A historian on Kholmogorov linking Kenesary Khan's head to Kazakhstan's Latin script

Kholmogorov absurdly links the handover of Khan Kenesary's head to Kazakhstan with the Kazakh script's switch to the Latin alphabet. The head, he says, has not been handed over yet, so one may "answer" the Kazakhs' farewell to Cyrillic with a moratorium on the release of an object that is almost sacred to them. What connection there is between the two processes, I, as a historian, cannot for the life of me see. It is simply populism, and once again in a negative direction. A country, to the best of its understanding and the level of its officials, is settling its internal affairs and proposing a Latin alphabet for its national language. What have questions of handing over cultural treasures to that country to do with it, when they were agreed at the highest level, regardless of any other business?

The head of Kenesary, the last khan of all three zhuzes, is presumed to have been kept in Russian museum collections since the early twentieth century, passing from one storeroom to another. For Russia the object, if it has any value at all, has it solely as a unit of museum storage, while it is well known how important the return of the head of the last khan of all three zhuzes is for Kazakhstan. The very suggestion of withholding the skull because of any internal affairs whatever of an independent state is that vile communal-flat rhetoric: your children don't say hello to us, so we'll go and smoke under your windows. Where does so much querulousness in people come from? I think this conversation is even lousier than the business of endless petty grievances and, as a consequence, the ban on selling Turkish tomatoes and sleeping with Turkish men.