Empire Lost, Russian People Stream out of Central Asia

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ARCHPRIEST Yevgeny of the Russian Orthodox Church here can see the difference plainly in the suddenly sparse crowd at annual Easter services. More than a million ethnic Russians - and a half million ethnic Germans - have left Kazakstan in less than four years. The apartments they have vacated have created the equivalent of a building boom in parts of Kazakstan. The faces peopling the capital of Almaty, still a rich ethnic mix, have become more Asian and less Slavic. The population of the immense Central Asian steppe shows the tide marks of the Russian empire. When the decade began, there were more Russians than Kazaks in Kazakstan, thanks to a century of Russian homesteading; …