How to divide Kazakhstan?

I'm trying to divide Kazakhstan for a map I'm currently making. The basic premise is that Soviet Union falls apart more violently, giving way for more militant irredentism(which also has an upper hand). How will Kazakhstan end up under such premise? Will Russia only seize the northern part of the country which basically had Russian minority? Or will they go further and try to at least occupy the western chunk of the country since it was only connected to Almaty through the northern oblasts(or at least that's what older maps have been showing me)? Or will Russia just fully reoccupy the country and probably even the entire Central Asia?
 
Aside for Russia occupying the northern regions that had a Russian minority (and even majority in some parts) and were somewhat important to the former Soviet Union, like Semipalatinsk, I can't really imagine any other type of partition (of course, excluding annexation). The rest of Kazakhstan is fairly homogeneous.

To be honest, I'm not a huge fan of the USSR breakup turning into a bigger Yugoslavia-TLs, but that might just be me.
 
Aside for Russia occupying the northern regions that had a Russian minority (and even majority in some parts) and were somewhat important to the former Soviet Union, like Semipalatinsk, I can't really imagine any other type of partition (of course, excluding annexation). The rest of Kazakhstan is fairly homogeneous.

To be honest, I'm not a huge fan of the USSR breakup turning into a bigger Yugoslavia-TLs, but that might just be me.


Basically my concern is this :

Judging from all the maps on Kazakh road system I've seen so far(including the old ones which are those that apply here), the only way to travel to the western part of the country without crossing another country would be through the north. The shortest route would be to cross to Kyrgyztan again before entering the country again through Tawaz. So it's less about demographic then it's about accessibility. Of course, I could be wrong and might have missed another road just above the southern route, in which case do tell.
 
Basically my concern is this :

Judging from all the maps on Kazakh road system I've seen so far(including the old ones which are those that apply here), the only way to travel to the western part of the country without crossing another country would be through the north. The shortest route would be to cross to Kyrgyztan again before entering the country again through Tawaz. So it's less about demographic then it's about accessibility. Of course, I could be wrong and might have missed another road just above the southern route, in which case do tell.
This map tells me there's a rail through Qyzylorda in the south.
 
cadens.jpg



Central_asia_demography.jpg
 

CaliGuy

Banned
Aside for Russia occupying the northern regions that had a Russian minority (and even majority in some parts) and were somewhat important to the former Soviet Union, like Semipalatinsk, I can't really imagine any other type of partition (of course, excluding annexation). The rest of Kazakhstan is fairly homogeneous.

To be honest, I'm not a huge fan of the USSR breakup turning into a bigger Yugoslavia-TLs, but that might just be me.
What about also having Russia seize Baikonur, though?
 
You could also see the four Turkish republic unite to some kind of pan-Turkic republic, with only south Kazakhstan being part of the this republic.
 
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/
 

CaliGuy

Banned
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/
Yes; however, wouldn't most Kazakh Germans have still immigrated to Germany after the end of the Cold War in this TL? After all, wouldn't the much better economic opportunities in Germany outweigh any autonomy that they would acquire in Kazakhstan?
 
Wouldn't such a union/republic be Uzbek-dominated, though?

Yes, but to mess up the Soviet collapse, you need large non-Russian actors, and pan-Turkism are pretty much the only other actor I can imagine as alternative.

@David T suggesting of creating a German autonomous oblast in northern Kazahkstan could serve as a catalyst for the creation of the pan-Turkism as a opposition force.
 

CaliGuy

Banned
Yes, but to mess up the Soviet collapse, you need large non-Russian actors, and pan-Turkism are pretty much the only other actor I can imagine as alternative.
Hang on--are you talking about Pan-Turkic forces in Central Asia sparking a Bosnia-like war there?
 
Hang on--are you talking about Pan-Turkic forces in Central Asia sparking a Bosnia-like war there?

It's pretty unrealistic, but a messy Soviet collapse, especially one where the Russians doesn't use all the resources to keep USSR together in western USSR (Ukraine and Belarus) need a strong alternate movement in Central Asia. In OTL the Central Asian SSR was against the collapse of USSR, so we need something which create a conflict in Central Asia.
 
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