FINALLY back to blogging. That was a hard five days.
Yet more fun with maps, this time with Central Asia.
Like many of my cartographic finds, this one answers a few questions but makes me ask many more. What does it really mean that one group is the majority in a certain area? When I was in Kazakhstan, I met people who were Ukrainian-Jewish, Uzbek-German, Kazakh-Russian-Tajik, etc. The groups are not neatly stratified into easily distinguishable groups. Germans apparently hold majorities in some areas. What about Koreans?
About Curzon
Lord George Nathaniel Curzon (1859 - 1925) entered the British House of Commons as a Conservative MP in 1886, where he served as undersecretary of India and Foreign Affairs. He was appointed Viceroy of India at the turn of the 20th century where he delineated the North West Frontier Province,
ordered a military expedition to Tibet, and unsuccessfully tried to partition the province of Bengal during his six-year tenure. Curzon served as Leader of the House of Lords in Prime Minister Lloyd George's War Cabinet and became Foreign Secretary in January 1919, where his most famous act was
the drawing of the Curzon Line between a new Polish state and Russia. His publications include
Russia in Central Asia (1889) and
Persia and the Persian Question (1892).
In real life, "Curzon" is a US citizen from the East Coast who has been a financial analyst, freelance translator, and university professor; he is currently on assignment in Tokyo.
Hey Curz,
Welcome back. Must have pained you guys excessively to be down during Queen Victoria’s birthday.
Solzhenitsyn has some interesting and contradictory things to say about Russa’s Volga Germans in his various novels and The Gulag Archipelago.
Where’d you meet them though? I pretty much only encountered mixed marriages (especially Slavic-Turkic) in cities or villages near cities. You get beyond those cities (and some cities, like Samarkand, do have stark divisions and little intermarriage) and majorities mean a lot. It’s weird though. You can go from one village to the next with only a few km between and one will be entirely Uzbek and the next entirely Tajik. You have cities like Karshi that are Uzbek with outlying villages almost entirely Tajik. The opposite in Samarkand. And they won’t have anything to do with one another. In the Zerafshan Valley from Navoi to Bukhara though, the Tajiks and Uzbeks do mix and tend to call themselves Uzbek if that’s what they speak.
So, long story short, there’s loads of distinct seperation, but one wouldn’t get that impression around cities. And that’s probably why Koreans don’t hold a majority anywhere. They tend to live only in cities while many Germans stuck to themselves in rural areas.
Trust you to answer my questions. Thanks.
Oh, and I don’t really listen to music, but thanks for thinking of us.
Germans are mainly repatriated back to the Germany. Along with their Slavic and Turck relatives. Yes, they used to live in rural areas but now it’s mainly Kazakh’s. And Oralmans (Kazakh repatriants form Mongoly) fill this gap.
It is hard to determine the real ethnicity of a person in the former USSR, because it was widely used to mark Russian all the Slavic groups and Kazakh some Turck groups in KZ. I am for instance Russian(1/4)-Ukrainian-Tatarian and officially Russian.
The point is that statistic is not exact. And visual observation doesn’t always give you good result — a lot of people have mixed ancestors here. Kazakh, Uigurs, Tatarian, Russian, Germans, Ukrainians, Chechens and lot of minorities.
I always believed that Kazakshtan is multietnical and multiconfessional and US variant suits us very vell: we must omit etnicity and become a Nation.
Alex — what would the language of a omit-ethnic Kazakhstan be, Russian or Kazakh or something else?
Both, I think.
Kazakh is relatively easy to learn and I can’t see any reason for Russain-speakers to discard such learning.