Author: Christopher Robbins Publisher: Atlas and Company ISBN: 1934633933 Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 305
Book Description
In this funny and revealing travelogue of Kazakhstan--a blank in Westerners' collective geography--Robbins reveals the country to be diverse, tolerant, and surprisingly modern. A superlative addition to the literature of travel--"The Observer" (UK). Illustrated.
Author: Joanna Lillis Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing ISBN: 0755626702 Category : Political Science Languages : en Pages : 369
Book Description
Dark Shadows is a compelling portrait of Kazakhstan, a country that is little known in the West. Strategically located in the heart of Central Asia, sandwiched between Vladimir Putin's Russia, its former colonial ruler, and Xi Jinping's China, this vast oil-rich state is carving out its place in the world as it contends with its own complex past and present. Journalist Joanna Lillis paints a vibrant picture of this emerging nation through vivid reportage based on 17 years of on-the-ground coverage, and travels across the length and breadth of this enigmatic country that lies along the ancient Silk Road and at the geopolitical and cultural crossroads where East meets West. Featuring tales of murder and abduction, intrigue and betrayal, extortion and corruption, this book explores how a president, Nursultan Nazarbayev, transformed himself into a potentate and the economically-struggling state he inherited at the fall of the USSR into a swaggering 21st-century monocracy. A colourful cast of characters brings the politics to life: from strutting oligarchs to sleeping villagers, from principled politicians to striking oilmen, from crusading journalists to courageous campaigners. This new edition features two additional chapters covering the aftermath of Nazarbayev's fall from power in 2019; the Chinese government's repressions against the Kazakhs of Xinjiang as part of its crackdown on Muslim minorities; and an Afterword reflecting on the tumultuous events of January 2022 in Almaty. Traversing dust-blown deserts and majestic mountains, taking in glitzy cities and dystopian landscapes, Dark Shadows conjures up Kazakhstan as a living, breathing place, full of extraordinary people living extraordinary lives.
Author: Sarah Cameron Publisher: Cornell University Press ISBN: 1501730452 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 395
Book Description
The Hungry Steppe examines one of the most heinous crimes of the Stalinist regime, the Kazakh famine of 1930–33. More than 1.5 million people perished in this famine, a quarter of Kazakhstan's population, and the crisis transformed a territory the size of continental Europe. Yet the story of this famine has remained mostly hidden from view. Drawing upon state and Communist party documents, as well as oral history and memoir accounts in Russian and in Kazakh, Sarah Cameron reveals this brutal story and its devastating consequences for Kazakh society. Through the most violent of means the Kazakh famine created Soviet Kazakhstan, a stable territory with clearly delineated boundaries that was an integral part of the Soviet economic system; and it forged a new Kazakh national identity. But this state-driven modernization project was uneven. Ultimately, Cameron finds, neither Kazakhstan nor Kazakhs themselves were integrated into the Soviet system in precisely the ways that Moscow had originally hoped. The experience of the famine scarred the republic for the remainder of the Soviet era and shaped its transformation into an independent nation in 1991. Cameron uses her history of the Kazakh famine to overturn several assumptions about violence, modernization, and nation-making under Stalin, highlighting, in particular, the creation of a new Kazakh national identity, and how environmental factors shaped Soviet development. Ultimately, The Hungry Steppe depicts the Soviet regime and its disastrous policies in a new and unusual light.
Author: Roberto J. Carmack Publisher: University Press of Kansas ISBN: 0700628258 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 280
Book Description
In July 1941, the Soviet Union was in mortal danger. Imperiled by the Nazi invasion and facing catastrophic losses, Stalin called on the Soviet people to “subordinate everything to the needs of the front.” Kazakhstan answered that call. Stalin had long sought to restructure Kazakh life to modernize the local population—but total mobilization during the war required new tactics and produced unique results. Kazakhstan in World War II analyzes these processes and their impact on the Kazakhs and the Soviet Union as a whole. The first English-language study of a non-Russian Soviet republic during World War II, the book explores how the war altered official policies toward the region’s ethnic groups—and accelerated Central Asia’s integration into Soviet institutions. World War II is widely recognized as a watershed for Russia and the Soviet Union—not only did the conflict legitimize prewar institutions and ideologies, it also provided a medium for integrating some groups and excluding others. Kazakhstan in World War II explains how these processes played out in the ethnically diverse and socially “backward” Kazakh republic. Roberto J. Carmack marshals a wealth of archival materials, official media sources, and personal memoirs to produce an in-depth examination of wartime ethnic policies in the Red Army, Soviet propaganda for non-Russian groups, economic strategies in the Central Asian periphery, and administrative practices toward deported groups. Bringing Kazakhstan’s previously neglected role in World War II to the fore, Carmack’s work fills an important gap in the region’s history and sheds new light on our understanding of Soviet identities.
Author: Didar Kassymova Publisher: Scarecrow Press ISBN: 0810879832 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 363
Book Description
Kazakhstan is in some ways a very old nation dating back to the Kazakh Khanate of 1458, but it dramatically transformed within the Russian Empire and even more so during the period when it was part of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Since 1991 it has been independent and has had to forge its own policy in all fields. Kazakhstan is in an enviable position in terms of exportable natural resources, but at the same time it is faced with many domestic problems, such as an inadequate infrastructure. Along with solving a multitude of social problems, Kazakhstan has had to simultaneously create a normal functioning state, which added to its political difficulties. The situation at present is a state run by a strong ruler, which solves some problems but creates others. The Historical Dictionary of Kazakhstan covers the history of Kazakhstan through a chronology, an introductory essay, appendixes, and a bibliography. The dictionary section has over 400 cross-referenced entries on important personalities, politics, economy, foreign relations, religion, and culture. This book is an excellent access point for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about Kazakhstan.
Author: Diana T. Kudaibergenova Publisher: Lexington Books ISBN: 1498528309 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 259
Book Description
*Shortlisted for the 2018 Book Award in Social Sciences of the Central Eurasian Studies Society* Rewriting the Nation in Modern Kazakh Literature is a book about cultural transformations and trajectories of national imagination in modern Kazakhstan. The book is a much-needed critical introduction and a comprehensive survey of the Kazakh literary production and cultural discourses on the nation in the twentieth and twenty first centuries. In the absence of viable and open forums for discussion and in the turbulent moments of postcolonial and cultural transformation under the Soviets, the Kazakh writers and intellectuals widely engaged with the national identity, heritage and genealogy construction in literature. This active process of national canon construction and its constant re-writing throughout the twentieth century will inform the readers of the complex processes of cultural transformations in forms, genres and texts as well as demonstrating the genealogical development of the national narrative. The main focus of this book is on the cultural production of the nation. The focus is on the narratives of historical continuities produced in the literature and cultural discontinuities and inter-elite competition which inform such production. The development of Kazakh literary production is an extremely interesting yet underrepresented field of study. Since the late nineteenth century it saw a rapid transformation from the traditional oral to print literature. This brought an unprecedented shift in genres and texts production as well as a rapid growth of the ‘writing’ class – urban colonial and first generations of Soviet intelligentsia. Kazakh literary production became the flagman of republic’s rapid cultural modernization and prior to the World War II local publishing industry produced up to 6 million print copies a year. By the 1960s and 1970s – the golden era of Kazakh literature, the most read literary journal Juldyz sold 50,000 copies all over the country. Literature became the mass provider of knowledge about the past, the present and of the future of the country. Because “Kazakh readers were hungry to find out about their pre-Soviet past and its national glory” national writers competed in genres, styles and ways to write out the nation in prose, poems, essays and historical novels.
Author: Michael Mandelbaum Publisher: Council on Foreign Relations ISBN: 9780876091678 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 264
Book Description
With the demise of the Soviet Union in 1991, its fifteen constituent republics suddenly found themselves sovereign states. Among the new countries are the five republics of Central Asia - Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Turkmenistan - that comprise the region to the south of the great Russian heartland. Each of these countries now faces the task of creating its own foreign policy: with one another, with its former imperial ruler to the north, with the Islamic countries to the south, and with the West. In Central Asia and the World, eight experts on the region address the historic power struggles between east and west and north and south that have shaped the region and the prognosis for success in overcoming a turbulent past and an uncertain, divided present. In addition to its continuing strong ties to Russia, Central-Asia's links with its southern neighbors and the potential role of Islam are also examined. The authors advance the case that these countries are critical to the West insofar as they affect Western interests in Russia and the Middle East. The ongoing civil war in Tajikistan and Central Asia's relationship with China are also addressed. The first book to examine the complex issues facing the region Central Asia and the World provides a comprehensive overview of the developing foreign policies of these five new countries, including a look at the internal political, economic, and military issues confronting each country.
Author: Bhavna Dave Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 1134324987 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 257
Book Description
Kazakhstan is emerging as the most dynamic economic and political actor in Central Asia. It is the second largest country of the former Soviet Union, after the Russian Federation, and has rich natural resources, particularly oil, which is being exploited through massive US investment. Kazakhstan has an impressive record of economic growth under the leadership of President Nursultan Nazarbaev, and has ambitions to project itself as a modern, wealthy civic state, with a developed market economy. At the same time, Kazakhstan is one of the most ethnically diverse countries in the region, with very substantial non-Kazakh and non-Muslim minorities. Its political regime has used elements of political clientelism and neo-traditional practices to bolster its rule. Drawing from extensive ethnographic research, interviews, and archival materials this book traces the development of national identity and statehood in Kazakhstan, focusing in particular on the attempts to build a national state. It argues that Russification and Sovietization were not simply 'top-down' processes, that they provide considerable scope for local initiatives, and that Soviet ethnically-based affirmative action policies have had a lasting impact on ethnic élite formation and the rise of a distinct brand of national consciousness.
Author: Rita Sanders Publisher: Berghahn Books ISBN: 1785331930 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 270
Book Description
Despite economic growth in Kazakhstan, more than 80 per cent of Kazakhstan’s ethnic Germans have emigrated to Germany to date. Disappointing experiences of the migrants, along with other aspects of life in Germany, have been transmitted through transnational networks to ethnic Germans still living in Kazakhstan. Consequently, Germans in Kazakhstan today feel more alienated than ever from their ‘historic homeland’. This book explores the interplay of those memories, social networks and state policies, which play a role in the ‘construction’ of a Kazakhstani German identity.
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Author: Christopher Robbins
Author: Joanna Lillis
Author: Sarah Cameron
Author: Roberto J. Carmack
Author: Didar Kassymova
Author: Wayne Eastep
Author: Diana T. Kudaibergenova
Author: Michael Mandelbaum
Author: Bhavna Dave
Author: Rita Sanders