Kazakh Poles arriving in Poland through the repatriation program still feel a close bond with the country where they were born, and for many of them it is an integral part of their daily existence. Maintaining regular contacts with Kazakhstan (direct or mediated by modern means of communication) and the family left there exerts a constant impact on the repatriates, and shapes their way of life. In this article, I attempt to highlight the actions or lifestyles that depend on this relationship, captured in the course of field research, using the categories of the theory of transnationality in the context of research on migration movements. By placing these activities and analysing them within the trans-local social network operating at various levels, I present a number of factors stimulating and hindering transnational activities. One of the outcomes of these deliberations is diagnosis of how the repatriates’ two-culture potential is put to use.

The study of colonial discourse in belles‑lettres fiction in the context of the “great time” (M. Bakhtin) allows us to trace its connections with the historical and cultural past, with today’s realities and find a connection with future events. Particularly interesting in this regard is the Russian colonial discourse, which claims a special place in history that distinguishes it from the colonial discourses of other empires. The poem by the poet Pavel Vasiliev, who was repressed in 1937, reflects imperial ideologemes relating to the Asian frontier – the Kazakh‑Russian transboundary. The colonial discourse in the poem is built on the opposition ‘COSSACKS – KAZAKHS’, which is an implementation of the opposition ‘OWN – OTHER’. In the conditions of the frontier the image of the OTHER is transformed into the image of the ENEMY. The Cossacks, the defenders of the imperial borders, brutally suppress the revolt of the Kazakhs working in salt mining. They act under the slogan‑ideologems of defending the fatherland, the tsar, and Orthodoxy. The description of this suppression is distinguished in the poem by naturalistic details, which are not of the author’s imagination, but an image of information heard from others. The author conveys the attitude of the Cossacks to the murder of unarmed women, children, old people, as a revelry, fun, using the technique of the “carnivalization” of a terrible, awful event. The author shows sympathy and pity for the victims of the massacre and presents the Cossacks as ruthless killers and robbers.