Don't forget that Kazakhstan had a large number of Germans (about 6 percent as late as the 1989 Soviet census
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kazakhstan#Demographics):
"During the 1970s, Soviet authorities began to confront growing dissident demands through a combination of repression and accommodation, what scholar Hanya Shiro describes as the “carrot and stick” approach to general protest activities and especially the nationalities problem. KGB chief Yuri Andropov in particular followed this policy course in the waning days of the Leonid Brezhnev regime. Besides cracking down on dissidents, Andropov oversaw plans for a German autonomous oblast near Tselinograd (now Astana), Kazakhstan, from 1976 to 1980. The regime considered it necessary to respond to the ethnic group’s emerging national protest movement, West Germany’s mounting diplomatic pressures, and the broader international community’s growing demands to protect emigration, human and minority rights. The USSR remained committed to the long-term integration and acculturation of its almost two million Germans, some of its most prized Soviet citizen-workers, with nearly half living in the Kazakh SSR. It sought to address domestic and foreign criticisms about the “German question” by formulating this new, but rather modest, nationality solution. The plan collapsed after June 1979, however, amid public demonstrations in the Kazakh SSR. Kazakh opposition at all levels revealed the complicated and troubling nature of Soviet nationality affairs and the limits of central authority over the periphery. The aborted plan’s legacy was the ethnic Germans’ continued lack of a national-territorial “container” when the USSR disintegrated in 1991. The proposal represented the regime’s first serious consideration of German autonomy since the group lost its remaining national districts and the Volga German ASSR between 1938 and 1941. Though it remains conjectural, the oblast could have established an embryonic national centre for Germans, from which they would have found themselves in a better political bargaining position during the dramatic Gorbachev and Yeltsin eras. It also could have helped reduce the dramatic mass migration of Germans from the former USSR to united Germany after 1990. Viewing the event from both “above” and “below,” this study incorporates various English-, German-, and Russian-language sources, including Soviet-era government documents and the handful of available memoirs and updated academic studies."
http://web.archive.org/web/20150821224349/http://eurasiahistory.com/vol-3-no-1-2014/