KZBlog

Some interesting news from RFE/RL: the movement Zheltoksan AkitatAkikat wants the government to investigate the December 86 protests and classify them as a rebellion. I assume this is a separate group from Zheltoksan 86, but I honestly don’t know what Akitat means in Kazakh (Zheltoksan means December). EDIT: Akikat, the actual name of the movement, means “truth”. Typo by RFE/RL repeated by men. (thanks, Bota)

The events of 1986 started as a protest against the appointing of an ethnic Russian, Kolbin, as head of the Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic. Many students, among others, protested in the central square of Almaty, and there was a violent suppression of the event by police. But Kolbin was replaced, and Nazarbayev appointed head shortly thereafter.

I’m not clear on what the goals of Zheltoksan AkitatAkikat are. I assume to redeem the names of those arrested and seek the men who gave orders to the police. However unlike, say the Tienanmen Square protests, the events of December 1986 are widely talked about in Kazakhstan and memorialized officially in a number of monuments. Many trace the beginnings of Kazakhstan’s independence from the Soviet Union to these events.