Public Commemoration and Nationalizing the Cult of World War II in Kazakhstan

The Kazakhstani state has faced the challenge of replacing or reimagining symbols and monuments commemorating Soviet ideologies, Soviet public memories, and Sovietized public figures with symbolism, monuments, museums, and exhibits that support and reinforce the nationalizing ideology of a sovereign state. This chapter provides an overview of some of the ways in which the collective memory of the Second World War has been renegotiated and instrumentalized in independent Kazakhstan as a tool of sovereign nation-building and framed as an important identity marker for Kazakhstanis today, irrespective of ethnicity. It then presents a brief case study appraising how ordinary citizens perceive contemporary memorializations of Soviet-era figures in the city of Aktobe in Kazakhstan’s northwest. In doing so, the chapter illustrates some of the ways in which the nationalizing memory regime of the Kazakhstani state has decolonized these figures and commemorative sites. The chapter concludes by arguing that the processes of decolonization and of establishing a new memory regime that are considered evidence strategies of deliberate ambiguity that likely increase citizen buy-in to Kazakhstan’s sovereign nationalizing projects.