12 - The Response of the Metropolitan District of the Russian Orthodox Church in Kazakhstan to the Emigration of Ethnic Russians from Independent Kazakhstan

Summary

Abstract

This chapter will explore how the Russian Orthodox Church of the Kazakhstan Metropolitan District has responded to the dramatic shrinking of the Russian community in Kazakhstan over the past three decades due to the out-migration of ethnic Russian citizens of Kazakhstan to, above all, the Russian Federation. It will present national- and regional-level statistics to demonstrate Kazakhstan's changing demographic composition, and explore the reasons for the exodus with reference to interviews with ethnic Russians who left Kazakhstan for Russia. The chapter will then provide an overview of the history of the Russian Orthodox Church in Kazakhstan before presenting an analysis of its discursive and practical response to meeting the humanitarian needs of its flock, including those experiencing difficulties as a result of post-Soviet societal changes in Kazakhstan and the migration of a significant proportion of the Russian and Russophone community of Kazakhstan

Keywords: Kazakhstan, Russia, migration, Russian Orthodox Church, demographic change, nation-building

Introduction

At the moment of national independence in 1991, ethnic Russians made up almost 38 per cent of the population of Kazakhstan, with other nationalities such as Germans, Koreans, Ukrainians, Belarussians and others making up a further 2 per cent. Kazakhstan's diverse demographic composition is largely the result of the forced displacement and large-scale managed population movements of the Tsarist and Soviet periods. During communist times, the borders between the fifteen union republics of the Soviet Union were administrative in nature, and often not felt or experienced as a frontier. Thus the division into independent states brought about many changes, with some 20 million Russians across the non-Russian USSR finding themselves transformed from part of the privileged majority to a minority of uncertain future in the new nation-building states. Kazakhstan was home to one of the largest Russian diasporas, and, while the leadership took a more conciliatory approach to nation-building than some of the newly independent states, many Russians responded by emigrating, with the result that by 2016 their number had reduced from 6.23 to 3.64 million; a much reduced 20.62 per cent of the population.

It should be noted that the migratory outflows do not concern only ethnic Russian citizens of Kazakhstan, but also other Russian-speaking nationalities, some of who have traditionally been Orthodox (Ukrainians, Belarussians) and some not (Poles, Germans, Jews).