hid at a dacha in the Tula region. Occasionally, he ventured to Lyubertsy for medical treatment. As time passed he grew less cautious, but in mid-February 2024 military police arrested him outside his home.

He was sent to Kaliningrad in western Russia, the permanent base of his unit, to await his fate. When a commander learned of Georgy’s engineering background, he set him to work renovating his private dacha. Meanwhile, Georgy pushed for a formal medical commission. When it finally took place, the results were surprising: he was not only declared fit for service but his category was upgraded from “partially fit” to “fit with minor restrictions”.

In May, he was told to report for questioning regarding a criminal case. Georgy fled again. On the way to the commander’s dacha, he got a taxi and flew to St Petersburg. His wife met him there to hand over his passport. From there he flew to Belarus, then Uzbekistan, Georgia and finally Montenegro, where he was taken in by a Swedish artist for whom he helped build a swimming pool.

Oksana remained in Lyubertsy with the children. Weeks after her husband left, an investigator began calling her. Georgy was placed on a federal wanted list.

In September 2024, security forces raided the family home. They confiscated phones from Oksana and the children, returning them only two weeks later. The stress caused Oksana to suffer a nervous breakdown, leading to a month-long stay in a psychiatric clinic. The visits from military police continued; the last raid occurred on January 7, 2025. After that, Oksana finally agreed to leave Russia.

Georgy has spoken openly to the press about his escape. In Montenegro, he was interviewed by Current Time TV. The family crossed the German border accompanied by a journalist from Die Welt, which later published a detailed account. A report for the Franco-German channel Arte was also filmed by Russian journalist in exile Masha Borzunova.

The first six months in Germany were particularly precarious. Under EU law, the migration service could have deported the family back to Croatia, their first point of entry. To prevent this, Georgy sought help from the church.

The tradition of Kirchenasyl, or church asylum, began in 1983 after Cemal Kemal Altun, a 23-year-old Turkish activist, took his own life in a West Berlin court while facing extradition. His death moved church communities to unite to protect refugees from deportation. Every year, hundreds of people receive a reprieve through this practice. The Avalianis were among them.

“It is a semi-legal, more like a cultural phenomenon that works differently in different states,” explains Alshansky. “The church gives the applicant a document stating they are under their care, and the authorities leave them alone.”

Thanks to this intervention, BAMF could not reject the family simply because they entered via Croatia. They were forced to consider the case on its merits. They rejected it anyway.

BAMF’s motivation

During his personal hearing, Georgy Avaliani detailed his service and desertion. When asked what he feared if returned to Russia, he replied: “I fear for my life. Legally, I could be imprisoned for up to 20 years. But more likely, I will be killed before trial or in prison… I know for certain that if they find me, a subhuman death awaits me.”

His wife, Oksana, tried to explain the psychological toll the military police raids had taken on her and the children. The family provided lots of evidence: the mobilisation order, the wanted notice from the interior ministry’s website, a letter from a German humanitarian organisation, medical records and Georgy’s military ID.

In its rejection, the agency claimed the Avalianis were “apolitical people”, making it unclear why they believed the Russian state would view them as opponents. BAMF argued that if they were truly targeted, Georgy would never have been able to leave Russia so easily.

Having erroneously stated that Avaliani faced only an administrative fine, the official added that it was “not evident that in the applicants’ case, due to specific circumstances, a different [punishment] should apply”.

The document also asserted that officials found no evidence that mobilisation continued after Putin’s verbal announcement. Even if it were to resume, BAMF argued, it was not certain Avaliani would be called up again, given Russia’s 25 million reservists.

“Even taking into account that the applicant evaded mobilisation, it is not to be expected that… he would be subjected to the inhuman or degrading treatment required to grant asylum,” the decision stated.

The agency concluded the family could lead a dignified life in Russia. Despite the economic crisis, the official noted that people in Russia are still provided with food, social benefits and pensions. “It is not seen that… they would find themselves in a completely hopeless situation,” the ruling said. Their physical and mental health was also deemed insufficient to require treatment specifically in Germany.

A template for rejection

Alshansky attributes the BAMF decision to the wave of draft evaders who fled to Europe after 2022.

“A crowd of people rushed to claim asylum over mobilisation, some without even a summons,” he says. “I think they have exhausted the Germans to the point where, as soon as they see a Russian applicant and the word ‘mobilisation’, they just churn out this rejection.” Artyom Klyga, from the rights organisation Connection E. V., confirms that around 1,000 Russians have requested asylum in Germany due to mobilisation.

Alshansky points out that the rejection text clearly treats Avaliani as a mere draft dodger rather than a man who fled the front and is now a fugitive. He believes BAMF compiled the document from fragments of other cases without truly studying Georgy’s story. “I have compared this rejection with others. It is a template; paragraph after paragraph is identical. They just changed the personal details in a Word file,” Klyga agrees.

Mediazona compared several BAMF decisions regarding Russians who fled mobilisation. The similarities are striking. In the case of a young man who left after an attempt to serve him a summons, the agency also cited Putin’s words on the end of mobilisation. The description of the economic situation in Russia—including the detail that 15% of Russians live below the poverty line—is identical in both his and Avaliani’s files.

In another case involving a reservist who left on a tourist visa, the agency used the same argument: that mobilisation is about military strength, not political vengeance. That document also cited the same €302 fine.

The same arguments were used against Anton Sh., a deserter from Ufa whose story was covered by Sever.Realii. He had been tortured in the same Zaitsevo cellar, where guards pulled out almost all of his teeth. Despite his ordeal and the fact he is wanted in Russia, BAMF ruled he faced no danger because he had been able to leave the country freely.

Georgy Avaliani is now consulting with lawyers to appeal. “From my interview, it is perfectly clear that my situation is different [from other cases BAMF cited in the rejection]. This rejection shows that these people either cannot read or didn’t bother to try,” he said.

Even if his appeal fails, Georgy has no intention of returning. “I didn’t come here for tastier sausage, but to avoid dying in prison,” he says. “I had a good job in Russia. I will never reach that standard of living here; I’m not 20 or even 30 years old anymore. I didn’t travel far for a better life. I left solely because of persecution. Pity they don’t understand that.”

“Goodbye to Arms” estimates there are currently about 100 Russian deserters in Germany. For others planning to follow Avaliani’s route through Croatia, Alshansky recommends heading to other countries, such as Spain, where he says the bureaucratic logic remains more straightforward than in Germany.

Source: “Rubber‑stamping rejections. Germany turns away Russian army deserters who refused to fight in Ukraine, claiming they face only a fine back home,” Mediazona, 5 February 2026. Thanks to News from Ukraine Bulletin for the heads-up. The emphasis, above, is mine. \\\\\TRR

Trans(national) Solidarity

“Yara Tychina, a young transgender woman and Astana resident, picketed on Vodno-Zelyoniy Boulevard next to the House of Ministries and the Parliament. Unfurling a handmade transgender flag, she demanded that the Senate, the Presidential Administration, and the President reject the ‘LGBT propaganda’ amendments. She was taken to the Yesilskoye District Precinct of the Astana Police. Further details are in the video.”

“[In which video Ms. Tychina says] Hello! I am Yara Tychina. I’m an ordinary citizen of Astana. I work in the coffeehouse [?] industry. I’m an openly trans women. I am protesting peacefully today because there are no other means to impact my country’s repressive policies. I don’t simply oppose this law. [It] violates my rights and freedoms, the rights and freedoms of my friends, my colleagues, the people in my life and, most importantly, my family, over half of whom are members of the LGBT minority community. I have carefully scrutinized this law and I can say truthfully that it has nothing whatsoever to do with ‘propaganda,’ since in black and white it says that any mention of LGBT—in a positive vein, in a neutral vein, it doesn’t matter which; in personal profiles, in personal conversations with people, it doesn’t matter where—is considered ‘propaganda.’ The fact that I’m an openly trans woman makes me a criminal, according to the new amendments. These amendments also don’t have anything whatsoever to do with ‘protecting children,’ since hundreds of Kazakhstani LGBT children, who had no way of influencing [who they are], will find themselves outlawed. They will be banned. They will be forbidden from talking about themselves on social media. They will be forbidden from gathering together in public or in private.

“[Ms. Tychina is interrupted by Astana police officers, who claim she is violating the law. She repeatedly states her willingness to go with them to the police station. She then continues.] I heartily and tearfully implore the Presidential Administration, the Senate, and the President of the Republic of Kazakhstan, Kassym-Jomart Tokayev, and the Constitutional Court, if that doesn’t work, to reject these amendments. Otherwise, hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of Kazakhstanis, will unavoidably suffer. With these amendments, you will bridge the gap between Kazakhstan and Russia, but you will also drive away all international investments and significantly harm Kazakhstan’s standing in the international arena. But first of all you will harm people. You will harm my family. I implore you to stop it. Thank you!

“[Responding to a reporter, who asks her name, Ms. Tychina says] My name is Yara Tychina. I’m in the coffeehouse [?] industry. I have a small business. I’m an ordinary [female] citizen. [Responding to a question about her flag, she says] It’s a transgender flag, the flag of my identity. It’s homemade. [To the police officers] Let’s go! Thank you! [A police officer explains to the press that Ms. Tychina has not been detained but has voluntarily agreed to go with them to the station.]“

Source: werequest.kz (Instagram), 3 December 2025. Translated, from the Russian, by the Russian Reader. Thanks to Peter Leonard for the heads-up.

Police in Kazakhstan’s capital detained a transgender activist for staging a solitary protest against pending legislation prohibiting so-called “LGBT propaganda.” Yara Tychyna held up a handmade transgender flag near government buildings in downtown Astana and called for the Senate and the presidential administration to reject changes to the law, which are designed to proscribe “propaganda of non-traditional relations,” a formulation broad enough that positive portrayals of same-sex relations could be treated as prohibited content. Lawmakers have been debating the measure since the lower house approved it in November. Officials insist the restrictions are framed as child-protection rules. Critics warn that the draft’s language is vague and that equating LGBT themes with harmful content risks legitimising discrimination.

Source: Peter Leonard, “Central Asia’s week that was #82,” Havli, 3 December 2025

On Wednesday, November 12, the [lower house of the] Parliament of Kazakhstan (Mäjilis) unanimously passed a law banning “LGBT propaganda” in the media and on the internet. Violators face fines, and in the case of repeat violations, up to ten days in jail.

“Endeavoring to protect children from information detrimental to their health and development, provisions have been made to restrict the dissemination of information promoting pedophilia and non-traditional sexual orientation in public spaces, as well as via the media, telecommunications networks, and online platforms,” the document states.

The changes will affect nine laws. Violations of the ban will be punishable by a fine of up to forty minimum calculation indices (in 2025, this amounted to 157,000 tenge, or approximately 260 euros, or 24,500 rubles), or up to ten days in jail.

Kazakhstan’s Deputy Minister of Culture Yevgeny Kochetov explained that materials containing “propaganda of non-traditional relationships” would have to be labeled “18+.” Content that violates the law would be blocked.

Kochetov added that the strictures currently apply primarily to those who distribute materials. If minors attend a screening of a film rated 18+, the cinema’s managers, not the parents, would face a fine, he explained.

“If, for example, [men] are holding hands in the park, this is not considered propaganda. These are their personal boundaries, and there are no questions here,” said one of the sponsors of the bill, MP Yelnur Beisenbayev.

The Mäjilis initially sought to ban “LGBT propaganda,” in April 2024, by amending the law “On Mass Media.” They later proposed criminalizing “LGBT propaganda” and equating it with incitement to ethnic, social, or religious hatred.

When MPs began discussing banning “LGBT propaganda,” a petition entitled “We oppose open and covert LGBT propaganda in the R[epublic of] K[azakhstan]” was posted on the website E-Petition.kz. It was the third petition in the country to gather the fifty thousand signatures required for consideration by the government.

The Ministry of Culture and Information decided to partly accede to the petitioners’ demands—when it came to strictures aimed at “protecting and shielding adolescents and children from the promotion and cultivation of sexual relations.”

Consequently, the ban was presented as an amendment to the draft law on archiving.

Traditional values

In recent months, Kazakhstan President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev has repeatedly spoken about the need to protect “traditional values.” The day before the Mäjilis passed the bill, and ahead of his visit to Moscow, Tokayev published an article in Rossiiskaya Gazeta in which he spoke about the friendship between the two countries.

“We are united by a common take on traditional values, similar views on the pressing issues of contemporary life, and cooperation in ensuring the welfare of [our two] brotherly peoples,” Tokayev wrote.

In Russia, the law banning “LGBT propaganda” among minors was first introduced in St. Petersburg in 2011, and then at the federal level in 2013. In 2023, the Russian authorities went so far as to declare the “international LGBT movement” extremist.

As of July 2025, Human Rights Watch had catalogued more than one hundred criminal indictments and convictions [in Russia] for involvement in the “international LGBT movement” or for displaying symbols which the authorities attribute to this movement.

Following Russia’s lead, “LGBT propaganda” was banned in Hungary in 2021, and in Georgia in 2024.

LGBTQ+ in Kazakhstan

Homosexuality was decriminalized in Kazakhstan de facto in 1997 and de jure in 1998. Since 2003, transgender people have been able to change their gender marker in official documents.

In 2021, the Williams Institute at UCLA School of Law ranked Kazakhstan 154th out of 175 countries in terms of public acceptance of LGBTQ+, below Uzbekistan, Russia, and Afghanistan.

The online platform Equaldex, which researches the rights of sexual minorities around the world, writes that “[a]ccording to recent survey data, there appears to be strong opposition to LGBTQ+ rights in Kazakhstan.”

Many human rights organizations have already criticized Kazakhstan’s ban on “LGBT propaganda.”

Human Rights Watch urged lawmakers to reject the bill. The NGO argues that the proposed amendments violate fundamental human rights and could make LGBTQ+ people in Kazakhstan more vulnerable.

Organizations including ILGA-Europe (the European branch of the International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans and Intersex Association), the World Organisation Against Torture (OMCT), and TGEU (Trans Europe and Central Asia) have also issued a joint statement against the bill.

The Kazakhstani organization Queer.kz commented on the Mäjilis’s passing the amendments banning “LGBT propaganda” as follows: “We continue to write letters! Our organization will continue to work together with our colleagues to defend human rights and freedom!”

Source: “Kazakhstan parliament votes to ban ‘LGBT propaganda,'” BBC Russian Service, 12 November 2025. Translated by the Russian Reader. Thanks to Peter Leonard for the heads-up.

Over the past four years of America’s modern anti-transgender panic, Missouri has been one of its chief laboratories. Each legislative session brings a flood of new proposals targeting transgender people—with each year opening with often more than a dozen bills—and 2026 is already shaping up to continue that pattern. In the first batch of early bills, lawmakers introduced 21 anti-LGBTQ+ measures, many escalating the state’s enforcement tactics beyond even last year’s cruelties. One stands out in particular: a bill that would ban “social transition” in schools—blocking teachers from using a student’s chosen name or pronouns, even with parental consent.

The bill, SB1085, filed by Senator Joe Nicola, states in its summary that it would prohibit “public school staff members from encouraging minor students in their ‘social transition,’” which the measure defines as engaging in any activity “with the goal of helping a student become perceived as a member of the opposite biological sex.” The text defines social transition broadly—“participating” in a student’s gender transition based on “details such as his or her name, appearance, or behavior”—and bars schools from taking part in any conduct that could contribute to a student “not being perceived and treated as a member of the student’s biological sex.”

The bill explicitly forbids all school staff and faculty from “the use of alternative pronouns or names for the minor student, either in school records or otherwise.” Notably, it contains no provision for parental consent—meaning the restrictions apply not only to unsupportive parents but also to parents who affirm their transgender children. The measure appears to single out trans students exclusively: nothing in its text bars name changes for any other reason unrelated to gender transition.

You can see the provisions here:

Provisions in SB1085

The bill marks the latest front in anti-transgender legislation: an effort not just to ban medical transition for trans youth, but to prohibit any form of transition at all, including social transition. Earlier this year, reporting out of Texas showed how a similar law led teachers to suddenly deadname students who had used their affirmed names for years without issue. Variations of this language have surfaced in several states, but Missouri’s proposal is among the most explicit and far-reaching attempts yet to regulate social transition in schools.

The ban on social transition—even with parental permission—underscores a shift in how anti-trans legislation is being sold to the public. For years, supporters of bathroom bans, sports bans, and “don’t say gay” policies framed their efforts as battles for “parental rights.” Increasingly, though, that language has fallen away as lawmakers move to strip supportive parents of any authority at all, mirroring the approach in medical transition bans that override parental consent entirely. Under Missouri’s proposal, parents would have no right to approve their child’s affirmed name or pronouns, and any teacher who honors a family’s wishes could face the loss of their license.

The social-transition ban is just one front in a broader offensive. Missouri lawmakers have already filed bills to outlaw public drag by defining it as prurient “male or female impersonation,” to strip Pride flags from public schools, and to roll back nondiscrimination protections for transgender people in housing, employment, and public accommodations. And more proposals are almost certain to follow. When the legislature gavels in on January 8, the real question for observers won’t be whether these bills appear—they already have—but which ones Republican leadership chooses to fast-track. That early movement will signal just how aggressive Missouri intends to be in advancing its anti-LGBTQ agenda this session.

Source: Erin Reed, “New Missouri Bill Would Ban “Social Transition” In Schools, Even With Parental Permission,” Erin in the Morning, 3 December 2025

On April 27, 2023, Kansas became the first state in the country to institute a statewide definition of sex. “A ‘female’ is an individual whose biological reproductive system is developed to produce ova,” the law declared, “and a ‘male’ is an individual whose biological reproductive system is developed to fertilize the ova of a female.” Since then dozens of state legislatures have introduced similar bills; sixteen have passed. In Indiana and Nebraska governors have issued executive orders to the same end. Each of these measures effectively strips transgender people of legal recognition.

The language of these policies usually distinguishes men from women by their reproductive capacity, which is assumed to be determined at birth or even at conception. Each statute mandates that its definitions of “sex,” “female,” and “male” be used whenever those words appear in any part of the state code. Some purport to be establishing a “women’s bill of rights,” as the titles of Kansas’s and Oklahoma’s bills suggest; Louisiana’s is titled “The Women’s Safety and Protection Act.” (On the other hand, the name of North Dakota’s bill—into which legislators slipped another term they wanted to define—captures the arbitrariness involved: “The Definition of Female, Male, Sex, and Scrap Metal Dealer.”)

This legislation is part of a broader onslaught. In the past few years Republican-controlled state legislatures have introduced thousands of bills targeting trans people, with measures to ban puberty blockers and hormones for trans youth, bar trans girls and women from sports, mandate that bathroom access be based on birth sex, outlaw drag performances, and more. So far more than two hundred of these laws have passed, with grave, often life-changing consequences for the trans residents of red states across the country.

Continue reading “Trans(national) Solidarity” →

12/16/11: The Truth About What Happened in Zhanaozen

Eleven years ago, on December 16, 2011, the bloodiest page in the history of independent Kazakhstan was written. A months-long strike by oil workers in Zhanaozen ended when police shot the unarmed strikers in the city’s central square. For another three days, the police and the army terrorized the local population.

In this documentary film, Just Journalism has reconstructed the chronology of those tragic days. Oil workers who survived the massacres, relatives of the victims, local residents, eyewitnesses, and people who were directly involved in the events in Zhanaozen in December 2011 talk about the fear and hatred that have settled on this city in western Kazakhstan since then.

The film features unique footage and eyewitness testimony.

00:00 – 12/16/11

01:29 – Chapter I. “STRIKE UNTIL YOU’RE BLUE IN THE FACE”

26:18 – Chapter II. “WE THOUGHT THEY WERE SHOOTING BLANKS”

46:05 – Chapter III. “THEY LET HIM GO BECAUSE THEY KNEW HE WAS GOING TO DIE”

01:23:23 – Chapter IV. “HE WENT OVER TO THE PEOPLE’S SIDE”

01:34:22 – EPILOGUE

01:56:14 – End Titles and Credits

Just Journalism is a nonprofit project by the journalists Lukpan Akhmedyarov and Raul Uporov. They strive to answer not only the questions who, what, where, and when, but above all the questions, Why is this happening? What does it mean?

Just Journalism is a nonprofit project. There are no advertisements, promotions, or product placements in our videos, which you can watch for free. If you want to support us you can do so by donating money over the phone on +7 775 570 59 20 or to Kaspi Gold card number 4400 4301 0175 8271.

In Kazakh and Russian. Translation from the Russian and English subtitles by Thomas H. Campbell

Go to Kazakhstan!

A bird’s eye view of Astana (aka Nursultan), the capital of Kazakhstan. Photo courtesy of Travel Triangle

Observing the discussions about visas [for Russians wishing to escape to the EU], I want to note how detached they are, in a way, from real life. It sometimes seems to me that this discussion is more about how Russians imagine “the West” than it is about helping actual people.

For many reasons it is more advantageous and convenient for certain people to leave, for example, for good old Kazakhstan. Why?

First, [Russia’s] longest land border is with Kazakhstan. There are numerous border crossings, and planes fly to and from there. This is one of the fastest and cheapest ways for many people to leave Russia.

Second, [Russians] don’t need visas to cross the border [with Kazakstan]. You don’t need a large packet of papers proving you have the right to a long-term stay, and you don’t need to go to a [Kazakhstan] consulate [before leaving Russia]. You can get a work patent and some kind of registration on the spot and remain in the country for a long time.

Third, it is easier to transfer your business there, to register it without losing previous business projects and connections. It is relatively easier to find a new job there or start your own business from scratch. There are still many tools for transferring money from Russia to Kazakhstan and back.

Fourth, it is a relatively cheap country: the prices are comparable to Russian ones.

Fifth, [Kazakstan] is still a culturally congenial country. The Russian language is widespread, and many of the bureaucratic rules and habits of everyday behavior in general are similar.

That is, generally speaking, from an “average Joe” point of view, good old Kazakhstan looks at the moment to be a more preferable place to go for very many people than good old Europe does. What follows from this? It implies the need, if we are talking about helping those who have left, to come up with a strategy for interacting with the conditions in Kazakhstan by establishing a dialogue with local politicians and officials, with society and its leaders, with the local media. In the end, this strategy should involve acquiring a basic knowledge of the language, culture and history of Kazakhstan, cultivating an attentive attitude to our own stereotypes and language, and getting rid of imperial habits. Europe and the West in general should be invited to cooperate with Kazakhstan in providing this assistance.

Еuropean visas, in fact, are hardly the main problem.

Source: Sergey Abashin, Facebook, 29 September 2022. Translated by the Russian Reader. I have featured Professor Abashin’s always invaluable and well-grounded reflections and observations on such topics as immigration policy in Russia and Russian attitudes to Central Asian migrant workers on many occasions on this website.

“To Become White in the Eyes of Whites”: Astrakhan Kazakhs and the War in Ukraine

Monument to the Kazakh composer Kurmangazy Sagyrbayuly in Astrakhan. Photo courtesy of Wikipedia

According to official statistics, ethnic Kazakhs [so-called Astrakhan Kazakhs] make up 16% of population of the Astrakhan Region. At the same time, 80% of the region’s residents who have been killed in the war in Ukraine and whose deaths have been publicly acknowledged by relatives or the authorities, are members of this particular ethnic group. Idel.Realii talked to several Astrakhan residents to understand why this is the case and what reaction it causes in the local community.

The situation is similar in regions without the status of “republics” — the Astrakhan Region is sending mainly ethnic Kazakhs, not ethnic Russians, to war. According to our figures, the regional and municipal authorities of the Lower Volga have acknowledged, as of today, the deaths of twenty-six natives of the region in the war in Ukraine. Based on the names of the victims and their places of birth, it is possible to say with a high degree of probability that twenty-one of them are ethnic Kazakhs.

Kazakhs are the second largest ethnic group in the Lower Volga after Russians. The 2010 census revealed that around 150 thousand Kazakhs live in the Astrakhan Region. Thus, the ethnic Kazakh population makes up 16% of the region’s residents who indicated their ethnicity. But Kazakhs are in the majority among the acknowledged war dead. Twenty-one out of twenty-six is 80% — that is, the disparity is fivefold.

Fragmentary reports coming from Astrakhan’s rural areas in the early days of the war suggest that the number of the region’s residents killed in Ukraine may be significantly higher than the official data admits. The ethnic imbalance is also noticeable in unconfirmed cases. Reports of war dead appeared mainly in the chats of residents of the Volodarsky District, the only part of the Astrakhan Region where Kazakhs make up the absolute majority of the population.

Idel.Realii talked to several residents of the Astrakhan Region to understand the possible causes of this imbalance and what people in the region think about it. The names of the interviewees have been changed for their safety.

“THE ONLY WAY TO FEED A FAMILY”

“This is not a new story: Kazakhs have always been represented in the uniformed services more than other Astrakhan residents,” says Aisulu from the Volodarsky District. “If you walk around the regional center, you will notice that almost half of the police officers are Kazakh in appearance — which is also much more than the proportion of Kazakhs in the entire population. You see the same picture among contract soldiers in the military.”

She believes that this is due to the fact that Astrakhan Kazakhs have traditionally been settled in small villages in rural areas.

“Many of them are located far from the city. They do not have permanent transport links with the outside world. They are separated from the main roads via one or more ferry crossings,” she says. “There is a high unemployment rate in such areas, and if you have bigger ambitions than working in agriculture, the main ways are rotation work or service in law enforcement and the military. The second option, of course, is regarded as more stable (not to mention respectable), so young guys from villages go en masse into the army and the police. This is often the only way for them to feed their families.”

According Aisulu, Kazakhs also choose to serve in law enforcement and the military more often than ethnic Russians because they have fewer job prospects in large cities: due to xenophobia, many employers prefer to hire a person of Slavic appearance, automatically considering them more competent and presentable. According to Aisulu, this further narrows career choices, motivating Astrakhan Kazakhs to go into voluntary [contract] military service, where ethnicity does not play such a huge role.

“WE DO NOT AND CANNOT HAVE INTERESTS IN UKRAINE”

“In the context of the current war, there may be another factor — ideology. Yes, there are an unusually large number of Kazakhs among Astrakhan military personnel, but they are clearly not the absolute majority. Why do we hear almost only about their deaths? We can assume that the command deliberately sends soldiers of non-Russian appearance to the front line to emphasize the formal justification for the attack on Ukraine: ‘the multi-ethnic people of the Russian Federation’ are fighting ‘fascism,'” says Adilbek, a native of the Narimanov District.

In his opinion, this is ironic.

“This is, allegedly, a campaign by a multi-ethnic people, in which there are Kazakhs, among others, and Putin says, ‘I am Lak, Jewish, Mordvin, Ossetian,’ but this campaign is aimed at expanding the ethnic Russian world and promoting Russian ethnic interests. It has nothing to do with the interests of Laks, Ossetians, or Kazakhs. We do not and cannot have interests in Ukraine at all, we have nothing to do with it. I see a sad irony in this. Russian fascists are waging an aggressive war, leading minorities into battle and taking cover behind fictional anti-fascism. Consequently, our guys are dying for people who actually despise them and are just using them.”

“WE DON’T WANT OUR CHILDREN TO DIE”

Rufina, a relative of an Astrakhan Kazakh who has died in the war in Ukraine, and a native of the Astrakhan Region’s Kamyzyak District, says that many residents of her village have gone to fight. Two other relatives of her parents are currently in Ukraine.

“My mother, grandmother, and other women who remain in the village are rather apolitical people with no coherent system of views. They are, in fact, now opposed to the war, but in their own way: ‘We don;’t want our children to die god knows where and god knows for whom.’ This does not prevent them from chewing out Ukraine and making fun of Zelensky, but they also chew out Putin. The only thing they really want is for all of it to stop and for their children to come home. The men are a little different: my uncle wears a T-shirt emblazoned with a Z, and some people in the village dress up children in these symbols. But I don’t consider this a direct endorsement of the war. In my opinion, their motivation, rather, is just to support their brothers, since they are [in Ukraine],” explains Rufina.

She actively opposes the war and puts up anti-war leaflets in the courtyards of residential areas in Astrakhan, but admits that this stance is not very popular even among her peers — people of high school age.

“Propaganda, unfortunately, does a bang-up job in these parts: many people believe in the ‘special operation’ and despise all Ukrainians. Our Russian-language teacher told us in class about ‘Ukrainian Nazis’ and went to a rally celebrating the ‘reunification’ of Crimea and Russia. I don’t see much opposition from schoolchildren,” says Rufina.

“On the other hand, I met some like-minded women who helped me with leaflets. We made small handwritten posters featuring slogans like ‘Silence is consent,’ ‘No death, no war,’ and ‘Bring flowers, not destruction,’ and pasted them on poles and bulletin boards. They were quickly torn down, however — whether by janitors or ordinary people who didn’t agree with [our message], I don’t know,” says Rufina.

“THE SENSELESSNESS IS STUNNING”

Kanat, who lives in Astrakhan, believes that the region’s residents are gradually losing interest in the events in Ukraine.

“War, like any other topic, cannot grip people’s attention for a long time. During the first month, I heard condemnation and discontent from the people around me and noticed that they were depressed. Now everyone is immersed in their daily problems again,” says Kanat. “There are more of these problems, but for some reason people no longer link them to what the army has been doing at the behest of the authorities. At the same time, it is clear that there is no freedom of speech, there is no criticism of the government and its actions, and we are thinking about how to live with what we have at the moment.”

“A colleague of mine says that when a war is on you must not condemn your country’s army. You can figure things out afterwards, but for now you can only support them. I don’t understand this. If this were a war to defend our own territory, to defend our rights and freedoms, then yes, we could say that, for the moment, we could close our eyes to certain crimes committed by the army or by individuals, and we would get to the bottom of them later. But now the exact opposite — a war of aggression — is happening,” claims Kanat.

According to him, he finds it “strange to see the posthumous medals for Kazakhs.”

“Maybe Kazakhs are not the only soldiers from Astrakhan Region who are getting killed, but I don’t really remember the others, to be honest. The senselessness is stunning. If you believe the rhetoric of the authorities, ethnics Russians are not loved in Ukraine, but ethnic Kazakhs from the Volodarsky District are dying for their interests. But I think that protests in Kazakhstan are more important to them than the rights of Russian-speaking residents of Odesa,” Kanat argues.

“TO BECOME WHITE IN THE EYES OF WHITES”

“Why are Kazakhs and other non-ethnic Russian Russian Federation nationals fighting? I would like to say that it is impossible to explain, but in fact I understand it,” says Rasul, a Kazakhstani national who moved to Russia to study at university. “First of all, these are people from poor regions, for whom the army is a way to move up in life, to become white in the eyes of whites, to become ethnic Russian in the eyes of ethnic Russians, to join something big and supposedly majestic. Secondly, Russian propaganda has this amazing property — it takes all imperial narratives that have existed in this country and fascistizes them to the limit. If you love the Russian Empire, here’s Christ for you. If you love the USSR, here’s the red banner. If you love Russia, here’s the tricolor. Are you a Tuvan who speaks Russian poorly? Here’s the opinion that [Russian defense minister Sergei] Shoigu is the reincarnation of Subutai. Are you a Kadyrovite? Here’s jihad for you. It all affects you, staying somewhere in your head, and when you are sent off to war, you easily find a moral justification for what you are doing.”

Rasul notes that he, perhaps, “would like to denounce ethnic Kazakhs involved in the war, to ‘discharge’ them from the Kazakh people, to say that they are all traitors.”

“From the viewpoint of sharia, they actually are traitors: all muftis, except the pro-Putin ones, have condemned this war. At the Last Judgment, these soldiers will be asked, ‘What did you die for? For Putin and his yacht? Well, then go to hell with them.’ But, to be honest, I feel more sorry for them on the purely human level than for the ethnic Russian guys, because after three years of living in Russia I understood how this propaganda works, how this society as a whole is organized, what the dynamics of interethnic relations are. I myself have many questions for our government, many problems with ethnic Kazakh and Kazakhstani identity, but over these two months I have repeatedly discussed Ukraine with my friends from Kazakhstan — with ethnic Kazakhs, ethnic Russians, ethnic Uyghurs, ethnic Dungans, ethnic Germans, and ethnic Poles — and we have always agreed that if Russia invaded us, we would go to war and shoot at the occupiers. We may speak Russian perfectly and have an excellent grasp of Russian literature, but this is our land, and we don’t need any ‘Russian world’ in it,” the Kazakhstani concludes.

Source: Idel.Realii (Radio Svoboda), 18 May 2022. Thanks to Comrade Koganzon for the heads-up. Translated by the Russian Reader

Kazahkstan’s State Oil and Gas Company Besieged by Striking Oil Workers from Zhanaozen

Employees of the Zhanaozen oilfield service company Kezbi LLP were in the capital demanding higher wages and better working conditions for over two weeks. The reason for the workers’ march on Nur-Sultan was the sacking of some strikers and management’s unwillingness to settle the labor dispute at the company.

Striking Zhanaozen oil workers outside KazMunayGas headquarters in Nur-Sultan

A strike of workers at Kezbi LLP in Zhanaozen has been underway since April 18. More than 300 people are involved in the protest. For almost a month, workers have demanded improved working conditions and wage increases. On the seventeenth day of the labor dispute, the company filed a lawsuit against twenty-one employees, and twelve employees were fired for participating in a strike that had earlier been ruled unlawful by a court.

Nevertheless, despite the pressure, the workers have refused to end the strike.

According to the protesters, they are dissatisfied with low wages, numerous violations of their labor rights, and discrimination. Separately, the employees highlight the serious wear and tear of production equipment, which poses a danger to their lives.

Amid the escalation of the conflict, a group of delegates went to Kazahstan’s capital in early May to get the truth [sic]. Twenty-six workers visited the Energy Ministry, the Prosecutor General’s Office, and the state-owned oil and gas company KazMunayGas. The oil workers reported that, during negotiations, the Ministry asked to give them time to resolve the issue.

However, without waiting for any concrete actions to resolve the labor dispute on the part of state representatives, the workers moved to “besiege” state agencies and the offices of KazMunayGas.

According to the protesters, there should have been many more envoys, but a number of Kezbi employees who had also planned to fly to the protest site to support their colleagues were unlawfully detained by regional law enforcement agencies. Some of them were threatened as well.

On May 16, after a whole day of silence by agencies and officials and heightened attention from the capital’s civil society groups, the authorities announced that they had created a commission that would be charged with resolving the labor dispute. According to the workers, the working group includes the chief state labor inspector, inspectors from other regions of the country, and officials from KazMunayGas, who have already left for Zhanaozen.

Satisfied with this response, the protesters left the KazMunayGas offices and headed home.

The workers hope that the main issues will be resolved in dialogue with commission. They want to be paid for a twelve-hour working day, receive a wage increase, sign a collective labor agreement, and be transferred to the staff of Ozenmunaigas.

Law enforcement officers watched the protesters the entire time but did not intervene.

Source: Kazakhstan International Bureau for Human Rights and the Rule of Law, 17 May 2022. Thanks to Kirill Buketov for the heads-up. Translated by the Russian Reader. Watch this space for a subtitled version of this recent documentary film about the massacre of striking oil workers in Zhanaozen in December 2011 and its aftermath. I translated the subtitles of this detailed, harrowing film earlier this year.

You Don’t Have It So Bad

Protests by Berlin-based artists over the curator of “Diversity United,” a traveling exhibition with ties to right-wing politicians, have led some prominent participants in the show to drop out.

The controversy over the show is related to protests surrounding the Kunsthalle Berlin, a new, temporary museum at the abandoned Tempelhof airport. Calling the Kunsthalle Berlin a “cynical, neoliberal machine,” Berlin-based artists took issue with the space’s founder, the curator Walter Smerling, who organized “Diversity United” in its initial showing at the airport. According to Candice Breitz, an artist who has been among those leading a movement known as Boycott Kunsthalle Berlin, at least 9 of the 90 participants have pulled out the show, which is now at the New Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow.

Artists associated with Boycott Kunsthalle Berlin claimed that the organizers of “Diversity United” failed to appropriately compensate many of the participating artists, and that the show had traveled to Russia with the explicit approval of President Vladimir Putin. The show, which aspires to showcase how the “artistic face of Europe is complex, diverse and permanently in flux,” was first staged in 2021 at the Tempelhof airport and is slated to travel to Paris after appearing in Moscow.

According to Breitz, Yael Bartana, Mona Hatoum, Aleksandra Domanović, Katja Novitskova, Ahmet Öğüt, Agnieszka Polska, Martina Vacheva, Dan Perjovschi, and Constant Dullaart are among those who have withdrawn—and there are others who have pulled out or intend to do so, but don’t want to go public, according to Breitz. Additional, artist caner teker is declining a prize for emerging artists being given out by a Bonn-based foundation run by Smerling.

“The artists who’ve thus far withdrawn from ‘Diversity United’ have tended to first formally communicate their intentions to the curatorial team behind the exhibition before reaching out to vocal members of the boycott group (#BoycottKunsthalleBerlin), to give us permission to share their decisions with a broader public,” Breitz said in an interview. “We’ve taken great care to ensure that we have their blessing before going public with their names.”

The Boycott Kunsthalle Berlin movement aims to highlight Smerling’s connections to right-wing politicians. “Diversity United” received support from former German officials like Armin Laschet and Gerhard Schröder. A key funder of the show, entrepreneur Lars Windhorst, has been implicated in both the Panama Papers and Paradise Papers. The political connections of the show and artists’ dashed hopes of making use of the Tempelhof airport for themselves spurred some to act.

In an email to ARTnews, Smerling wrote, “I have no understanding for the boycott. Boycotting is not a solution, for anyone. The solution is to find common ways. There must be opportunities for private, public and cooperative exhibitions. Incidentally, I find it highly disrespectful and undignified when artists want to prevent other artists from being seen.”

Smerling also defended the show’s connections with Putin, even as tensions increase in Russia due to the situation in the Ukraine. “The claim of ‘Diversity United’ is to build bridges with art, open the possibility for dialogue, where everything else fails,” Smerling wrote. “Maybe that is why the foreign ministry and the president of the federal republic of Germany support this exhibition, fully aware of its patrons.”

Smerling received 1 million euros in funds from the German Foreign Federal Office to organize the “Diversity United” show, which is more than the National Gallery in Berlin has within its annual acquisition fund. While the show was organized around the theme of diversity, all of the 10 curators of the show and all of the financial backers were white. “There was significant frustration around ‘Diversity United’ when it was installed in Berlin, but the constellation of power behind the exhibition made it very intimidating for people to speak out,” Breitz said.

Smerling had been given access to two hangars in the Tempelhof Airport rent-free. And while there had initially been claims that Smerling had to find private funding to cover the Kunsthalle Berlin’s operating costs, which can run to as much as 100,000 euros a month due to the lack of infrastructure and the old age of the building, it turned out that the government had agreed to cover half the costs, according to the German publication Monopol. (These funds had come out of a pool of money for buildings and real estate, not one for public museums.) Christoph Gröner, a real estate developer who Breitz alleges is responsible for hundreds of evictions over the years, footed the other half of the bill for the running costs of Kunsthalle Berlin.

Asked about the show’s funding, Smerling argued that these facts don’t represent the full picture, saying, “Each art exhibition costs us far more than just the operating costs for the halls and, depending on the number of visitors, also more than the operating subsidy we receive. This is all our risk.”

Smerling has said he welcomes a “dialogue” with the artists, but Breitz believes this overture came too late. “Until a couple of weeks before it opened, nobody had even heard that we would be getting a ‘Kunsthalle Berlin,’ including our top museum directors and curators at public institutions. That is absolutely unacceptable. The purpose of a boycott is to seek to alter a situation that is unacceptable.”

Source: Shanti Escalante-De Mattei, “Amid Kunsthalle Berlin Protests, Artists Withdraw from Controversial ‘Diversity United’ Exhibition,” ARTnews, February 9, 2022

An escalator in the Petersburg subway, 11 February 2017. Photo by the Russian Reader

I once gave an interview about the situation in Zhanaozen to Gulzhan Yergaliyeva for the website Guljan.org. After the interview was published, the local police inspector came to see me. He said that the deputy head of the regional police department had arrived from Aktau and really wanted to talk to me. I said I would meet him. I went to the meeting, and this police chief demanded that I send all the strikers home and stop the strike. “You’re an activist!” he told me. I told him that it was impossible: no one would go along with me, and I personally wouldn’t agree to stop the strike. That was the end of it. As soon as I arrived home from this meeting, as soon as I got out of the car and went into the landing of my building, two guys ran after me and began to beat me. They knocked me to the floor and started kicking me. When I mixed it up with them, one of them took out a traumatic pistol and shot me twice in the head. That’s when I lost consciousness. It turns out that on the exact same day exactly the same attack was carried out on Orken and Asan, journalists from Radio Azattyk. They were also shot with traumatic pistols and beaten with bats.

The murder of Zhaksylyk Turbayev, who was a trade union leader at Munai Field Service, ratcheted things up. He said that the workers at his company would support the strike and the people on the square. After he made this statement, he was killed in a trailer at his workplace.

How was he killed?

He was beaten to death with rebar rods in a trailer. The entire trailer was covered in blood.

Has this crime been solved?

No, it hasn’t been solved.

After Zhaksylyk Turbayev’s murder, literally the next month, Zhansaule Karabalayeva was murdered. She was 18 years old. The oil workers saw it as a murder meant to intimidate them, because Zhansaule’s father was among the trade unionists who constantly were here on the Alan.

How was Zhansaule killed, and where was she found?

She was raped and murdered. She was taken to the steppe. She was killed not far from a border post, some kind of military installation outside of town. She was killed and her body was dumped about 300 to 400 meters from this place.

Another incident that inflamed things happened to a woman named Aizhan, who was a staff member of the strike committee. The police broke into her house during her lunch break and forced everyone to lie face down on the floor. Everyone who was at home was thrown on the floor. Aizhan’s 10-year-old son stood up in front of the police and shielded his mother. This boy was punched in the head by a police captain. The child suffered a moderate head injury, a concussion.

Source: 12/16/11: The Truth About What Happened in Zhanaozen 10 Years Ago. Translated by the Russian Reader

“We Are Fraternal Peoples!”

Activists in Novosibirsk record message for the international community about Kazakhstan • Arina Yuzhnaya • Siber.Realii (RFE/RL) • January 10, 2022

Novosibirsk residents have recorded a video message to the international community “on behalf of all Russian citizens who oppose the Russian military intervention in Kazakhstan.” They are certain that the peaceful protesters in Kazakhstan “are not terrorists,” our correspondent reports.

Nine people appear in the video, including pianist Timofei Kazantsev, former head of the We Are Against Corruption Foundation Viktor Sorokin, and activists Andrei Kaygorodtsev, Rashid Zamanov and Alexander Abrosov. The appeal has been released in two versions: in Russian with English subtitles, and in English translation.

“The citizens of Kazakhstan who came out to protest poverty and corruption are not terrorists. Their arrests, and even more so their murders, are unacceptable,” they say in the message.

They stress that they consider the Russian military intervention unacceptable, since it could lead to “interethnic hostility and bloodshed.”

“President Tokayev called on the CSTO to defend [Kazakhstan] against an external terrorist threat. We believe that the Kazakhs will perceive Russian soldiers, who make up the bulk of the Collective Security Treaty Organization military contingent, as an external threat,” Kazantsev told us.

He believes that there now exists an “extraordinary situation in which our country is potentially behaving like an aggressor.” Kazantsev considers it wrong when an international organization meddles in the internal affairs of a sovereign state, even at the request of the country’s president. All this, in his opinion, is fraught with consequences.

For this reason, the authors of the video also appeal to the people of Kazakhstan. They explain that the Russian people have no “aggressive ambitions,” but that “no one has asked the opinion of ordinary Russians.”

At the end of the appeal, the authors of the video demand the withdrawal of Russian troops from Kazakhstan.

Translated by the Russian Reader

Revolt and Repression in Kazahstan

Revolt and repression in Kazakhstan • People and Nature • January 9, 2022

The Kazakh government has unleashed ferocious repression against the uprising that exploded last week.

Security forces opened fire on demonstrators. “Dozens” died, according to media reports, but on 7 January president Kassym-Jomart Tokayev let slip that “hundreds” had been killed. Tokayev also said he gave the order to “shoot to kill without warning” to suppress protests.

There are no accurate figures, because the government has cut off internet access for almost the whole country and imposed an information blockade.

The internal affairs ministry has said that more than 4400 people have been arrested, and warned that sentences of between eight years and life will be imposed. The Kazakh regime has used torture against worker activists before: its forces may be emboldened by the 3000 Russian and other troops flown in to support them.

From social media via The Insider. The security services facing demonstrators in Almaty

It’s difficult, in the midst of this nightmare, to try to analyse the wave of protest and its consequences. Anyway, here are four points, based on what I can see from a distance.

Continue reading “Revolt and Repression in Kazahstan” →