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KAZAKHSTAN: RURALIZATION OF CITIES AND ESCALATION OF THE CONFLICT BETWEEN “MODERNIST” AND “TRADITIONALIST” IDENTITY
Zhuldyzbek ABYLKHOZHIN
Zhuldyzbek Abylkhozhin, D.Sc. (Hist.), professor at the Ch. Valikhanov Institute of History and Ethnology (Almaty, Kazakhstan)
The rural and urban worlds have always been in sociocultural opposition to each other. The dynamics and topicality of this conflict was affected by the shrinking of rural subculture and expansion in its urbanistically modified segment.
In the course of the 20th century, this phenomenon underwent drastic transformation in Kazakhstan: Emerging as an extremely sluggish process, by the end of the century it acquired dramatic acceleration, showing a quantum leap. The slow start was to a very large extent due to the colonial status of this backyard of the Russian empire: Cities performed noneconomic functions, serving mainly as military-administrative colonial centers. Their infrastructure was essentially designed to advance imperial geo-economic and geopolitical interests.
Nonetheless, cities began gradually to emerge as vehicles of communication between separate districts. In that capacity, they drew rural migration, but, ill-adapted to meet the requirements of all-round regional development, they simply could not absorb surplus rural population. In other words, the cities’ colonial nature and their resultant ethnocultural environment impeded adaptation of rural migrants to urbanized subculture.
During the Soviet era, village-to-town migration invigorated considerably but was far from its potential peak yet. In 1926, a mere 2.1 percent of ethnic Kazakhs lived in towns; in 1959, 24.3 percent; in 1979, 30.9 percent; and in 1989, more than 38 percent. In other words, the last all-Union census showed that by the late 1980s, Kazakhs were still an “agricultural” ethnic group. Their relatively low urbanization level had its causes. It will be recalled that the totalitarian state, intruding as it did into all spheres of society’s life, rigidly controlled, among other things, migration policy. Whereas in rational economies, the market ensured a normal movement of labor resources, the Soviet command-and-administer mobilization system allowed any mass movement of…………….
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