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Old 09-20-2016, 06:02 PM
 
Location: SoCal
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Were Kazakhs the Russian equivalent of Native Americans for the U.S.?

After all, just like White Americans settled on a lot of (previously conquered) Native American land here in the U.S., ethnic Russians settled on a lot of formerly Kazakh lands which they previously conquered.

Anyway, any thoughts on this?
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Old 09-20-2016, 06:51 PM
 
Location: Eastern Washington
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Kazakhs originally lived in Kazakhstan, in Central Asia. I'm not an expert on Russian history, I don't know how much interaction there was before Soviet times. In Soviet times Kazakhstan was used as both a rocket-launching area and to some extent for testing nuclear weapons, neither one did any environmental good.
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Old 09-20-2016, 07:07 PM
 
Location: Type 0.73 Kardashev
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Futurist110 View Post
Were Kazakhs the Russian equivalent of Native Americans for the U.S.?

After all, just like White Americans settled on a lot of (previously conquered) Native American land here in the U.S., ethnic Russians settled on a lot of formerly Kazakh lands which they previously conquered.

Anyway, any thoughts on this?
There are over 10 million Kazakhs in Kazakhstan. They constitute a majority of the population. As such, they're really not analogous to Native Americans in the United States - who collectively (ie, not just one tribe) number less than 3 million nationwide, and are less than 15% of the state in which they are most populous, Alaska, and don't even breach the 10% mark in any other state.

The Russians ran things and move in en masse, but they failed to completely overrun and all but eliminate Kazakhs.
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Old 09-20-2016, 07:08 PM
 
Location: Minnysoda
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lots of ethnic German blood running in folks there. Uncle Joe used it as a dumping ground for German Russians in '41

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germans_of_Kazakhstan
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Old 09-20-2016, 07:25 PM
 
Location: SoCal
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Unsettomati View Post
There are over 10 million Kazakhs in Kazakhstan. They constitute a majority of the population. As such, they're really not analogous to Native Americans in the United States - who collectively (ie, not just one tribe) number less than 3 million nationwide, and are less than 15% of the state in which they are most populous, Alaska, and don't even breach the 10% mark in any other state.

The Russians ran things and move in en masse, but they failed to completely overrun and all but eliminate Kazakhs.
Please keep in mind, though, that Native Americans were a majority in the territory that is now the U.S. at some point in time. Indeed, in the U.S. state of Arizona, Native Americans made up a whopping 34% of the total population as late as 1890! :

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Native...cal_population

Also, for the record, ethnic Kazakhs made up just 30% of Kazakhstan's total population in 1959:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demogr...ic_composition

Indeed, had Russia not suffered such massive demographic losses during World War II, the ethnic Kazakh percentage of Kazakhstan's total population could have been even lower than that!
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Old 09-20-2016, 07:32 PM
 
Location: SoCal
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Quote:
Originally Posted by M3 Mitch View Post
Kazakhs originally lived in Kazakhstan, in Central Asia. I'm not an expert on Russian history, I don't know how much interaction there was before Soviet times. In Soviet times Kazakhstan was used as both a rocket-launching area and to some extent for testing nuclear weapons, neither one did any environmental good.
Kazakhs made up just 30% of Kazakhstan's total population in 1959, though. Plus, even as late as 1979, some parts of Kazakhstan apparently had a Kazakh population of less than 20%:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikiped...ation_1979.jpg
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Old 09-20-2016, 10:18 PM
 
Location: Eindhoven, Netherlands
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The Siberians are the "Native Americans" of Russia
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Old 09-21-2016, 07:04 AM
 
Location: Type 0.73 Kardashev
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Futurist110 View Post
Please keep in mind, though, that Native Americans were a majority in the territory that is now the U.S. at some point in time. Indeed, in the U.S. state of Arizona, Native Americans made up a whopping 34% of the total population as late as 1890! :

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Native...cal_population

Also, for the record, ethnic Kazakhs made up just 30% of Kazakhstan's total population in 1959:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demogr...ic_composition

Indeed, had Russia not suffered such massive demographic losses during World War II, the ethnic Kazakh percentage of Kazakhstan's total population could have been even lower than that!
There are some key differences.

'Native American' is simply a catch-all phrase for a vast group of distinct peoples. The balance of the Arizona population in 1890 was almost entirely white - Hispanic and non-Hispanic - and this is analogous to the ethnicity of 'American', because we lack the dominate single nationality of a nation-state such that the USSR was at its core (while paying lip-service to the equality of all Soviet nations, it was Russian dominated). And in 1950, while Kazakhs were indeed only 30% of Kazakhstan, the balance were not entirely Russian, who numbered a 43% plurality. The remainder were other constituent ethnic groups also dominated by the Russians. A better comparison would be Kazakhs in Kazakhstan with only one Native American group from Arizona - say, Navajo, or Tohono O'odham. Or, to compare all the non-Russians in Kazakhstan with all the Native Americans in Arizona.

Also, in 1890 Arizona was a mere territory. It was nothing but a chunk of forgotten war booty and a railroad route where fewer than 100k people lived. Kazakh SSR was the equivalent of a U.S. State, and Arizona would not achieve statehood until 1912. Comparatively, in 1950 Kazakh SSR had over 7 million people. So the comparison there is between two regions are very different stages of their development.

We see where this has gone. Kazakhstan, while certainly influenced by the Russians and the Soviet state, today remains Kazakh. The Kazakh language is the most widely spoken mother tongue there. Kazakh culture dominates. Arizona is not Native American - there, the indigenous culture has been subsumed by American culture.

I think the basic root of this is the nature of the conquest. In the Americas, a wave of depopulating diseases spread out before the first-arriving Europeans, eliminating over 90% of a population which had no developed resistance to those diseases. There were relatively few individuals to resist the coming tide. In Central Asia, this was not the case. Kazakhs did not suffer from a similar lack of resistance to Old World diseases because they were Old World people who had been encountering those diseases for millenia. And the Russians came not as vast waves of settlers but as much as colonists, arriving in moderate numbers for control and profit more than to Russify the Kazakh steppe. This is true for much of Russia/the USSR east of the Urals. The indigenous population was more able to resist numerically than in the New World, and the priorities of the arriving Russians differed from the priorities of the arriving Americans.

And that, I think, is why Arizona is a place of American culture which speaks mostly English and then Spanish and even there, where Navajo is the most widely spoken Native American language north of the Mexican border, it is hardly a blip on the linguistic radar -- and why Kazakhstan is today essentially Kazakh.
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Old 09-22-2016, 07:19 PM
 
Location: Southeast Michigan
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Unsettomati View Post
There are some key differences.

'Native American' is simply a catch-all phrase for a vast group of distinct peoples. The balance of the Arizona population in 1890 was almost entirely white - Hispanic and non-Hispanic - and this is analogous to the ethnicity of 'American', because we lack the dominate single nationality of a nation-state such that the USSR was at its core (while paying lip-service to the equality of all Soviet nations, it was Russian dominated). And in 1950, while Kazakhs were indeed only 30% of Kazakhstan, the balance were not entirely Russian, who numbered a 43% plurality. The remainder were other constituent ethnic groups also dominated by the Russians. A better comparison would be Kazakhs in Kazakhstan with only one Native American group from Arizona - say, Navajo, or Tohono O'odham. Or, to compare all the non-Russians in Kazakhstan with all the Native Americans in Arizona.

Also, in 1890 Arizona was a mere territory. It was nothing but a chunk of forgotten war booty and a railroad route where fewer than 100k people lived. Kazakh SSR was the equivalent of a U.S. State, and Arizona would not achieve statehood until 1912. Comparatively, in 1950 Kazakh SSR had over 7 million people. So the comparison there is between two regions are very different stages of their development.

We see where this has gone. Kazakhstan, while certainly influenced by the Russians and the Soviet state, today remains Kazakh. The Kazakh language is the most widely spoken mother tongue there. Kazakh culture dominates. Arizona is not Native American - there, the indigenous culture has been subsumed by American culture.

I think the basic root of this is the nature of the conquest. In the Americas, a wave of depopulating diseases spread out before the first-arriving Europeans, eliminating over 90% of a population which had no developed resistance to those diseases. There were relatively few individuals to resist the coming tide. In Central Asia, this was not the case. Kazakhs did not suffer from a similar lack of resistance to Old World diseases because they were Old World people who had been encountering those diseases for millenia. And the Russians came not as vast waves of settlers but as much as colonists, arriving in moderate numbers for control and profit more than to Russify the Kazakh steppe. This is true for much of Russia/the USSR east of the Urals. The indigenous population was more able to resist numerically than in the New World, and the priorities of the arriving Russians differed from the priorities of the arriving Americans.

And that, I think, is why Arizona is a place of American culture which speaks mostly English and then Spanish and even there, where Navajo is the most widely spoken Native American language north of the Mexican border, it is hardly a blip on the linguistic radar -- and why Kazakhstan is today essentially Kazakh.
I read a book on the Great Game, and the point the authors made wrt/ the Russian conquest of Central Asia was that they never had the aim of populating the area with Russians - they already had more land than people to settle it with - but wanted to incorporate the various nations of the region into their Empire and make them the loyal subjects of the Tzars, and the buffer / launchpad against Turkey and Iran.

This is very different from the designs that the American settlers had on the lands out West.

Also, unlike the American Indians, the majority of the people of Russian Central Asia (not sure about Kazakhs per se) had for centuries lived in countries, complete with law and bureaucracy. They may have had laws and bureaucratic institutions that were different from the Russian ones, but they followed the same general principles. So it would be far easier for them to adjust to living under the Russian rule, than for the Native American tribes to change their entire way of living to meet the requirements of a system they didn't quite understand. The roving bands of Indian pillaging farms were not just an invention of the racist Hollywood movie studios. The settlers and the Indians were often simply incompatible with each other. I assume that this would not be true for most of the Central Asian people.
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Old 09-22-2016, 07:52 PM
 
2,321 posts, read 1,963,771 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Davy-040 View Post
The Siberians are the "Native Americans" of Russia
Depending on how you want to count, there either are no (as in none, zero) ethnic equivalents to native Americans, or there are at least a half dozen, if not 10 or 20 ethnic groups that qualify.

It is difficult to say historically, because the records are sometimes not that good, but the whole ethnic thing in Russia is much much different than in the US. Russia has a dozen or three distinct ethnic groups. And they were mixing over many generations for way longer than the US has been around.
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