A startling bulletin was issued from the headquarters of TASS, the official Soviet news agency, just before Christmas last year: students had rioted in Alma-Ata, the capital of the Soviet republic of Kazakhstan, during the previous day and night. Cars and a food store were burned, TASS said, and townspeople had been "insulted." Never before had the Soviets, who blamed the protests on "nationalist elements," reported such violence so frankly and promptly. The revelation was seen as another sign of Mikhail Gorbachev's campaign for glasnost, or openness. Still, Western journalists have long been barred from Alma-Ata -- until last week. Flying to the city with eleven other reporters, TIME Moscow Bureau Chief James O. Jackson pieced together a firsthand account of the violence in Alma-Ata and its ambiguous aftermath. His report:
Few physical traces remain from last December's rioting at the place where it began, a bleak expanse of concrete aptly named Brezhnev Square. Three officers in a yellow-and-blue militia bus keep watch over the few cars and pedestrians passing through on an icy evening. Club-carrying civilian police auxiliaries patrol nearby streets where, on the night and morning of Dec. 17-18, mobs of Kazakh youths smashed windows and torched cars. In some parts of the square, new trees have been planted, apparently to replace those damaged by demonstrators.
But if the physical damage from the night of rioting has been repaired, psychological scars remain. "There was quite a bit of tension between Russians and Kazakhs afterward," said a Kazakh schoolteacher. Young ethnic Russians were openly resentful of the demonstrators and, in some cases, of Kazakhs generally. "They didn't like it when Kunaev got thrown out," said one Russian student. "They got everything without working, through their relatives and cronies."
Dinmukhamed Kunaev, 75, had ruled the republic's Communist Party for a quarter of a century until he was deposed and disgraced at a Dec. 16 plenum of the party Central Committee. His removal and the decision to replace him with an ethnic Russian from outside Kazakhstan, Gennadi Kolbin, party leader from Ulyanovsk province, set off the demonstrations the following day. According to officials in Alma-Ata, the demonstrators were angered not so much by Kunaev's dismissal as by the decision to replace him with an outsider, Russian or not. But the motives may have run deeper than that. Prime Minister Nursultan Nazarbaev, a Kazakh who rose to the premiership when Kunaev was in power, said that some demonstrators shouted slogans like "Kazakhstan for Kazakhs!" and attacked non-Kazakhs on the streets. "It was a manifestation of nationalism -- we are not trying to get around that," he said. But he insisted many demonstrators were motivated by resentment resulting from Kunaev's frequent assertions that Kazakhstan was the bountiful provider of meat, bread and steel for the rest of the country, with the implication that it was getting too little in return.