A creative collective from Kyrgyzstan has designed a web extension that doesn’t so much draw a line under the country’s Russian colonial past as run a big red one through it.
The Birtops group from Kyrgyzstan’s capital, Bishkek, won a gold medal earlier this month at a long-running regional marketing festival in Minsk called The White Square.
They scooped their prize for a new web plugin called We Are Kyrgyzstan, which automatically corrects users on any online use of “Kirghizia” — the Russian colonial and Soviet-era designation for their now-independent country — with the word “Kyrgyzstan.”
That is a boost to Kyrgyz who find the name an eyesore in the most literal sense, but developers say the project’s main aim is to draw attention to what they call an insult to national pride and sovereignty.
“It was kind of our protest that after more than 30 years of independence our country is still being called Kirghizia,” Nursultan Bakyt, Birtops’s creative director, told RFE/RL of the project.
Users wanting to download We Are Kyrgyzstan as a Google Chrome extensionwill also find a link to a petition asking all Russian speakers to call the country by its official title, the Kyrgyz Republic, or Kyrgyzstan.
The petition, which has a few hundred signatures, was blocked for a week after going online in late April, a fact Bakyt attributed to a wave of complaints from Russians as Birtops began promoting the initiative.
“You just have to do an Internet search or watch any number of videos by bloggers who visited our country” to see how prevalent the use of “Kirghizia” is, he said.
The promoter said the problem became more acute after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine sent thousands of fighting-age Russians fleeing to Kyrgyzstan last year.
What’s In A Name?
Place names are time-honored points of controversy in former Soviet countries, and Russia’s military incursions into Ukraine — beginning with Moscow’s seizure of the Ukrainian peninsula of Crimea in 2014 — have only intensified these arguments.
An online campaign begun by Ukraine’s Foreign Ministry has helped mainstream the transliterated form of the Ukrainian spelling “Kyiv” for their national capital at the expense of “Kiev,” which is transliterated from the Russian spelling.
Another sore spot for Ukrainians is the use of the Russian preposition “na,” meaning “on” when referring to something happening inside Ukraine, rather than “v” or “in,” which is more typically used for sovereign entities.
In English, an equivalent faux pas is referring to Ukraine as “the Ukraine.”
In Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan’s neighbor to the north, the country’s largest city, Almaty, is still known by its Soviet-era name of Alma-Ata in Russia. And that can be a thorny subject for different reasons.
The words “alma” and “ata” translate as “apple” and “grandfather” in English.
But while the city’s historical name, Almatau, was likely linked to the region’s deep abundance of the fruit, some residents regard the use of the hyphen and the folksy “grandfather” reference for the Soviet name as embarrassing impositions.
“For other people, Alma-Ata might evoke pleasant, nostalgic feelings. For me, it is associated with the Soviet Union and the fact that our culture was erased, and that in its place was planted a new one imitating Kazakh culture but lacking any meaning,” said Aidana Aidarkhan, an activist.
The debate over names is “more serious than it may appear at first glance,” she argued.
“Because first they don’t recognize a name — and then they don’t recognize sovereignty,” Aidarkhan told RFE/RL.
‘Zone Of Influence’
Kyrgyzstan’s formal title is the Kyrgyz Republic, with Kyrgyzstan an alternative official title. Russia’s official name for the country transliterates as the “Kirghiz” Republic, with a spelling that features the Cyrillic “и” (transliterated as “i”) rather than the Cyrillic “ы” that converts to the Latin “y” in English.
Crucially, opponents of Moscow’s rendering feel language is no argument for using Kirghiz, or Kirghizia, since the Russian language has constitutional status in Kyrgyzstan alongside the state language, Kyrgyz.
In this sense, and given that both “Kyrgyzstan” and “Kyrgyz Republic” appear on the Russian-language version of the basic law, Moscow is contesting Kyrgyzstan’s authority to determine how the country is spelled in a language that the two countries share, they complain.
The status of the Russian language in Kyrgyzstan is certainly important to Moscow.
That was made clear during a Russian Foreign Ministry briefing last week that saw ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova give a detailed response to a media question about Kyrgyzstan’s plans to develop and expand usage of Kyrgyz through a new law on the state language that has won backing from lawmakers in parliament.
Zakharova said on June 2 that Russia was counting on its ally, “Kirghizia,” to carry out “a balanced language policy.”
She also voiced concern that the law might create problems for citizens of the Central Asian country that don’t speak “Kirghiz.”
“For as long as [the] Russian [language] has official status, the country is called Kyrgyzstan,” read one of the softer Kyrgyz rebukes to Zakharova’s comments on Twitter.
“When Russian loses that status, then you can call us whatever you like.”
There is currently no indication that Kyrgyzstan is planning to strip Russian of its official status, a move that would surely provoke a crisis in relations.
As it is, though, the persistent use of “Kirghizia” adds to doubts that the relationship with Moscow is one of “mutual respect and understanding,” Semetei Amanbekov, editor in chief of the Bulak.kg news website, told RFE/RL.
And it isn’t just the Kremlin and its state media echo chamber that falls into the trap.
Some independent Russian outlets, including those like Meduza that work in exile, have also come in for criticism over their perceived use of colonial terms.
In 2018, the Riga-based website incurred wrath for a social media post in which it set forth its style guide for former Soviet republics, including the “na” preposition for “in Ukraine.” The outlet then added: “Belorussia, Kirghizia, Moldavia. Sorry everyone.”
Meduza has since changed its style for all four of those countries and now calls Almaty by its post-independence name, too.
But Amanbekov said there are few signs that official Moscow will shed its preference for “Kirghizia” over Kyrgyzstan.
This, allied with Russian politicians’ complaints about language policy, indicate that Moscow views Kyrgyzstan as part of its “zone of influence” where it can “dictate terms,” Amanbekov said.
