Strong and Unique: Three Decades of U.S.-Kazakhstan Partnership
By S. Frederick Starr and Svante E. Cornell
Published in December 2021.
Chapter One: Dramatic Beginnings
Ties between Kazakhstan and the United States are strong but certainly not ancient. True, there were a number of Americans, notably diplomat Eugene Schuyler, who travelled there in the nineteenth century and wrote about it. But these were rare exceptions. It is therefore not surprising that the links that arose during the years immediately preceding and following the collapse of the USSR in 1991 still define many aspects of U.S.–Kazakhstan relations today. For this reason, they warrant our attention—not as curiosities of the past, but as the genesis of an important and durable relationship
The blunt reality is that as recently as the 1980s, Americans and Kazakhs scarcely knew of each other. Yet within a very few years, beginning around 1980, each “discovered” the other and came to perceive their mutual interests with a high degree of sophistication and practicality. The causes of this strange situation trace to the very peculiar circumstances prevailing in both countries prior to their mutual discovery.
That Kazakhs knew little of the United States is by no means surprising. As part of the USSR, the Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic was a constituent element of the Soviet Union beginning in 1936. As such, it maintained its own Ministry of Foreign Affairs, but this body was fully subordinate to directives from Moscow. Its scant dealings with the outer world were fully shaped by the Kremlin. The few Kazakhs who developed expertise in international affairs did so thanks to training at Moscow institutions and honed their skills while serving as representatives of the USSR—not of Kazakhstan. Yet this background was nonetheless important, as it gave rise to knowledge and expertise that was to prove invaluable as Kazakhstan began moving out from under its northern shadow. A similar evolution, all but invisible but nonetheless real, occurred in the economic sphere, as Kazakhs who managed Soviet firms on their territory began reaching out to the larger world.
In the broader society of Kazakhstan, all information on America was filtered through the lens of Soviet education, books, and newspapers. This included a few engaging works like Ilf and Petrov’s droll but dated One Story America (1935), but far more of the available sources presented the United States as the aggressive but declining headquarters of world capitalism. Kazakhs who were fortunate to gain access to elite educational institutions in Moscow—and, to a lesser extent, in Kazakhstan itself—gained a fuller picture of the USSR’s great enemy, but they were few in number.
Compounding this situation was the fact that few Kazakhs were allowed to participate in educational and scientific exchanges with the United States. Beginning in 1968, America’s public-private International Research and Exchanges Board (IREX) brought Soviet students and scholars to conduct research at American institutions, but the Soviet side of these exchanges was dominated by ethnic Russians. However, when Kazakhs were included, it invariably bore long-term fruit.
This process of exclusion extended even to the cultural sphere. Thus, the selection of Soviet participants in the American-Soviet Youth Orchestra, founded in 1987, was fully controlled by the Moscow Conservatory, with no input from the Kazakh capital of Almaty. In spite of this highly controlled environment, beginning in the 1970s many young Kazakhs gained a keen interest in American popular culture, in many fields, including jazz, dress, and lifestyle.
America’s ignorance of Kazakhs and Kazakhstan mirrored this situation, but for a very different set of causes. At an official level, the focus was squarely on the United States’ Cold War rival, the USSR—and hence on its capital, Moscow. Only a couple of American graduate students were allowed to study in Central Asia, and their research topics—like those of all American scholars on IREX—were censored by the Soviet side to exclude most current issues. Washington mounted great effort to advance the study of Russian but ignored other languages of the USSR, including Kazakh. And even if Americans had wanted to acquaint themselves with the peoples of Central Asia, there were few, if any, ethnic Kazakh or Uzbek émigrés they could have called on to teach. A far more favorable situation existed for Ukrainian and the Baltic languages.
During the late Soviet period, the Library of Congress endeavored to import as many Soviet publications as possible. But the Soviet Academy of Sciences sent only publications by its Moscow institutions, excluding the other fourteen republics of the USSR. The Library of Congress responded by appointing two staff members to travel regularly to all non-Russian republics, including Kazakhstan, to purchase books from local publishers directly. This absurd arrangement persisted for years, accounting for the few books from Kazakhstan that reached America.
In other respects, the U.S. government’s narrow focus on Kremlin politics kept Kazakhstan and the other fourteen non-Russian republics in the shadows. The Foreign Broadcast Information Service (FBIS) translated news only from Russia and Russian sources, and had neither the interest nor the capacity to draw on other languages, including Kazakh. When it finally ventured to garner news from Kazakhstan, it drew from local Russian-language outlets of the main Moscow papers rather than from Kazakh-language sources.
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