D. Gordon: While Deeply Kissing Putin, Kazakhstan’s Tokayev Needs To Recall The Words Of Russian MP Tolstoy – OpEd
Daily Mail, in a piece entitled “Russian pranksters release clip of hoax video call showing David Cameron discussing dinner with Trump, Kyiv’s NATO bid and a possible Labour victory – believing he was talking to a former Ukraine president”, said: “A pair of notorious Russian pranksters… ‘Vovan and Lexus’ have posted a screen recording of the 15-minute-long conversation which sees Lord Cameron touch on topics from Ukraine’s bid for NATOmembership and the state of the West’s ongoing support for Kyiv to private dinners with Donald Trump and a possible Labour victory in the upcoming election…
The call also touched on the broader geopolitical ramifications of Russian aggression in Ukraine, with Lord Cameron revealing that during a recent trip to Kazakhstan, officials expressed concern that the Kremlin could seek to seize some territory there too.
‘I was recently in all the ‘stans, and Kazakhstan are convinced that Putin wants a slice of the north of Kazakhstan’ he said.
He also relayed a conversation with the Kazakh foreign minister, who allegedly said that ‘Ukrainians are dying for Kazakhstan. They are putting their lives at risk to hold back Russia. And that benefits us’”.
That story has seemingly got Kazakhstan’s MFA into a tricky situation. Some Kazakh media tried to get an official comment from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Kazakhstan, on the matter. But, as reported in the report, their attempts to contact the official representative of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Kazakhstan, Aibek Smadiyarov, were unsuccessful – no response was forthcoming.
Meanwhile, the Russian RIA Novosti news agency quotes the following comment from Aibek Smadiyarov: “There was no such conversation <…>. The British Minister bears full responsibility for the disinformation”. Well, it looks like, the Kazakh MFA has sought first of all to reassure Moscow. As a result, there are ‘loud’ headlines in the Russian press today such as: “The Kazakh Foreign Ministry accused Cameron of disinformation about Astana”, “Kazakhstan’s MFA caught Cameron in a lie”. The official representative of the Russian Foreign Ministry, Maria Zakharova, suggested that British Foreign Secretary David Cameron resign after his remarks about Kazakhstan. Meanwhile, the topic of fear from belligerent statements and dire warnings by the Russian MPs and politicians to Kazakhstan has once again been put aside.
In a recent interview with Vasil Golovanov, Dmitro Gordon, a prominent Ukrainian journalist, interviewer, and politician, commenting the nationalist speech by State Duma Deputy Speaker Pyotr Tolstoy on KP (Komsomol’skaya Pravda) Radio in Moscow accompanied by territorial claims on Kazakhstan, said: “This is a typical speech of the Russian fascists, and it was voiced by Tolstoy. And it’s good that he did that. So that they in Kazakhstan would know what to expect from Russians. So that the leader of Kazakhstan Kassym-Jomart Tokayev, while deeply kissing Putin, would recall sometimes the words of the Vice-Speaker of the State Duma Pyotr Tolstoy”.
Let’s see what this is about. In the May 24 2024 interview with Komsomol’skaya Pravda-Radio, the Vice-Speaker of Russia’s Parliament said: “Look at what is happening today in Kazakhstan in terms of building a certain Kazakh state. Look at what kind of national mythology is blooming there regarding independence, regarding the transition to the Latin alphabet”.
Pyotr Tolstoy further said: “They forgot Alma-Ata (Almaty) is the former city of Verny, our Russian Cossack fortress”.
The latter words may seem to be not harmless at all if you look at what is now happening in Ukraine. Many people in Russia believe that Novorossiya (a swath of land from the Russian-Ukrainian border through Odessa to TransDniestr) should belong to Russia by historical right as the main cities there were founded by Russia: Kharkiv in 1656, Zaporizhzhia in 1770, Kryvyi Rih in 1775, Dnipro in 1776, Kherson in 1778, Mariupol in 1778, Luhansk in 1795. While listing these cities, the Russian authors wonder: what do they have to do with Ukraine! And they are not alone in this endeavor. The Russian Central TV channels talk not about conquering those cities but about their liberation both in their news and commentary. It seems therefore that Russia is waging not an aggressive, not an imperialist war, but a patriotic war, a war of liberation, a just war, and it is exercising the right to return its territories by military force. Years and years of official propaganda and indoctrination have further embedded these beliefs in the populace.
It may not seem like such an interpretation by Russians of their historical right to some territories in Ukraine has much to do with Kazakhstan and Kazakhs, but it does. If you analyze their words, it turns out that Russia’s public opinion holds that “almost all the major cities of present-day Kazakhstan were built by Russians, including both capitals of the republic, Almaty and Astana”.
Among Russian politicians, public figures, and media celebrities, there are many, who use this factor to turn the facts upside-down and find fault with Kazakhstan. For instance, Russian political scientist Alexander Tsipko, who once was with the apparatus of the CPSU Central Committee, has for years claimed that in the 1950s, the then-Soviet leader, Nikita Khrushchev transferred half of what is now Kazakhstan, along with Karaganda and present-day Astana, from Russia to the then-Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic. This is sheer fabrication, invented to support the idea that Northern Kazakhstan is said to constitute the so-called Russian South Siberia. But nobody in Kazakhstan publicly objects to this fabrication by Alexander Tsipko. This encourages other Russian public figures to follow his method. Vyacheslav Nikonov, Chairman of the Education and Science Committee in Russia’s State Duma, who said, “The territory of Kazakhstan is a great gift from Russia and the Soviet Union”, is just one of those.
The situation may seem even more worrying in view of the fact that the foundations of most major cities of present-day Western, Northern, and Eastern Kazakhstan were laid by Russians earlier than those of the above-mentioned cities in Ukraine: Atyrau (known until 1991 as Guryev) in 1645, Oral (known in Russian as Uralsk) in 1584, Petropavl in 1752, Pavlodar in 1720, Semey (until 2007 known as Semipalatinsk) in 1718, and Oskemen or Ust-Kamenogorsk in 1720. Almaty was founded as a Cossack outpost, Verniy, much later, in 1854. Yet calling Almaty (Oral, Pavlodar, or Semey) a Russian city, would be just like calling Montréal a French city; Mexico City, a Spanish city; Vyborg, a Swedish city; Kaliningrad a German city; or, say, Harbin, a Russian city. Yes, as did Ukraine, Kazakhstan was part of the Russian Empire, then the USSR. But in today’s world, using that kind of historical facts to further a political agenda to restore the Empire in one form or another is treading in dangerous waters. Such behavior may set an undesirable precedent for actions with unpredictable consequences for the existing world order.
