Uproar in Soviet Central Asia

For months Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev has been complaining that bureaucratic defenders of the status quo were stubbornly resisting his efforts to modernize the creaky Soviet economy. However, last week’s student riots in Alma-Ata--the capital of the Central Asian Soviet republic of Kazakhstan--were the first known instance of resistance taking a violent turn.

Gorbachev has used economic shortcomings in Kazakhstan as a horrible example of old-style Communist leadership. Two-thirds of the members of the regional Communist Party central committee have been purged, along with many local party officials.

A week ago the new regional central committee dutifully fired Dinmukhamed Kunaev, a 74-year-old Kazakh who had headed the republic’s Communist Party organization for 22 years, and replaced him with Gennady Kolbin, an ethnic Russian from Siberia. Kunaev, a protege of the late Leonid I. Brezhnev, is also expected to lose his membership in the ruling Politburo.

This, on the face of it, was a risky business. The Soviet Union is in actuality a colonial empire in which non-Russian nationalities are dominated by Moscow. Kazakhstan is one of several Central Asian republics, most of them predominantly Muslim, that border on China, Afghanistan and Iran. The country’s unwritten rule has previously been that the provincial governments are headed by the representatives of local ethnic groups, whose power has frequently been more apparent than real, with Moscow’s man sitting in as No. 2.

By unseating Kunaev, the Kremlin offended the ethnic sensitivities of the Kazakhs. The day after Kunaev’s downfall, rioting broke out among several hundred students who burned autos and a store, fought police and “insulted townspeople,” according to an unprecedented Tass report that blamed the riots on “hooligans and parasites” who were “incited by nationalistic elements.”

Order was restored by police and troops on the second day--but not before several people were killed, according to Soviet sources cited by the Washington Post. The Post also reported that the students were supplied with vodka and narcotics, apparently with the connivance of local officials who feared that Kunaev’s removal endangered their own jobs and privileges.

The Kremlin sent in a Politburo member, Mikhail Solomentsev, to restore ideological order. According to reports circulating in Kazakhstan, dozens of local party officials have been arrested. Communist youth organizations are being castigated by the Kremlin for “poor moral and ideological teaching” and for failure to cope with “growing problems.”

From where Gorbachev sits, all this has to be a disturbing demonstration of the fact that his anti-reform enemies in the bureaucracy are willing to go to any lengths--including the stoking of racial hatreds among the Soviet Union’s dozens of nationalities--to oppose his efforts to bring the country out of the economic and social dark ages.