Gennadiy N. Lepeshkin: We had Russians and Ukrainians, and even ethnic Germans working for us. Kazakhs were few in number. They represented maybe only about ten per cent of all the specialists.
Interviewer: Why was that the case?
Lepeshkin: Well, because, you see, the city itself is small, and the population consisted mostly of Russian speakers. It was later, after the Soviet Union collapsed, that all the Kazakhs from nearby auls [villages] came here and so on, but before that, there were many Russians.