Ive here. Readers are discussing the Chinese government’s efforts to simplify its characters, or as other readers believe, to impose new and/or fewer meanings on them. I think this post on the use of the alphabet in “Stans” will fit into that discussion.

By: Buckley Rother, professor of economics at James Madison University in Harrisonburg, Virginia.Originally Posted in voice of the economy

It is too early to comment in detail on the current unrest in Kazakhstan as it is simply impossible to figure out what is going on, with multiple conflicting accounts and accounts from many sources. Instead, I’d like to comment on a deeper question related to this, which, while not central, also affects Kazakhstan’s Central Asian neighbors: what alphabet should they use? This is an ongoing problem in several of these countries and is changing.

Before 1928, all five present-day Central Asian countries were republics of the Soviet Union: Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan all used some variant of the Arabic alphabet, while Russia conquered Samarkand and the Bukhara Khanate only in the late 1800s. This reflects the cultural and political dominance of Sunni Islam in all these regions. The region wasn’t even part of the Soviet Union when it was first declared on December 30, 1922, and was ambiguous when it was nominally under Bolshevik control, but was known as Basmachi from the beginning of the 1920s until most of the 1930s. Traditionalist rebels ransacked, a word that actually means “bandit.”

Efforts to “modernize” and more formally integrate into the Soviet Union did not begin in Central Asia until 1928, as Stalin assumed supreme power in the Soviet Union. Part of this work involved eliminating the use of the Arabic alphabet, initially introducing the Latin alphabet. This reflects the ongoing local modernization movement related to Pan-Turkism (part of a wider movement known as Pan-Turanism), which seeks to unify all Turkic speakers under a single political entity , and pushed for the adoption of the Latin alphabet. In Turkey, Kemal Ataturk replaced the Arabic alphabet with the Latin alphabet as part of a Europeanized secular modernism. This movement has spread to the Turkic-speaking regions of Central Asia, making it easier to adopt (note that in Tajikistan they speak Iranian-related languages, not Turkic).

Given this connection to the Pan-Turkic movement, it’s no surprise that Stalin was ultimately frustrated with it and wanted greater national unity within the Soviet Union. Thus, in 1940 he imposed the Cyrillic alphabet used in Russia on all Central Asian republics. Both alphabet changes were met with resistance, and at some point violence erupted. Strangely, the first place I read it was in Thomas Pynchon’s novel Gravity’s Rainbow, which has a lot of discussion about race and its issues and movements during WWII.

One might think that, given how long it has been around, there will be no further changes. But with the collapse of the Soviet Union in late 1991 and the republics of Central Asia becoming independent states, the problem resurfaced, with each letter actually having its own symbolic and practical significance. Obviously, keeping the Cyrillic alphabet means maintaining reasonably close ties to Russia in various ways, both economically and politically. A rising Islamic fundamentalist movement urges a return to Arabic, although this has not happened in any of the five countries, and only in Tajikistan is such a movement strong enough to have any serious impetus. The main competitor is the Latin alphabet, which provides both a link with Turkey and with the West, especially the US, but is also open to China to some extent, where there is more knowledge of the Latin alphabet and use of Bisili Er letters.

Two of the five countries have retained the Cyrillic alphabet with only minor changes, and the two smallest countries: Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, which, despite the economic influence from China now, are still closely related to Russia and its Part of the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) is closely related. Has sent troops to Kazakhstan and is also a member (other members are Russia, Belarus and Armenia). I did note that although Kyrgyzstan is still part of the Collective Security Treaty Organization, since 1991, Kyrgyzstan is the only country of the five that has actually had a more or less democratic government for a period of time.

Curiously, Turkmenistan was the first to switch to Latin and stick to it almost immediately after independence. This is the most isolated of these countries, in fact the most isolated of the former Soviet republics. It is a strict dictatorship, a cult of personality, and while it does belong to the United Nations, it has always been excluded from all alliances. It ranks third in both population and land area. It has managed to maintain its isolated independence thanks to the vast supply of natural gas from the Caspian Sea, the export of which has left Turkmenistan without any financial assistance from outsiders.

Uzbekistan, the most populous and second-largest by size, was long ruled by former Soviet Communist Party General Secretary Islam Karimov, who died in 2016 and was succeeded by Shakwat Mirziyoyev. The Karimov regime was probably second only to Belarus in maintaining something close to the old Soviet economic system, and Karimov was a complete dictator. Since his death, his successor has made various market reforms but not much progress on political liberalization. But Karimov acted independently, adopting the Latin alphabet. But that wasn’t done, both Latin and Cyrillic were used, although in the long run there was a trend towards full Latin adoption. Ironically, while Karimov followed the Soviet economic model, he tried to maintain independence from Russia, not Belarus. But the alphabet problem still exists and is not fully resolved.

This brings us to the now troubled Kazakhstan. I noticed that almost no one predicted any kind of political unrest there. It is one of the few former republics to rise in real per capita income rankings, and Kazakhstan has long been a major exporter of oil and gas. Like Uzbekistan, it was ruled by its last Soviet Communist Party general secretary, Nursultan Nazarbayev, 81. There is a lot of corruption and political repression, but it is true in other Central Asian countries, Kazakhstan seems to be doing better than them, Nazarbayev has deals with the US and China, while maintaining major and close relations with Russia, not only is in the Collective Security Treaty Organization and has a Russian space base in Baikonur, where Russian troops help protect its oil wells near its southwestern region of the Caspian Sea (the second most populous and largest land area among the former Soviet republics) In second place, the eastern border is in China’s Xinjiang province, which has a Uyghur population). Kazakhstan has long had a diverse population, about a quarter of which are Slavs, mostly Russians, many of whom moved to northern Kazakhstan in the early 1960s as part of the Khrushchev Virgin Lands program. But so far, clashes between many groups have gone awry.

Regarding the alphabet, it continued to use the Cyrillic alphabet for a long time. But in 2017, the current president, Kossym-Jormat Tokayev, who studied at the KGB higher school during the Soviet era and served as ambassador to China and the United Nations, persuaded Nazarbayev to leave the The Cyrillic alphabet was switched to the Latin alphabet. At the time, Russian President Vladimir Putin expressed dissatisfaction with the move, as the main railway section of China’s Belt and Road Initiative passes through Kazakhstan, which may have more to do with China than with the United States. Nazarbayev personally selected Tokayev to succeed him as president in 2019, and Nazarbayev “went upstairs” to head the National Security Council. In the face of the current upheaval, Tokayev has dismissed Nazarbayev.

In any case, Russian propaganda agency RT claims that Putin demanded that, as a condition, sending troops to Tokayev should recognize Russia’s annexation of Crimea and reintroduce the Cyrillic alphabet. It seems that Putin did not insist on this, and even without this change, troops were sent in. But it shows that this is still an important issue for Putin, and we may also see pressure on Kazakhstan to restore alphabetical order.