Paper long abstract:

One of the defining characteristics of nationalism is its promise of building something larger than the sum of its parts, a program shared selflessly by its many members, for the benefit of its members, including children, the elderly, the otherwise incapable, and those not yet born. In other words, there is a striking contrast between the personal importance of the mission to each member of the nation and the impersonal reality of the experience. National music is not, after all, a song belonging to a specific person, family, or tribe. National food, national (folk) literature, national crafts, national traditions are for the masses, even if they had earlier origins and were at one point unique, individualized, personal. In the early twentieth century, for example, the personal family histories of a select group of individuals came to stand in for the national history of the newly minted Kazakh nation. At the same time, many of the individuals later accused and punished (and much later lauded and memorialized) as Kazakh nationalists had serious misgivings about the project of nationalism, which they associated with terrorism, senseless bloodshed, and the excesses of European chauvinism. By looking at a selection of the staunchly anti-nationalistic writings of some of these individuals we gain an insight into the process of nationalism and the reasons for the annihilation of the Kazakh nationalists as bourgeois enemies of the very state that fomented the nations in the first place.