KAZAKHSTAN The names of the heroes of the new Kazakhstan

Almaty wants to change the name of a street in the city center, shelving cosmonaut Jurij Gagarin to make room for the memory of a local lyrical singer. The demolition of the Soviet mythological apparatus is one of the faces of derussification. But there is no shortage of perplexity among local residents.

Almaty () – The authorities of Almaty, the most populous city in Kazakhstan, have announced that they will rename the main part of the street that runs through the city center, Gagarina Prospekt, in honor of the great Kazakh lyrical singer Ermek Serkebaev, whose centenary of birth coincides with the centenary of his death in 2013, after a life spent in the former capital of the south of the country. The prospekt was named after the first astronaut to reach space since 1961, when the Soviet Union celebrated in Jurij Gagarin its superiority over the entire Western world.

De-Russification in this case also becomes a demolition of the Soviet mythological apparatus, which Putin’s Russia instead tries to revive, and the local population’s reactions to this are quite disparate, as documented by a street survey published by Orda.kz. Valentina, a woman from Almaty who has lived in the city since Gagarin’s time, claims that “our bosses like these name changes, and they don’t ask our opinion,” even though a vote had actually been proposed in online on the municipal administration website. However, Valentina assures that “we like Gagarin’s title, we are proud to represent such an important historical event.”

Another younger Almatynets, Sergej, claims that “I don’t know who this Serkebaev is, while everyone knows him,” and in any case “a lot of money will be wasted on the name change, and we have much more pressing problems.” . Other inhabitants are more in favor of Kazakh names, to defend their own identity and culture, and as Erlan says, “an opera singer may be little known, but displaying his name helps to reconstruct the memory of men who have made a great contribution to Kazakh history.

On the current Gagarina prospekt, there is also no shortage of symbols and works of art related to astronautical feats, also remembering that Gagarin’s spacecraft was launched from the Baikonur base in Kazakhstan, and was called Vostok-1 (“East-1 »), underlining the Eurasian pride of the Soviet empire, which is often referred to in Russia, but also throughout Central Asia. The Russian vaccine against Covid, hastily produced at the end of 2020 to anticipate the Western ones, was called Vostok-5, recalling cosmic feats.

In the middle of the avenue there is an installation of Gagarin with his diving suit, sitting on a bench, replicated in a courtyard of one of the apartment blocks in the area, in what is called “Gagarin Park.” Children love to sit in the astronautical embrace, and young people in general support heroic exaltation, without feeling the attraction of the national opera: «We will have to study to find out who that singer is, while the name of Gagarin is known and sounds good”.

Other opinions more openly support the idea of ​​the “new Kazakhstan” that President Kasym-Žomart Tokaev so advocates, stating that “the old must be overcome, our language and culture must flourish and change for the better, this is what we want to convey to our children”. There were also many reactions on the pages and social networks, where some recalled the controversy of 2017, when another avenue in the city, Furmanova prospekt, became the current Nazarbaeva prospekt, replacing the Russian-Soviet revolutionary poet Dimitri Furmanov with the still ETA president Nursultan Nazarbaev. In that case, more than de-Sovietization, the intention was to celebrate the figure of the Kazakh “father of the country”, since discredited after the events of recent years, so that many are now asking for a new name for this street as well, or at least They make calls like “give us back Furmanov!”

Tokaev has repeatedly condemned the Kazakh practice of naming streets and erecting monuments only for “relatives and friends”, and proposes a higher vision of Kazakh national consciousness, one that overcomes the colonial past, but also “tribal narrowness.”

Kazakhstan is a proud but unstable nation, spread over a vast territory where semi-nomadic ancestors roamed, and it is not easy to establish the right perspective to explore it in all directions.