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RUSSIA AND KAZAKHSTAN: GEOPOLITICAL ALTERNATIVES AND CIVILIZATIONAL CHOICE
Sergei KLIASHTORNIY
Sergei Kliashtorniy, Professor, head of the Sector for Turkic and Mongolian Studies of the St. Petersburg Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Oriental Studies (St. Petersburg, Russian Federation)
The geographical coordinates of the geopolitical space oriented toward Russia were defined long before the formation of its current borders. The interaction between Old Russia-Russia and the Turkic world began about 1,500 years ago and in no way peacefully at first. The migration of Turkic tribes from Central Asia westward during the 5th-15th centuries gave rise to at least two types of military-political integration in the Eurasian space—Oguz-Turkic (in the 5th-10th centuries) and Mongolian-Turkic (in the 13th-15th centuries). In the 15th century, when agrarian overpopulation of the central part of Russia became clearly designated, the state began to expand outward to the east and southeast. This process and the migration that accompanied it were just as inevitable as the previous migration of the Turkic peoples, who engaged in nomadic cattle breeding, to the west of the Eurasian steppes. It is indicative that although they differed chronologically, these migration movements, which encompassed the southern expanses of Russia, the Ural and the Volga regions, Siberia, and Northern Kazakhstan, coincided in terms of area. But in contrast to the westward migration of the Turkic peoples, the spread of Russians to the east and southeast had a different underlying economic motive—the people made their living by means of agricultural farming. Arable land did not take over pastureland, but was compatible with it, giving rise to new types of economic symbiosis.
The state formations of the Great Steppes created by the nomads were distinguished by extreme instability and low conflict-resolving ability, nor did they ensure the safety of economic activity, but led to constant warring, which often ended in genuine genocide. For example, in 1723-1727, which were imprinted on the Kazakh memory as the “years of great trouble,” a significant portion of these people, who belonged to separate antagonistic domains, was massacred by the jungars. Incidentally, this horrendous slaughter was only more instance in the series of jungar invasions of 1681-1684, 1694, 1711-1712, and 1714-1717. By establishing a new system of power relations, Russia was performing the mission of pacifying the Great Steppes, and later, Turkestan, thus drawing together the geopolitical space of Eurasia into a single whole.
At the present time, we are seeing the clear and intensified actualization of a historical and politically important problem—Russian-Turkic symbiosis or, in geopolitical………………
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