This is the best tl;dr I could make, original reduced by 87%. (I'm a bot)

> Russian remains an official language in the former Soviet country, where even many ethnic Kazakhs - including government officials - speak Russian more fluently than Kazakh, although that situation has recently been changing.

> The clubs became instantly and unexpectedly popular as thousands of Russian-speakers in Kazakhstan decided to learn Kazakh, a trend Skalozubov and some club members link to the political atmosphere created by the Kremlin's war in Ukraine.

> "You began to think about how the Russian colonization affected local languages in the Soviet states," she told RFE/RL. "Before, we probably regarded Kazakh as a somewhat secondary language that you didn't have to learn. Now, I realize that Kazakh is important, that it is part of my life in Kazakhstan, and that if don't learn Kazakh I would be like a stranger here."

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