The Historiography of the «National Trauma»: The Agricultural Colonization of the Steppe Region in the Modern Studies of the Republic of Kazakhstan

Based on the materials of the modern research tradition of the Republic of Kazakhstan, the authors of the article identify and justify the key approaches of national historians to assessing the causes and results of the agricultural colonization of the steppe region in the second half of the 19th to the early 20th centuries. The authors aim to restore the historical and contextual conditions of the formation of the modern Kazakhstan historiographic tradition, which influenced the formation of researchers' ideas about the process of colonization as imperial domination and compulsion towards the indigenous peoples of Central Asia. To reach the aim, the authors used the provisions and principles of the new cultural and intellectual history, the contextual approach in particular. This approach views the historiographic tradition as a form of social activity and part of a developed culture in connection with current social and political events and ideological conditions. The authors identify the main stages of the formation of modern historiography of the agricultural colonization of the steppe region in Kazakhstan. The starting point of the institutionalization of the modernized historio-graphic tradition in this matter was the collapse of the Soviet Union, the growth of ethnic identity, and the actualization of the traumatic experience of the Kazakh people, which was most pronounced in the materials of the national intelligentsia. Thus, the understanding of the historical experience of colonization in the Republic of Kazakhstan at the turn of the 21st century occurred in the projection of the colonial discourse with its inherent anxious mood. Post-Soviet researchers cover a wide range of issues related to the traumatic outcome of the colonial empire: the organization of administrative management, the relations of the indigenous population with the immigrants. In the national historiographic tradition of studying the agricultural colonization of the steppe region in the 1990s, the anti-colonial rhetoric of the late 19th to early 20th centuries was resumed, returning to the concept of colonization as an "absolute evil", which became the main argument of supporters of the "official" direction. Representatives of the "liberal" trend in the historiography of the Republic of Kazakhstan, accepting the theory of "relative" evil, only softened the unequivocally negative assessment of the practices of imperial colonization.

Keywords

Authors

References