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Kazakstan
In the Soviet Union
In 1917 a group of secular nationalists called the Alash Orda
(Horde of Alash), named for a legendary founder of the Kazak people,
attempted to set up an independent national government. This state
lasted less than two years (1918-20) before surrendering to the
Bolshevik authorities, who then sought to preserve Russian control
under a new political system. The Kyrgyz Autonomous Soviet Socialist
Republic was set up in 1920 and was renamed the Kazak Autonomous
Soviet Socialist Republic in 1925 when the Kazaks were differentiated
officially from the Kyrgyz. (The Russian Empire recognized the
ethnic difference between the two groups; it called them both
"Kyrgyz" to avoid confusion between the terms "Kazak" and "Cossack.")
In 1925 the autonomous republic's original capital, Orenburg,
was reincorporated into Russian territory. Almaty (called Alma-Ata
during the Soviet period), a provincial city in the far southeast,
became the new capital. In 1936 the territory was made a full
Soviet republic. From 1929 to 1934, during the period when Soviet
leader Joseph V. Stalin was trying to collectivize agriculture,
Kazakstan endured repeated famines because peasants had slaughtered
their livestock in protest against Soviet agricultural policy.
In that period, at least 1.5 million Kazaks and 80 percent of
the republic's livestock died. Thousands more Kazaks tried to
escape to China, although most starved in the attempt.
Many European Soviet citizens and much of Russia's industry
were relocated to Kazakstan during World War II, when Nazi armies
threatened to capture all the European industrial centers of the
Soviet Union. Groups of Crimean Tatars, Germans, and Muslims from
the North Caucasus region were deported to Kazakstan during the
war because it was feared that they would collaborate with the
enemy. Many more non-Kazaks arrived in the years 1953-65, during
the so-called Virgin Lands campaign of Soviet premier Nikita S.
Khrushchev (in office 1956-64). Under that program, huge tracts
of Kazak grazing land were put to the plow for the cultivation
of wheat and other cereal grains. Still more settlers came in
the late 1960s and 1970s, when the government paid handsome bonuses
to workers participating in a program to relocate Soviet industry
close to the extensive coal, gas, and oil deposits of Central
Asia. One consequence of the decimation of the nomadic Kazak population
and the in-migration of non-Kazaks was that by the 1970s Kazakstan
was the only Soviet republic in which the eponymous nationality
was a minority in its own republic (see Ethnic Groups, this ch.).
Data as of March 1996
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