Kazakh intelligentsia and the quest for egalitarianism, 1917-1927

Abstract

Within its multiethnic empire, Tsarist Russia institutionalized the inequality between Russians and non-Orthodox, non-Russian peoples. At the beginning of the 20th century, the country was undergoing radical political transformations that included the participation of actors from the borderlands. By bringing to the fore the voice from the periphery, this thesis examines the political history of making Soviet Kazakhstan between 1917 and 1927 from the perspective of the local Kazakh politicians. The central question is why Kazakh intellectuals engaged with the Soviet project. Based on the documents of the local elite, the main argument is that the Kazakh political establishment strived to achieve an egalitarian position within Russia, which became an essential determinant for their engagement with the Soviet project. Specifically, the struggle for equality occurred in three dimensions. Firstly, the intelligentsia strove to achieve equal rights for the indigenous population and equal representation within the multiethnic state. This became the determining factor in their acceptance of the Soviet power. The second dimension was an effort to overcome the Tsarist legacy – that is, to eliminate the historical inequality between dominant and oppressed nations and thereby ensure actual equality. The last dimension focuses on Kazakh statesmen’s ideas to transform the Kazakh society in conformity with egalitarian principles. Specifically, the emphasis lies in the spread of education and class restructuring of society, which corresponded to the Soviet project. This latter dimension would also challenge the Central Party's interpretation in the mid-1920s that the local statesmen were either a conservative or nationalist force.