17.01.2022, Moscow.
The building of an independent Kazakh nation in 1990s began from the idea of returning the Kazakhs to yurts, said political scientist, philosopher and the leader of the Essence of Time movement Sergey Kurginyan in The Meaning of the Game broadcast issued on January 8 on YouTube.
Kurginyan explained that regress is an inescapable background process of all events in the post-Soviet space.
“Regress with pseudo-religious, pseudo-nationalist, pseudo-cultural traits began in all the territories of the disintegrated Soviet empire,” the political scientist noted. He spoke about the effect of this regress specifically in Kazakhstan.
“In Kazakhstan, intellectuals close to the leadership in early 1990s would say that they would not be able to build a Kazakh nation without its ‘yurtization,’ i.e. without moving Kazakhs to yurts where they would finally find their identity, their traits, their historical and cultural distinctness,” the expert said. He added that, according those intellectuals from Kazakhstan, this would be the initial step to turn towards some kind of statehood.
Meanwhile, no one in Kazakhstan, Kurginyan notes, made any serious effort towards “yurtization” of the population, but regress steadily continued as major industrial facilities disappeared. “The cultural level of the population was declining, the wages of the low-income population were decreasing, and some sort of gloomy rural or nomad peculiarities came about. The nomad way of life did not come to the surface, but these specifics,” the political scientist described the regress in Kazakhstan.
Kurginyan also gave an example from his own experience, when in the early 2000s he encountered migrant workers from Central Asia. One of the migrants was an educated Tajik with fluent Russian. He told Kurginyan that he used to be an engineer with a good salary and interesting life in the USSR. After the Union collapsed, all his previous life was ruined and turned into poverty, and he had to look for a job elsewhere.
The key event happened, Kurginyan explained, when in the evening the worker from Central Asia, having completed his daily work, wanted to have some rest. “A thick blanket was lying on the grass, and the man, after saying good-bye to me, lay on this blanket to sleep. And suddenly I realized that this was a scene from the 19th century. That his historical memory in this regress automatically reproduced some plastic poses he knew, almost archetypical, learned from his grandfathers, grandmothers or someone else, from memories somehow conveyed to him. This was where the total regress began,” the political scientist explained.
According to Kurginyan, regress began in all the republics of the former USSR, including the core of the former empire, Russia, where the current president, Vladimir Putin, did not stop the regress completely, but he slowed it down to some extent. Belarus is the only exception where this regress was markedly contained, the expert noted. In the beginning of 2022, mass protests began in Kazakhstan, triggered by raising gas pieces for the population. The protests rapidly escalated into unrest using firearms in the major cities of Kazakhstan.
Source: Rossa Primavera News Agency
