Kazakhstan's history: a steppe people outnumbered on its own land and back

Who held the steppe before the Kazakhs

People have lived on the land that is now Kazakhstan since the Palaeolithic. The Botai culture of the northern steppe, dated to 3700 to 3100 BC, is credited with the first domestication of the horse. Britannica places the Bronze Age Andronovo culture across much of the territory in the 2nd millennium BCE, followed by nomads who made the "animal art" later linked to the Scythians, and it warns that none of these populations can be tied directly to the Kazakhs.

Turkic-speaking groups spread across Central Asia between the 5th and 11th centuries and slowly displaced or absorbed the Iranian-speaking Saka and Massagetae who had been there before them. Medieval statehood on the territory began with the Turkic Khaganate of the mid-6th century; after it came the Turgesh, the Karluks, the Oghuz with their capital at Yangikent near the Aral Sea, the Kimeks and finally the Kipchaks, whose name was given to the whole western steppe as the Dasht-i Kipchak. Arab armies reached the south in the 8th and 9th centuries and brought Islam with them.

The Mongol conquest began after Khwarazm came into conflict with Genghis Khan in 1218. The west and north of the present country went to his eldest son Jochi and became part of the Golden Horde; the south went to Jochi's brother Chagatai. Under Özbeg Khan, who ruled from 1313 to 1341, Islam became the Horde's state religion. Kazakh oral tradition remembers the reign of his son Jani Beg as a golden age, and modern Kazakh historians treat the Horde as part of the continuity of Kazakh statehood. Soviet censorship had discouraged that reading: the historian Sanjar Asfendiyarov, executed in 1938, was denounced in the press for "replacing Kazakh history with praise of the khans".

The oldest building of national standing on the territory dates from the end of this period. Timur ordered the mausoleum of the 12th-century Sufi teacher Khoja Ahmed Yasawi at Turkestan, then the town of Yasi, and it was built from 1389 to 1405. Work stopped when Timur died in 1405 and the main entrance was never finished. UNESCO inscribed it in 2003 as a prototype for the Timurid buildings of Samarkand.

How the Kazakh Khanate was founded and divided

The khanate began as a secession. Two Chinggisid sultans, Kerei and Janibek, refused to accept the authority of the Uzbek khan Abu'l-Khayr and led their followers east into Moghulistan, whose khan Esen Buqa gave them pastures between the Chu and Talas rivers. Britannica dates the move to about 1465 and puts the number who left at some 200,000; the Wikipedia history gives around 1459. Kazakh historiography takes 1465 as the founding date. The people who left were called Kazakh, "independent" or "vagabond", Uzbeks, and over time their way of life drew apart from that of the Uzbeks who stayed: more nomadic, less settled.

Under Burunduk Khan, who ruled from 1488 to 1509, and Kasym Khan after him, the Kazakhs held nearly the whole steppe from the Caspian and the Aral to the upper Irtysh, reportedly able to field 200,000 horsemen. Many historians count Kasym's reign as the start of a separate Kazakh state, and the first Kazakh law code, known as the Bright Road of Kasym Khan, is dated to 1520.

Kasym's three sons, who ruled in turn from 1518 to 1538, could not hold the khanate together, and it began to split into three hordes, or zhuz:

• the Great Horde in the south-east, north of the Tien Shan
• the Middle Horde on the central steppe east of the Aral Sea
• the Little Horde between the Aral Sea and the Ural River

In each horde the khan depended on the loyalty of the sultans, the beys and the batyrs who led the clans. Haqnazar Khan, who ruled from 1538 to 1580, reunited the three and raided Transoxania; Tauekel Khan, who ruled from 1586 to 1598, briefly took Samarkand, and in 1598 Tashkent became part of the khanate. Tauke Khan, who ruled from 1680 to 1718 by Britannica's dating, united the hordes again and issued a second code, the Jeti Jargy, which mixed customary and Islamic law, and kept his headquarters at Turkestan. After his death, dated to 1715 or 1718, the hordes became separate khanates in practice.

Why the Dzungar wars ended in Russian protection

The Dzungars, a western Mongol confederation, were the khanate's main enemy from the 1680s to the 1750s. In 1723 they invaded the eastern Kazakh lands without warning, and the Kazakhs fled with what they could carry, abandoning their herds; the episode is remembered as the Great Disaster. Abulkhair Khan united the militias of all three hordes in 1726, and Kazakh forces defeated the Dzungars on the Bulanty River in 1726 and at Anyrakai in 1729.

The war turned the Kazakh khans toward Russia. In 1730 Abulkhair, khan of the Little Horde, swore allegiance to the Empress Anna, and the Little Horde accepted Russian protection in 1731, the Middle Horde in 1740 and part of the Great Horde in 1742. Britannica notes that the protection did little against the Dzungars. Russia had already built a line of forts along the steppe edge, at Omsk in 1716, Semipalatinsk in 1718, Ust-Kamenogorsk in 1719 and Orsk in 1735, and moved it south over the following decades.

The Dzungar threat was ended by China. The Qing campaigns of the 1750s destroyed the Dzungar Khanate as a political entity, and its land, reaching to Lake Balkhash, passed to the Qing. Ablai Khan of the Middle Horde had kept out of that war, and in 1771 both the Chinese and the Russians confirmed him as ruler. He was the last khan whose authority was recognised across the whole steppe.

How Russia absorbed the steppe

Russia abolished the khans one horde at a time: the Middle Horde in 1822, the Little Horde in 1824 and the Great Horde in 1848. Resistance came in a series of revolts: Sultan Qasym's in 1824 to 1827, the rising led by Isatay Taymanuly and Makhambet Utemisuly in 1836 to 1838, and the longest, by Kenesary Qasymov, who proclaimed himself khan in 1837 and fought Russian forces until his death in 1847. Historians have called Kenesary both a national hero and a reactionary, depending on the decade they wrote in.

From the 1890s the land itself changed hands. About 400,000 Russians had settled on the steppe during the 19th century, and about 1,000,000 Slavs, Germans, Jews and others followed in the first third of the 20th. The Trans-Aral Railway between Orenburg and Tashkent opened in 1906, and between 1906 and 1912 the Stolypin reforms created more than half a million Russian farms on grazing land and scarce water. When the tsar ordered Central Asians conscripted into the imperial army in July 1916, the steppe rose; the revolt was suppressed by the end of the year, thousands of Kazakhs were killed and thousands more fled to China and Mongolia.

Russian rule also brought schools, and a Kazakh intelligentsia came out of them. Shoqan Walikhanov and the poet Abai Qunanbayuly adapted Russian and European ideas to Kazakh life in the 19th century, and in the early 20th Ahmet Baitursynuly's newspaper Qazaq carried a modern Kazakh literature. Members of that circle formed the Alash party, and in 1917 its Alash Orda government sought Kazakh autonomy and, in Britannica's words, existed only in name. The Red Army had taken the region by 1920.

What Soviet rule did to the Kazakh population

The Soviet state created the Kirghiz Autonomous Socialist Soviet Republic on 26 August 1920, inside the Russian republic and with its capital at Orenburg. It was renamed the Kazak ASSR in 1925, when Orenburg was returned to Russia and the capital moved to Kyzylorda and then to Alma-Ata. On 5 December 1936 it became a full union republic, the Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic, of 2,717,300 square kilometres.

How the famine emptied the steppe

From 1927 Moscow set out to settle the nomads, and from 1929 it forced them onto collective farms. Herders slaughtered their animals rather than surrender them, and the famine that followed, known in Kazakh as Asharshylyk, is dated to 1930 to 1933. Estimates of the dead differ by source: between 1 and 2 million in one account, and more than 1.5 million between 1926 and 1939 in Britannica's. The census counted 3.6 million Kazakhs in 1926 and 2.3 million in 1939. Thousands fled to China, and Britannica records that fewer than a quarter survived the crossing; about 300,000 went to Uzbekistan and 44,000 to Turkmenistan.

Who was sent to Kazakhstan

The republic then became a destination for people Moscow wanted moved. More than 170,000 Koreans were deported from the Russian Far East to the Kazakh and Uzbek republics in 1937. About 400,000 Volga Germans followed in September and October 1941, and later Greeks and Crimean Tatars. Over one million prisoners passed through the Karaganda labour camp, Karlag, between 1931 and 1959. At ALZhIR, outside the present capital, about 8,000 women served sentences in a camp kept for the wives of men declared traitors.

In 1953 Nikita Khrushchev launched the Virgin Lands campaign to plough the northern grasslands for wheat, and Russians and Ukrainians arrived to farm them. By 1959 Kazakhs made up 30% of the republic's population and Russians 43%. Britannica records that by 1989 Kazakhs again slightly outnumbered Russians.

What the Soviet state built on the steppe

Two Soviet installations made the republic part of the arms race. The Semipalatinsk test site in the north-east was founded in 1947, and the first Soviet nuclear bomb was exploded there on 29 August 1949; hundreds of tests followed until 1989, and the site was closed in 1991. The Baikonur Cosmodrome, built in the 1950s, launched Yuri Gagarin's Vostok 1 in April 1961.

Dinmukhamed Kunayev led the Communist Party of Kazakhstan from 1959 to 1986. When Moscow replaced him with Gennady Kolbin, a Russian from Ulyanovsk, students demonstrated in Alma-Ata from 16 to 19 December 1986. The protests, remembered as Jeltoqsan, were put down by force; accounts of the number killed differ widely.

How Kazakhstan became independent last

Kazakhstan declared its sovereignty within the Soviet Union on 25 October 1990. Nursultan Nazarbayev, first secretary of the republic's party since 1989, argued through 1991 for keeping a reformed union, on the view that its economies were too intertwined to survive apart, while he pressed Moscow to give up control of the republic's mineral resources; Moscow did so in June 1991. After the failed coup in Moscow in August, the republic was renamed the Republic of Kazakhstan on 10 December 1991 and declared independence on 16 December, the fifth anniversary of Jeltoqsan. It was the last Soviet republic to do so. The Alma-Ata Protocol, signed in the city on 21 December 1991, founded the Commonwealth of Independent States, and the United Nations admitted Kazakhstan on 2 March 1992.

A first constitution was adopted on 28 January 1993 and replaced in 1995. In December 1994 Kazakhstan signed the Budapest Memorandum, with Russia, the United Kingdom and the United States as guarantors, and gave up the Soviet nuclear warheads on its soil. The Supreme Council voted on 6 July 1994 to move the capital north from Almaty to Aqmola; the move took place in 1997, and in May 1998 the city was renamed Astana.

Nazarbayev was president from 1991 to 2019. Britannica describes a leadership that began restrained and grew increasingly authoritarian: a 2007 amendment exempted him personally from the two-term limit, and he was re-elected in 2011 with more than 95% and in 2015 with nearly 98%. Oil workers in Zhanaozen struck over pay in May 2011, and on 16 December 2011 police opened fire during a riot in the town, killing 17 people. Nazarbayev resigned on 19 March 2019. His successor renamed the capital Nur-Sultan the next day; the name was changed back to Astana in September 2022.

What changed after the January unrest

At the start of 2022 the government ended price caps on liquefied petroleum gas and its price doubled. Protests began in Zhanaozen on 2 January and spread across the country; in Almaty demonstrators stormed and set fire to government buildings. On 6 January forces of the Collective Security Treaty Organization were deployed in Kazakhstan, the first time the alliance had intervened in a member state. Nazarbayev was removed as head of the Security Council the same month.

A referendum on 5 June 2022 amended 33 of the 98 articles of the 1995 constitution, and a decree of 17 September 2022 limited presidents to a single seven-year term. Four years later the constitution itself was replaced. A referendum on 15 March 2026 approved a new text with 87.15% of the vote on a turnout of about 73%. It came into force on 1 July 2026, abolished the two-chamber parliament in favour of a single chamber, the Kurultai, restored the office of vice president, which had been abolished in 1995, and made 15 March Constitution Day. The first Kurultai was elected on 23 August 2026; Kazakhstan: politics covers how the new institutions work.

The new text also changed the status of Russian, from a language used on a par with Kazakh to one used alongside it, according to the Caspian Policy Center's reading, and officials are to provide information in Russian on request. The Kazakh share of the population has kept rising since: 70.4% at the 2021 census and 71.5% in 2026.