Basic national policy of the Soviet state in Kazakhstan (1920-1929 years)

The national policy of the Soviet state is the subject of intense research interest for many years. After winning, the Bolsheviks faced the need to find a fair solution of the national question. In the first years after the end of the Civil War their approaches to the settlement of inter-ethnic relations were revolutionary and were aimed at the integration of society and gaining the trust of the population of the national borderlands. The native research and Western sovietology have associated the "Golden Age" of Soviet nationality policy with the name of Lenin. Nation- building, indigenization management, land policy and cultural changes formed the core of the national policy of the Bolsheviks. The indigeniza-tion policy or positive discrimination in personnel policy has been an invention of the Bolsheviks, not of the Indian nationalists in the midtwentieth century. The indigenization policy included enforcing a series of measures intended to overcome the alienation of the Kazakh population in the new government, to attract Kazakhs to the government, and to modernize the social structure of the ethnic group through the framing of industrial workers. The indigenization was successfully carried out at the level of the republic’s leadership which made it possible to carry out the ethnically oriented policy in the allocation of land reserves. It brought about the aggravation of inter-ethnic relations and the outflow of the "European" population of Kazakhstan. Since the mid-1920s the centralizing tendency prevailed associated with the formation of Stalin’s autocratic regime. In the national policy significant adjustments were made that had to do with the lifting of the ban on the relocation from the European part of the country and the introduction of functional indigenization. These changes caused the conflict between the national-oriented communists and stalinists from the leadership of the Kazkraykom. National communists argued for the preservation of the nomadic communities and traditional cultural order of the Kazakh society. The defeat of the national opposition in 1927-28 opened the way to a gigantic social experiment at the turn of 1929-1930 that brought about the tragedy of collectivization. At the same time one cannot deny the significant progress that occurred in the 1920s in the solution of the national question in the USSR. In a short time the legal inequality of the Soviet peoples was liquidated. The Soviet government was consistently pursuing a policy of internationalism, reacted quickly enough to emerging issues and sought the real integration of Soviet peoples.

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