ABSTRACT
The nation-building process was attended by radical changes: economic modernization, promotion of mass education and the establishment of prestigious institutions of ‘national statehood’ based on a new powerful stratum – the administrative, creative and scientific-technical intelligentsia. According to the 1989 USSR census, the Russian population in the region numbered 9,500,000 and constituted 19.3 per cent of the overall population. When the USSR existed, the Russians in Central Asia and Kazakhstan were employed primarily in the development of industry, transport and urban construction. In the former USSR Russians enjoyed for decades the comfortable status of a people dominating all the major socio-cultural areas. The deterioration of inter-ethnic relations in Central Asia and Kazakhstan in recent years has been caused mainly by the upsurge in ethnic nationalism among the representatives of the titular groups and by inter-clan and inter-regional disputes that climaxed in a series of ethnic conflicts and even, in the case of Tajikistan, in a devastating civil war.
