AstanaVictory Day in Kazakhstan is shedding Soviet framing.
The government has pursued quiet de-Russification, replacing Soviet war memory with a Kazakh national narrative.
Whether the shift extends to school curricula or state media is undecided.
Sources: The Diplomat
THE SOVIET FRAME
Victory Day — May 9 — was the USSR's most sacred civic ritual: a Moscow-centered story in which all Soviet peoples were liberators under Russian leadership. The frame absorbed local histories into a single Russian-language narrative of the Great Patriotic War.
THE FAMINE THE FRAME ERASED
Between 1930 and 1933, Soviet collectivization killed roughly 1.5 million Kazakhs — over a quarter of the ethnic Kazakh population. The Asharshylyk (the great hunger) ended the nomadic way of life and made Kazakhs a minority in their own republic until the 1990s. Soviet war memory left no room for it.
THE DEMOGRAPHIC INVERSION
At independence in 1991, ethnic Kazakhs were only ~40% of the population; ethnic Russians were ~38%. Three decades of out-migration, higher Kazakh birth rates, and returning oralman (diaspora Kazakhs) have flipped the ratio — Kazakhs are now ~70%, Russians under 15%. The cultural shift follows the demographic one.
THE 2022 PIVOT
Russia's invasion of Ukraine accelerated everything. Astana refused to recognize the annexed territories, declined to send troops, and watched Moscow's threats against "Russian-speakers abroad" land uncomfortably close to home — northern Kazakhstan has the country's largest Russian-speaking population.
THE LATIN ALPHABET
Kazakh was written in Arabic script until 1929, Latin from 1929–1940, then forcibly switched to Cyrillic under Stalin. Nazarbayev announced a return to Latin in 2017; the transition has been repeatedly delayed but remains official policy. Alphabet is infrastructure — it determines which civilizational orbit a language reads from.
THE QUIET METHOD
Kazakhstan's de-Russification is deliberately slow and unannounced — street renamings, curriculum tweaks, language quotas in broadcasting — never a single dramatic break. The model is the opposite of the Baltic states' confrontational approach, designed to avoid giving Moscow a pretext.