What Really Happened in Alma-Ata

By JAMES O. JACKSON

A startling bulletin was issued from the headquarters of TASS, the official Soviet news agency, just before Christmas last year: students had rioted in Alma-Ata, the capital of the Soviet republic of Kazakhstan, during the previous day and night. Cars and a food store were burned, TASS said, and townspeople had been "insulted." Never before had the Soviets, who blamed the protests on "nationalist elements," reported such violence so frankly and promptly. The revelation was seen as another sign of Mikhail Gorbachev's campaign for glasnost, or openness. Still, Western journalists have long been barred from Alma-Ata -- until last week. Flying to the city with eleven other reporters, TIME Moscow Bureau Chief James O. Jackson pieced together a firsthand account of the violence in Alma-Ata and its ambiguous aftermath. His report:

Few physical traces remain from last December's rioting at the place where it began, a bleak expanse of concrete aptly named Brezhnev Square. Three officers in a yellow-and-blue militia bus keep watch over the few cars and pedestrians passing through on an icy evening. Club-carrying civilian police auxiliaries patrol nearby streets where, on the night and morning of Dec. 17-18, mobs of Kazakh youths smashed windows and torched cars. In some parts of the square, new trees have been planted, apparently to replace those damaged by demonstrators.

But if the physical damage from the night of rioting has been repaired, psychological scars remain. "There was quite a bit of tension between Russians and Kazakhs afterward," said a Kazakh schoolteacher. Young ethnic Russians were openly resentful of the demonstrators and, in some cases, of Kazakhs generally. "They didn't like it when Kunaev got thrown out," said one Russian student. "They got everything without working, through their relatives and cronies."

Dinmukhamed Kunaev, 75, had ruled the republic's Communist Party for a quarter of a century until he was deposed and disgraced at a Dec. 16 plenum of the party Central Committee. His removal and the decision to replace him with an ethnic Russian from outside Kazakhstan, Gennadi Kolbin, party leader from Ulyanovsk province, set off the demonstrations the following day. According to officials in Alma-Ata, the demonstrators were angered not so much by Kunaev's dismissal as by the decision to replace him with an outsider, Russian or not. But the motives may have run deeper than that. Prime Minister Nursultan Nazarbaev, a Kazakh who rose to the premiership when Kunaev was in power, said that some demonstrators shouted slogans like "Kazakhstan for Kazakhs!" and attacked non-Kazakhs on the streets. "It was a manifestation of nationalism -- we are not trying to get around that," he said. But he insisted many demonstrators were motivated by resentment resulting from Kunaev's frequent assertions that Kazakhstan was the bountiful provider of meat, bread and steel for the rest of the country, with the implication that it was getting too little in return.

There was more death and damage in Alma-Ata than was at first reported in the Soviet media. According to Nazarbaev and Interior Minister Grigory Knyazev, up to 3,000 youths participated in the demonstrations, significantly more than the "several hundred" reported in the Soviet press. They also said that two people were killed, a student and an auxiliary policeman, not one, as previously stated. Both died from head injuries, but the officials did not specify whether the injuries were caused by rioters' stones or policemen's clubs. An additional 200 were injured, Nazarbaev said, and 100 were "detained." Of those, three were sentenced to prison terms of up to five years, and another 28 are "under investigation."

The size of the disturbances hardly measured up to recent student unrest in Paris, Seoul, Madrid or Shanghai. Nonetheless, they were deeply troubling to a Kremlin regime that rules over a vast patchwork of nearly 100 nationalities, ranging from the European-minded Lithuanians to the Asian-oriented Kazakhs, who are of predominantly Muslim heritage. The Soviet Union is held together by a ramshackle, Russian-dominated central bureaucracy that is ever fearful that nationalist outbreaks could spread. Moscow was therefore quick to punish not only those who participated in the riots but the officials who failed to prevent them.

The students were hardly back in their dormitories before Politburo Member Mikhail Solomentsev was dispatched to Alma-Ata to dress down party officials and order changes. "We are all apologizing," a young government official ruefully commented when asked how things had been going since the riots. "We are cleaning things up."

The cleanup is more like a purge. The republic's former leadership has undergone scathing criticism for inefficiency, nepotism, corruption and high living. Scores of officials have been dismissed from office, including many of those responsible for education. The minister for higher education was fired last week, and Kunaev's brother Askar was ousted as president of the Kazakhstan Academy of Sciences. The head of the republic's Communist youth organization has also been ousted. In addition, teachers are being reprimanded for not keeping students under control. But if the Kremlin was quick to punish, it was also quick to placate. The Politburo's Solomentsev paid highly publicized visits to stores, markets and housing complexes to hear citizens' complaints about food shortages and poor housing. "Before Dec. 18 there was nothing in the shops," said a Kazakh. "There were shortages of meat, milk, cheese, everything. But in three days, suddenly, the shops were full." A special effort was made to provide adequate supplies of good-quality mutton, beloved by the Kazakhs, who do not eat pork because of Muslim dietary rules.

Ordinary Alma-Atans were pleased with the change. Soviet officials might take pause, however, to consider why they were pleased. One young man at the city's central market, marveling at the newfound abundance, quipped that maybe they should have a demonstration every year.