Why We’re Here – Russia/Kazakhstan 2008-2009

Below is Nathan’s award winning proposal abstract. It’s confirmed, we’re spending a total of 16months on his dissertation fieldwork in Russia and Kazakhstan. We hope to be able to stay in Podsosnovo, Russia until September08 – pending our visa renewals – then relocate to Sherbakty, Kazakhstan for the remaining 10months.

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From Perestroika to the Polka: The Politicization and Everyday Life of “Germanness” in Kazakhstan
Nathan Paul Jones, Kazakhstan, Anthropology

Residing throughout Kazakhstan is a population of nearly 300,000 Germans whose ancestors either immigrated there in the 19th and 20th centuries, or were deported there from western Russia during World War II. Since the USSR’s collapse, many of them have left Kazakhstan for their purported ancestral homeland, but once there other Germans perceive them as Russians or Asians, devoid of “Germanness.” Alarmed by this lack, German-funded NGOs such as the Technical Cooperation Society (GTZ) have deployed personnel and money to Kazakhstan with the belief that language and cultural education can reconnect these erstwhile Germans to their ethnic roots and stem their need to seek the same in Germany. Kazakhstan’s government officially sanctioned this effort by authorizing a similar indigenous organization known as “Rebirth” and establishing the Assembly of the Peoples of Kazakhstan, which promotes multiculturalism in cooperation with the GTZ and Rebirth. The GTZ believes it can moderate the desire for migration by providing authentic ethnic identity for Germans, while Kazakhstan’s government expects this increasingly ethnicized minority to contribute to its multicultural political image.

What influence does such an ethnic-based project have on its subjects, and how do the subjects influence the construction, implementation, and outcomes of the project and its sponsoring institutions? How do NGOs purport to “regermanize” Germans, and how might these attempts interact with local government objectives? If Germans have indeed lost their Germanness, what has replaced it? Do they possibly represent a non-ethnicized, postsocialist identity in the highly nationalized global politics of the 21st century? If so, could they be seen as an alternative model of political identity rather than a failure that needs correcting? Why don’t the Kazakh or the German governments see it this way? How might de-ethnicized identities interact with the NGOs and their work? Finally, do the ethnic projects accomplish the intended outcomes or something altogether unexpected – do they affect migration, economic and political opportunities, and relations between ethnic Germans and others in Kazakhstan?

Stalin’s fear that ethnic Germans living in the USSR might collaborate with invading Nazi troops during the war prompted their exile from western Russia. Deportation to forced labor camps, followed by settlement in collective farms in rural Siberia and Central Asia, characterized the early phase of exile. These experiences influenced the gradual withering of German dialects spoken in western Russia, as well as other cultural repertoires associated with “Germanness.” Nonetheless, in 1989, the USSR reported its total German population at just over two million. With political liberalization in the early 1990s, Germans were permitted to leave for Germany resulting in the departure of over a million people from the former USSR between 1991 and the present.

My dissertation research will compare two villages with significant German populations located in neighboring regions of Kazakhstan and Russia. I will conduct ten months of research during the academic Fulbright year in Kazakhstan’s Pavlodar region. This period will follow six months of research conducted across the border in Russia funded by an IREX IARO Grant from March until August, 2008. Studying the local-based institutions and those originating from Germany operating in two countries will help separate the effects of the German projects from the programs supported by local states, and will reveal which institutions have more influence.

My research will examine NGOs’ attempts to regermanize Kazakhstan’s Germans, the Germans’ own notions of identity, and their ability to influence regermanization. Germany has gradually decreased funding to the GTZ in Kazakhstan, forcing it to employ local Germans and Russians to operate its programs. This affords opportunities for locals to apply identities and practices from their socialist and postsocialist experiences. I once attended a GTZ-operated German youth camp in Kazakhstan employing local Germans and Russians, many of whom worked with youth in the socialist period as leaders in the Communist Union of Youth (Komsomol). While German kids learning to dance a polka from a former Russian dance teacher and Komsomol leader may not be what the German government had in mind for its funding, it provides an amazing laboratory for studying the interaction of politics and ethnicity. Understanding how the NGOs and locals produce such interactions and how, through everyday social life, locals challenge notions of Germanness and the authority to impose identities is the basis of my inquiry.

I will conduct my research between September 2008 and June 2009 in Sherbakty, a village in Kazakhstan’s Pavlodar region. Sherbakty maintains a large population of Germans and is also a site of intervention by the GTZ and Rebirth with assistance from the above-mentioned Assembly. My research there will employ open-ended interviewing and participant observation. I will interview village residents, NGO employees, and local administrators, asking them about their experiences regarding marriage, religion, migration, education and labor in both the socialist and postsocialist periods. In my past experiences in Kazakhstan, these topics provoked richer elucidations about Germanness than responses to direct questions about ethnic identification. My participation in the daily life of German villagers and in the NGO-supported festivals and activities will help me to identify how these organizations attempt to regermanize, and how their subjects’ react to and attempt to influence the process. Participant observation will also reveal variations in the presentation of German ethnic markers in different contexts over time.