| Demographic and Language Politics in the 1999 Kazakhstan Census |
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Bhavna Dave and Peter Sinnott Abstract No state in the former Soviet Union was more eager to conduct a census in the post-1991 years than Kazakhstan. For nationalists and ruling elites, the census was expected to confirm that Kazakhs had achieved a majority status within their "own" country, after having been reduced to a minority of the population under Soviet rule. This study analyzes the both the results of the 1999 census in Kazakhstan and, just as important, the demographic and language politics that shaped the census. |



National Council for Eurasian and East European Research (NCEEER) is a non-profit organization created in 1978 to develop and sustain long-term, high-quality programs for post-doctoral research on the social, political, economic, environmental, and historical development of Eurasia and Central and Eastern Europe. More
Aesthetic Politics in St. Petersburg: Skyline at the Heart of Political Opposition
Alexei Yurchak, University of California, Berkeley
This working paper focuses on the plans to construct a skyscraper in St Petersburg, Russia, known originally as Gazprom-City and recently renamed into Okhta Center, and on the controversy that developed around these plans. The paper uses the skyscraper debates as a lens to discuss a particular "aesthetic politics" of St Petersburg, the meaning of "world cities" and "global architecture" in Russian and international contexts, post-Soviet forms of political and corporate governance, the mobilization of civic opposition to such projects and the ability of such urban protests to translate into a more unified and politically oriented opposition than has been possible in other contexts in Russia.