Where did this holiday come from?
Republic Day was established in 1995, in honor of the adoption of the Declaration of State Sovereignty of Kazakhstan on October 25, 1990. It is believed that this declaration was the first important step towards complete independence from the Soviet Union.
The declaration stated that the Kazakh SSR retains the right to freely withdraw from the Union, has the right to act as an independent subject of international relations, determine foreign policy in its interests, exchange diplomatic and consular missions, participate in the activities of international organizations, including the UN and its specialized agencies. The document also separately prescribed a ban on testing nuclear weapons on the territory of the Kazakh SSR, the construction and operation of test sites for other types of weapons of mass destruction.
In fact, as Tolganai Umbetalieva, a candidate of political sciences and the general director of the Central Asian Foundation for Democracy Development, notes, when the declaration was adopted, the leadership of the Kazakh SSR did not assume that Kazakhstan would become a separate country: the state became independent only in 1991, when Gorbachev declared the end of the USSR.
Today, Republic Day (October 25) is celebrated on the day of the adoption of the Declaration of State Sovereignty, and Independence Day (December 16) is the date of the declaration of full independence after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.
However, in 2009, Republic Day was excluded from the list of state holidays. Officially, this was explained by the need to simplify the state calendar: so as not to duplicate the significance of Independence Day, which is celebrated on December 16. At that time, the emphasis was on the fact that Independence Day should become the main symbol of sovereignty and national unity, since formally the declaration of sovereignty did not define Kazakhstan as an independent player – even the name of the republic in the document was retained as "Kazakh SSR".
It is also important that Nazarbayev was actively building a personality cult at the time, and Independence Day was associated with his role in the country gaining independence. It was he who signed the Declaration of Independence on December 16, 1991, and the Declaration of Sovereignty was adopted by the Supreme Council and signed by Erik Asanbayev. Therefore, the abolition of Republic Day can be seen as the elimination of a historical date that is not sufficiently associated with Nazarbayev.
Tolganai Umbetalieva believes that the holiday of October 25 was removed in order to change the meaning of the events of December 1986 – to turn them into a holiday. She notes that initially the leadership of the Republic of Kazakhstan tried to place responsibility for the brutal suppression of the student protest in December 1986 only on Moscow and Gorbachev – but they failed to do so.
— Based not only on the recollections of the protesters, but also the military and security forces that took part, it became clear that the decision to suppress the student protest was made with the active participation and assistance of Nazarbayev personally. Then there was an attempt to blame Konayev, but this had the opposite effect — Konayev’s authority, on the contrary, grew very quickly. Therefore, combining the holidays was another unsuccessful decision to influence the interpretation of the events of 1986 and the role of Nazarbayev as the leader who led the republic to independence, — the expert believes.