Kazakhstan, Republic of Kazakhstan

Kazakh: Qazaqstan, Qazaqstan Respublikasy

The word ‘qazaq/kazak’ is of Turkic-Mongolian origin and refers to a free, wandering nomad. First attested in Russian around 1395, this term later evolved into the designation ‘Cossack’, referring to a free border dweller in the military service of the state. In the Tsarist Empire, the people now known as Kazakhs were referred to as ‘Kyrgyz’ or ‘Kyrgyz-Cossacks’, whilst the actual Kyrgyz were known as ‘Karakyrgyz/Qara-Kyrgyz’ (Black Kyrgyz). It was not until the mid-1920s that the two ethnonyms were officially established.

Kazakhstan is a unitary state in Central Asia that has been independent since 1991. It lies to the north-east of the Caspian Sea and borders Russia to the north and north-west, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan to the south, and China to the south-east. With an area of 2,724,900 km², it is the second-largest country in the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) and ranks ninth in the world in terms of area.

The west, north and east are dominated by steppe and forest-steppe, respectively, with black and chestnut-coloured soils, whilst in central and southern Kazakhstan there is a considerably drier natural region characterised by wormwood, saline soils and semi-desert. The climate in this part of Central Asia is very continental, characterised by dry, hot summers and cold winters with little snow.

There is evidence of Turkic-speaking nomads living in what is now Kazakhstan as far back as the 6th century. At the beginning of the 13th century, the territory that is now Kazakhstan became part of the Mongol Empire ruled by Genghis Khan (died c. 1227) and his descendants. Ethnopolitical nomadic confederations such as the Kok-Orda, the Golden Horde and the Uzbek Khanate emerged. It is only from the mid-15th century onwards that the Kazakhs can be regarded as a distinct people.

From the 8th century onwards, Islam spread, initially in the southern regions, in historical Turkestan; by the 18th century, it had extended to the entire area inhabited by the Kazakhs. However, the Islamisation of the nomads often remained superficial. Pre-Islamic cults and shamanism continued to play an important role in their daily lives, and customary law (adat) continues to play a significant role alongside Sharia to this day.

In the 18th century, the incorporation of Kazakh lands and tribes into the Russian Empire began. It was only through a strong military presence, the construction of fortresses, administrative reforms and a targeted colonisation policy involving Russian and Ukrainian settlers, as well as by engaging local elites, did Russia achieve lasting control over the conquered territories between the 1820s and the 1860s. For example, the fortresses of Omsk (founded in 1716, now in Russia), Semipalatinsk/Semei (1718), Ust-Kamenogorsk/Öskemen (1720) and Petropavlovsk/Petropavl (1752) formed the so-called Irtysh frontier. As they advanced into the steppe, new outposts were established, including the later district and regional capitals of Kokchetav/Kökshetau (1824), Akmolinsk (1830) and Verny (1854), which later became Alma-Ata/Almaty.

During the Tsarist era, Kazakhstan did not constitute a political-administrative unit. In the north and east, the Akmolinsk and Semipalatinsk regions had formed an independent Steppe General Governorate since 1882, with Omsk as its administrative centre. In the west, the Turgaj region (with Orenburg, now in Russia, as its regional centre) and the Uralsk/Oral region were grouped together under the names ‘Kyrgyz Region’ or ‘Kyrgyz Steppe Regions’. Southern Kazakhstan belonged administratively to the Turkestan General Government: in the Syr Darya and Semirechye (Kazakh: Žetísu, Russian: Semireč’e) regions there, the Kazakhs constituted the majority of the population.

The Bolshevik seizure of power, which took the form of a coup, in November 1917 relied primarily on Russian workers and soldiers in towns and railway stations in Kazakhstan. On 26 April 1920, the Kyrgyz (renamed Kazakh in 1925) Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic was founded. Initially, this autonomous republic comprised the former Kyrgyz steppe regions. As part of the demarcation of Turkestan as a nation-state in late 1924, the republic was allocated larger parts of the Syr Darya and Siebenstromland regions.

As a result of the Bolshevik policy on nationalities, certain advances were made in Kazakhstan, for example in healthcare, the fight against illiteracy and socio-cultural development. On the other hand, the forcibly imposed policies of collectivisation and sedentarisation between 1929 and 1932 led to a human catastrophe that cost the lives of hundreds of thousands of Kazakh nomads (for further details, see ‘Demographic Processes’).

The sparsely populated territory, combined with the significant loss of population and the onset of raw material extraction in the wake of accelerated industrialisation, made the republic particularly ‘attractive’ as a location for penal camps (GULag) and exile. During the German-Soviet War from the summer of 1941 onwards, more than 200 major industrial plants were rebuilt in Kazakhstan following their relocation. 540,000 people were evacuated from areas of Russia close to the front line to Kazakhstan, and members of several ethnic groups (Germans, Ingush, Meskhetian Turks, Chechens, among others) were deported from their homelands in Russia to Kazakhstan.^[1] Minorities such as Koreans (who had previously been based in the Far East) suffered the same fate even before the war, as did Greeks from the Black Sea region after the war. The so-called ‘New Land Campaign’, launched in 1954, gave a strong impetus to further socio-economic development – particularly in northern Kazakhstan – whilst at the same time bringing about a decisive change in the ethnic composition of the population: In order to remedy the food shortage – and, above all, the shortage of grain – approximately 42 million hectares of new land were brought into agricultural use in the USSR by 1960, of which around 25.5 million hectares were in Kazakhstan alone. In addition to massive investment in transport and agricultural infrastructure, hundreds of new state-run farms, known as sovkhozes, were established. In total, between 1954 and 1962, approximately two million people, the majority of whom were of Russian and Ukrainian nationality, resettled in Kazakhstan.^[2]

From the early 1930s onwards, the Kazakh population increasingly became a minority within its own autonomous region and, from 1936, within the Union Republic; their language and culture were gradually displaced from the cities. Nevertheless, the national nomenklatura led by the long-serving party leader Dinmuchamed Kunayev (1912–1993) succeeded in to foster a broad intellectual class drawn from the ranks of the titular nationality – albeit one educated predominantly in Russian – and to fill key posts in the state, party and ideological apparatus with national cadres. The underlying dissatisfaction with Russian-Slavic dominance led, following Kunayev’s dismissal in December 1986, to serious ethnic unrest in the then capital, Alma-Ata. For the first time in Soviet history since 1923, numerous nationality issues were subsequently debated publicly.

As the USSR continued to disintegrate, the Union Republic declared its independence on 16 December 1991. In the wake of the post-socialist transformation, the first decade of sovereignty was characterised by economic and social decline, as well as unmistakable nationalist tendencies involving both overt and subtle favouritism towards the state-supporting nationality. Consequently, at least two million Russians, 700,000 Germans, 400,000 Ukrainians and tens of thousands of Tatars and Greeks, amongst others, emigrated to their historical homelands.^[3]

Steady economic growth began in the early 2000s: Kazakhstan is very rich in mineral resources and ranks among the world’s leading producers of raw materials. It possesses significant oil reserves around the Caspian Sea, as well as abundant coal and ore deposits. Other important raw materials include copper, chromium, lead, uranium ore and rare earths. The gross domestic product (GDP), which has grown steadily in recent years, is currently significantly higher than in neighbouring Central Asian countries and also exceeds, for example, that of the EU member state Romania (70th place in terms of GDP per capita, adjusted for purchasing power, as at April 2014).^[4]

Whilst extensive pastoral farming predominates in central and southern Kazakhstan, the soils in the rest of the country allow not only livestock farming – primarily of sheep – but also agriculture specialising in cereal cultivation. In the south, the population and agricultural activity are concentrated mainly in oases and along the few rivers. Here, over considerable areas, cotton, tobacco and sugar beet are grown using artificial irrigation, as are grapes and melons, and vegetable and fruit gardens are cultivated. Almost half of the workforce is employed in the three main sectors of the economy: agriculture (28.2 per cent), industry (11.6 per cent) and construction (7.3 per cent) (as of 2010).

Kazakhstan is a secular republic with a strong presidential system; it is a member of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) and international organisations such as the UN, UNESCO, the IMF, the World Bank and the OSCE. President Nursultan Nazarbayev, who has been in office since 1990, is often criticised for his autocratic leadership style and numerous human rights violations, whilst at the same time being praised for maintaining inter-ethnic peace in the country and for his course of economic reform, albeit not always consistently pursued.

The figures in Table 1 illustrate the numerous demographic changes that took place in Kazakhstan during the 20th century, which reached their tragic climax with the famine of 1932–1933: As a result of the policy of forced resettlement, around 1.6 million Kazakhs starved to death, whilst approximately another million fled abroad or to neighbouring Soviet republics.^[5] War-related migration flows, ethnically motivated deportations and economic development caused the proportion of the titular nationality to fall further. By the end of the 1950s, Kazakhs accounted for only 30 per cent of the total population. It was not until the early 1970s that, thanks to above-average population growth, the Kazakhs regained the absolute number they had last recorded in 1926. After 1991, this was compounded by the policy of repatriating Kazakhs living abroad (known as ‘Oralman’), with the result that by 2013 the state-forming nation accounted for more than two-thirds of the population. Owing to low birth rates and negative net migration, the relative proportion – and often also the absolute number – of members of Slavic-European nationalities is steadily declining. With a population of 17,353,000, Kazakhstan is one of the most sparsely populated countries in the world (6.4 inhabitants per km², as of October 2014).^[6]

Table 1: Ethnic composition in Kazakhstan, based on pre-revolutionary, Soviet and post-Soviet censuses^[7]

* The figures for 1897 are based on calculations by Kazakh statisticians, as there was no national territory or state at that time.
** Compiled from data on three separately listed peoples: Uyghurs, Tarantchi and Kashgars.
*** Under the name ‘Turks’ (tjurki).
n/a – no data available

It was not until the 1890s that a significant number of Germans began to live in what was then known as the ‘Kyrgyz Steppe’. These were mainly peasant settlers from the old mother colonies on the Volga and in the Black Sea region, as well as, to a lesser extent, from Volhynia and other parts of the Russian Empire. They arrived without any special status, as part of the Russian peasantry, in the wake of the general wave of migration and colonisation towards the peripheral regions of Central Asia. Before the First World War, approximately 70,000 Germans lived in the four steppe regions and the neighbouring provinces of the Turkestan General Government. Within the territory of what would later become Kazakhstan, this figure stood at around 45,000 people, concentrated mainly in the districts (ujezd) of Kokchetav, Akmolinsk, Pavlodar and Kustanai.^[8] More than 90 per cent of them lived in rural areas and were primarily engaged in agriculture. The 1917 Revolution initially had little impact on their settlement patterns and social structure. Owing to the deportation of the kulaks and an increase in emigration and flight (to escape the threat of arrest) from the European part of the USSR, their numbers rose to 92,571 shortly before the Second World War. Consequently, the Soviet Republic of Kazakhstan was already home to 6.5 per cent of the total number of Germans within the USSR at that time. In the Karaganda/Qaraghandy industrial region, most of the 14,818 Germans – who had not always come there of their own free will – were already living in urban settlements (50.7 per cent); they were mainly employed in the coal mining industry.^[9]

Far larger population displacements took place during the Second World War following the German invasion of the Soviet Union. Kazakhstan served as a reception area for exiled Germans from the Volga German Republic, the Crimea, Ukraine, the North and Transcaucasus, and from Moscow/Moskva. By 4 November 1941, there were already 349,713 deportees who, regardless of their professional or urban background, were permitted to be housed only in rural areas. The inhabitants of the German villages established in Kazakhstan before the war were, for the most part, allowed to remain where they were; only those from the towns and industrial areas were resettled. From the beginning of 1942, men – and a few months later women and young people as well, whether deportees or long-standing residents – were required to report for duty in forced labour camps (the so-called ‘labour army’, Russian: trudarmija). By 1 May 1943, 103,905 Germans had been mobilised here, the majority of whom were deployed outside the republic’s borders.^{[10] In} Kazakhstan itself, the Russian-German forced labourers were mainly employed as miners in the Karaganda coalfield (more than 8,000 people), on the construction of regional railway lines, in ore mining (Aktyubinsk) and in the oil industry (Guryev/Atyrau).

After the end of the war, Germans and other ‘punished’ peoples remained for a decade as special settlers under the authority of the commandant’s offices of the Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD). As persons with limited legal rights, they were severely restricted in their freedom of movement, choice of occupation and educational opportunities. In 1953, this applied to 448,626 Germans.^{[11] The} gradual improvement in their legal situation following the death of Iosif Stalin (1878–1953) reached its provisional peak with the decree of 13 December 1955: The lifting of the restrictions was made conditional upon the waiver of any material compensation and upon not returning to their places of origin.

In the wake of perestroika and the accompanying rise of national movements, the German minority also demanded similar conditions for the development of their national language and culture to those enjoyed by other peoples of the Soviet Union. Thus, the Republican Law ‘On Languages’ of 22 September 1989 declared Kazakh to be the official language; however, only 0.6 per cent of Germans were proficient in it, which increasingly restricted their education and career prospects.

After 1991, the young Kazakh state focused primarily on promoting the ‘state nation’ in all political, social and cultural spheres, despite the severe economic and social crisis resulting from the transformation of the social system. As many German families already had relatives in Germany, the gap widened for those who remained between the opportunities available there and their situation in Kazakhstan. Against the backdrop of the Russian Federation’s refusal to to support resettlement and the restoration of the former Volga Republic, the number of emigrants from Kazakhstan rose sharply, reaching a peak of 121,517 in 1994. In total, since the late 1980s, more than one million people have emigrated from Kazakhstan to the Federal Republic of Germany, including family members of other ethnic backgrounds.^[16] Tens of thousands of Germans, who were denied resettlement in Germany due to the stricter admission criteria, migrated to the Russian Federation and settled, amongst other places, in the German districts of Asovo in the Omsk Oblast and Halbstadt in the Altai Region. According to official statistics, there were 11,848 and 9,409 Germans respectively in 1994 and 1995 alone.^[17]

The 2009 census recorded 178,400 Germans in the country, or 1.1 per cent of the republic’s population, with regional concentrations in Northern and Central Kazakhstan. Germans live primarily in the Karaganda administrative region (32,787), where they make up 2.4 per cent of the regional population, as well as in the Kostanay/Quostanai region (27,959 or 3.2 per cent), Pavlodar (20,708 or 2.8 per cent) and Akmola/Aqmola (16,878 or 3.5 per cent). In the current capital, Astana (formerly Akmolinsk, known as Zelinograd between 1961 and 1992), 6,916 Germans were recorded, representing 1.1 per cent of the city’s population, and in the former administrative capital, Alma-Ata/Almaty, 5,743, or 0.4 per cent.^[18]

The minority’s social organisation, ‘Wiedergeburt’ (Rebirth), with its headquarters in the Deutsches Haus in Almaty and a network at regional and district level, endeavours – with financial support from the German and Kazakh governments – to offer language tuition and preserve elements of national culture.^[19] The association’s most important publication is the bilingual (German/Russian) weekly *Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung*, which has a circulation of 1,200 copies.^[20]

Many issues relating to the German minority in Kazakhstan in particular, and in Central Asia in general, still require more in-depth academic research, such as the relations with neighbouring peoples of Slavic and Turkic origin in everyday life, which have not always been free of tension, or the extent and forms of expression of conformist and non-conformist social activities in comparison with the titular nationalities and the Russians resident in Central Asia, as well as other ethnic communities. The ‘contribution’ of Germans to the modernisation of traditional Oriental societies should also be examined in greater detail. Another gap in existing research concerns the changes in lifestyle and national identity of an originally rural minority in an urban setting. The Karaganda region in particular – where, in 1989, 78.5 per cent of the 143,525 Germans registered there lived in towns and cities – lends itself well as a subject for study.

• Viktor Fast, Jakob Penner: Streams of Water in the Wilderness. The Early History of the Karaganda Mennonite Brethren Congregation. 1956–1968. Steinhagen 2007.
• Andreas Kappeler: Russia as a Multi-Ethnic Empire. Origins, History, Collapse. 2nd, revised edition. Munich 1993.
• Kazakhstan. In: Roland Götz, Uwe Halbach: Political Encyclopaedia of the CIS. Munich 1992, pp. 138–156.
• Robert Kindler: Stalin’s Nomads: Rule and Famine in Kazakhstan. Hamburg 2014.
• Viktor Krieger: Rhine, Volga, Irtysh. From the History of the Germans in Central Asia. Almaty 2006.
• Manfred Sapper, Volker Weichsel, Andrea Huterer (eds.): A Mosaic of Power in Central Asia. Traditions, Restrictions, Aspirations. Bonn 2007.

[1] The History of Kazakhstan from the Earliest Times to the Present Day in 5 volumes. Volume 4: Kazakhstan in the Soviet Period [History of Kazakhstan from the Earliest Times to the Present Day in 5 volumes. Vol. 4: Kazakhstan in the Soviet Period]. Almaty 2010, pp. 669–670.

[2] History of Kazakhstan (note 1), p. 672.

[3] The author’s calculations based on the results of the 1989, 1999 and 2009 censuses and his own research.

[4] Source: de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liste_der_L%C3%A4nder_nach_Bruttoinlandsprodukt_pro_Kopf (accessed 7 January 2015).

[5] Rudolf A. Mark: The Famine in Kazakhstan. Coming to terms with Stalinist crimes. In: Sapper, Weichsel, Huterer (eds.): Power Mosaic: Central Asia, pp. 571‒588.

[6] Kazakhstan’s population reached 17.353 million. In: www.inform.kz/eng/article/2716412 (accessed 12 December 2014).

[7] Calculated from: Malik Asylbekov, Asimbai Galiev: Social and Demographic Processes in Kazakhstan (1917–1980) [Social and demographic processes in Kazakhstan (1917‒1980)]. Alma-Ata 1991, p. 187; The Agency on Statistics of the Republic of Kazakhstan (ed.): Results of the 2009 National Population Census of the Republic of Kazakhstan. Analytical Report. Astana 2011, p. 20. Further data from the Soviet censuses are taken from the following portal, which is maintained by the Institute of Demography (Moscow): demoscope.ru/weekly/ssp/census.php (accessed 8 December 2014).

[8] Viktor Krieger: The German Presence in Kazakhstan during the Tsarist Era. Munich 1993, pp. 13‒16. Outside the future republic, Germans were to be found in the district and city of Omsk, the Akmolinsk Governorate and in the city of Tashkent/Toshkent.

[9] Vsesojuznaja perepis’ naselenija 1939 goda. Osnovnye itogi [All-Union Census of 1939. Main Results]. Moscow 1992, pp. 76–77.

[10] Viktor Brul’, Viktor Kriger (Viktor Bruhl, Viktor Krieger): Kazachstan [Kazakhstan]. In: Germans of Russia. Encyclopaedia. Volume 2: K‒O [The Germans of Russia. An Encyclopaedia. Vol. 2: K‒O]. Moscow 2004, pp. 8‒16, here p. 11.

[11] Brul’, Kriger: Kazachstan (note 10), p. 11.

[12] Brul’, Kriger: Kazakhstan (note 10), p. 12.

[13] Krieger: Rhine, Volga, Irtysh, p. 124; All-Union Population Census 1939 (note 9), p. 86.

[14] Vladimir Auman, Valentina Čebotareva (eds.): History of the Russian Germans in Documents (1763–1992). Volume 1 [History of the Russian Germans in Documents (1763‒1992). Vol. 1]. Moscow 1993, p. 210.

[15] Calculated on the basis of: Eduard Deibert: Summary of the List of German Prisoners in and from the Former USSR. No. 1 – No. 9 (1984–1988). Typescript. Bochum 2006, pp. 4‒14.

[16] Annual admission statistics in: Susanne Worbs, Eva Bund, Martin Kohls, Christian Babka von Gostomski: (Late) Resettlers in Germany. An analysis of current data and research findings. Bonn 2013 (Research Report, Federal Office for Migration and Refugees 20), pp. 32‒33. Data broken down by countries of the former USSR have been available since 1992. By 2012, 927,353 people had arrived from Kazakhstan during this period.

[17] Čislennost’ i migracija naselenija Rossijskoj Federacii v 1994 g. (statističeskij bjulleten’) [Population and Migration in the Russian Federation in 1994]. Moscow 1995, pp. 46, 48; ibid., 1995, Moscow 1996, pp. 43, 45. At the same time, 2,107 and 2,432 Germans respectively moved from the Russian Federation to Kazakhstan in these two years.

[18] Taken and calculated from: 2009 Population Census of the Republic of Kazakhstan. Summary Results [The 2009 Population Census in the Republic of Kazakhstan. Summary Results]. Astana 2010, p. 11.

[19] www.wiedergeburt.kz/index.php.

[20] See the bilingual website: www.deutsche-allgemeine-zeitung.de.

Viktor Krieger: Kazakhstan. In: Online Encyclopaedia on the Culture and History of Germans in Eastern Europe, 2015. URL: ome-lexikon.uni-oldenburg.de/p32626 (accessed 9 March 2022).