The history of Kazakhstan

Kazakhstan, the largest landlocked country in the world, covers a vast belt of steppe, desert and mountain between the Caspian Sea and China. For thousands of years it was a land of mounted nomads, from the Saka and Huns to the Turkic and Mongol peoples, while oasis towns along the Syr Darya and the foothills of the Tian Shan lay on the trade routes of the Silk Road. The Kazakhs emerged as a people in the fifteenth century, when their khanate broke away from the successors of the Mongol Golden Horde. Russia absorbed the steppe between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and under Soviet rule the Kazakhs suffered a catastrophic famine, while the republic became a place of exile, labour camps, nuclear testing and space launches. Independent since 1991, Kazakhstan has grown rich on oil and minerals under a strong presidency.

Stone tools in the Karatau Mountains and elsewhere show that early humans lived in the region hundreds of thousands of years ago. After the Ice Age, hunters and later farmers and herders spread across the steppe. At Botai in northern Kazakhstan, people of the fourth millennium BCE lived in large villages and relied heavily on horses; traces of mare's milk in their pots and wear on horse teeth have been read as some of the earliest evidence of horse herding, though whether the Botai horses were truly domesticated, or ridden, remains debated. In the Bronze Age the Andronovo culture, usually linked with early speakers of Indo-Iranian languages, raised cattle and sheep, mined copper and tin, and buried its dead with horses and chariots.

From the first millennium BCE the steppe belonged to nomadic horse peoples whose way of life would last until the twentieth century, moving herds between summer and winter pastures. The Saka, the eastern branch of the Scythians, appear in Persian inscriptions as subjects or enemies of the Achaemenid kings. Their chiefs were buried under great kurgans, and the Issyk mound near Almaty, excavated in 1969, held a young warrior dressed in thousands of gold ornaments, the "Golden Man" who is now a national symbol. Later the Wusun ruled the Zhetysu, the "Seven Rivers" region of the south-east, and the Kangju state the middle Syr Darya.

The rise of the Xiongnu in Mongolia from the third century BCE pushed peoples westward across the steppe, and by the fourth century CE groups linked with the Hunnic Empire had moved through the region toward Europe. In the sixth century a new power, the Göktürks, built a Turkic khaganate that stretched from Mongolia to the Black Sea, and its western half was centred on the pastures of the Zhetysu. Turkic languages, which the Kazakhs speak today, spread across the steppe from this time, carried by successive confederations: the Türgesh, the Karluks, and the Oghuz, who dominated the lower Syr Darya in the ninth and tenth centuries.

The south of the country was part of the network of caravan routes known as the Silk Road, with towns such as Otrar, Taraz, Sayram and Sygnak trading with Sogdian merchants, China and the Islamic world. The Tang dynasty extended Chinese power deep into Central Asia in the seventh century, but in 751 its army was defeated by the forces of the new Abbasid Caliphate at the Talas River near Taraz, a battle that marked the western limit of Tang expansion. Islam spread among the settled towns of the south over the following centuries. The philosopher Al-Farabi, one of the great thinkers of the Islamic world, is traditionally said to have been born near Otrar in the late ninth century.

In the tenth century the Kara-Khanid Khanate, the first Turkic dynasty to adopt Islam, ruled the south-east and the oases beyond. To the north the Kimek–Kipchak confederation dominated the Irtysh and the central steppe, and from the eleventh century the Kipchaks, known in Europe as the Cumans, spread across the plains from the Irtysh to the Danube, which Persian writers came to call the Dasht-i Kipchak, the Kipchak Steppe. The Sufi poet Ahmad Yasawi, who died in the twelfth century, preached in the town of Yasi, now Turkestan, and became one of the most revered figures of Turkic Islam.

In 1218 the governor of Otrar, a city of the Khwarazmian empire, massacred a trade caravan sent by Genghis Khan. The following year the Mongols besieged and destroyed Otrar, and went on to devastate the cities of Central Asia. The Mongol Empire divided the land among Genghis Khan's heirs: most of the steppe went to the descendants of his eldest son Jochi, whose realm became the Golden Horde, while the south-east fell to the Chagatai Khanate. The Mongol ruling class was gradually absorbed into the Turkic-speaking nomads and adopted Islam.

The eastern wing of the Jochid realm, often called the White or Blue Horde, was ruled by khans such as Urus, whose descendants would found the Kazakh Khanate. Its rival Tokhtamysh reunited the Golden Horde with the help of Tamerlane, but then turned against him and was defeated in campaigns that swept across the steppe in the 1390s. Tamerlane built the great mausoleum of Ahmad Yasawi at Turkestan, left unfinished at his death in 1405 and today a UNESCO World Heritage Site. After the fall of the Timurid Empire the steppe fragmented, and in the mid-fifteenth century the Uzbek khan Abu'l-Khayr, of the Shaybanid line, gained control of much of it.

Around 1459 two Jochid sultans, Kerei and Janibek, broke with Abu'l-Khayr and led their followers east into the Chu and Talas valleys, under the protection of the khan of Moghulistan. Those who left became known as Kazakhs, a Turkic word meaning roughly "free wanderers", and the founding of the Kazakh Khanate is traditionally dated to 1465. After Abu'l-Khayr's death many more clans joined them, and when his grandson Muhammad Shaybani led his Uzbeks south to conquer the Timurid cities, the Kazakhs took the steppe. Under Kasym Khan in the early sixteenth century the khanate stretched from the Ural River to the Irtysh, and his law code was remembered as the "Bright Road of Kasym Khan".

The khans ruled a confederation of clans rather than a centralised state. Over the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the Kazakhs became organised in three hordes, or zhuz: the Senior Horde in the south-east, the Middle Horde in the centre and north, and the Junior Horde in the west. The khans Haqnazar and Tauekel fought the Uzbek khanates over the Syr Darya towns, and Tashkent was held by the Kazakhs for long periods. Tauke Khan, who ruled from Turkestan in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, gave the khanate its customary law code, the Seven Rules, and governed with the support of the biys, the respected judges of the clans, among them Tole Bi, Kazybek Bi and Aiteke Bi.

The khanate's great enemy was the Dzungar Khanate of the western Mongols, heirs of the Oirat Confederation. In 1723 a Dzungar invasion overran Kazakh pastures and towns, and the flight and famine that followed are remembered as the Aqtaban Shubyryndy, the "Great Disaster". The Kazakhs rallied and won victories, notably at Anyrakay around 1730, under leaders including Abul Khair and the young Ablai, later khan of the Middle Horde. The Dzungars were finally destroyed not by the Kazakhs but by the Qing dynasty of China in the 1750s, in campaigns that killed most of the Dzungar people.

Seeking protection from the Dzungars and leverage against rivals, Abul Khair, khan of the Junior Horde, swore allegiance to the Russian empress in 1731, and parts of the Middle Horde followed in the 1740s. For the Kazakhs this was at first a diplomatic alliance, but the Russian Empire treated it as submission. A line of Cossack forts, including Orenburg, Semipalatinsk and Ust-Kamenogorsk, slowly closed in on the steppe, and Ablai Khan balanced between Russia and the Qing to preserve his independence until his death in 1781.

In the nineteenth century Russia abolished the authority of the khans, in the Middle Horde in 1822 and the Junior Horde in 1824, and governed the steppe directly. Resistance was fierce: the uprising of Isatay Taimanuly and the poet Makhambet Utemisuly in the 1830s, and above all the war of Kenesary Kasymov, Ablai's grandson, who proclaimed himself khan in 1841 and fought the Russians until he was killed in 1847. The fort of Verny, the future Almaty, was founded in 1854, and in the 1860s Russia used the steppe as a base to conquer the oasis states of the south, taking Tashkent in 1865 and reducing the Khanate of Khiva to a protectorate in 1873.

From the 1890s, and above all after the agrarian reforms of Pyotr Stolypin, hundreds of thousands of Russian and Ukrainian peasants were settled on the best pastures of the north and of Zhetysu, squeezing the nomads onto poorer land. A small educated Kazakh elite emerged; the poet and thinker Abai Kunanbaiuly, who died in 1904, is regarded as the founder of modern Kazakh literature. In 1916, when the tsar ordered Central Asian men to be conscripted for labour behind the front in the First World War, the Kazakhs and Kyrgyz rose in revolt. The rising was crushed with great brutality; tens of thousands died and many more fled to China.

After the Russian Revolution of 1917, Kazakh liberals led by Alikhan Bokeikhanov and Akhmet Baitursynuly formed the Alash party and proclaimed an autonomous Alash Orda government, which sided with the Whites in the civil war before it was dissolved by the Bolsheviks in 1920. The Soviet Union created a Kirghiz Autonomous Republic, renamed Kazakh in 1925, within Soviet Russia; its capital moved from Orenburg to Kyzylorda and in 1929 to Alma-Ata, and in 1936 it became a full union republic, the Kazakh SSR. Civil war and requisitioning had already caused a famine in 1919 to 1922.

Far worse followed. Under Joseph Stalin, the party chief Filipp Goloshchekin forced the nomads into collective farms and permanent settlements from 1929, confiscating their herds. Around 90 per cent of the livestock perished, and in the famine of 1930 to 1933, the Asharshylyk, about 1.5 million people died, roughly 40 per cent of all Kazakhs, by most estimates the highest proportional loss of any Soviet nation. Hundreds of thousands fled to China, Mongolia and other republics, and the Kazakhs became a minority in their own land. The Alash intellectuals were executed in the purges of 1937 and 1938.

Kazakhstan also became a place of exile and forced labour. The Karlag camp complex near Karaganda and the ALZhIR camp for the wives of "traitors to the motherland" near Akmolinsk held tens of thousands of prisoners. Whole peoples were deported to the steppe: Koreans from the Soviet Far East in 1937, Volga Germans in 1941, and Chechens, Ingush and others in 1944, many of whom died on arrival. During World War II more than a million people from the republic served in the Red Army, among them the Panfilov division formed in Alma-Ata, and factories evacuated from the west turned the republic into an industrial base.

During the Cold War the steppe was used for the Soviet Union's most secret projects. On 29 August 1949 the first Soviet atomic bomb was exploded at the Semipalatinsk test site, where some 456 nuclear tests were carried out until 1989, exposing hundreds of thousands of people to radiation. The Baikonur Cosmodrome launched Sputnik in 1957 and Yuri Gagarin in 1961. From 1954 Nikita Khrushchev's Virgin Lands campaign brought hundreds of thousands of Slavic settlers to plough the northern steppe, which yielded huge grain harvests but also dust storms and erosion. Irrigation for cotton in the Soviet south drained the Aral Sea, which shrank to a fraction of its size.

Dinmukhamed Kunayev, an ethnic Kazakh, led the republic's Communist Party for most of the years from 1960 to 1986. When Mikhail Gorbachev replaced him in December 1986 with Gennady Kolbin, a Russian with no ties to the republic, young Kazakhs demonstrated in Alma-Ata. The Jeltoqsan ("December") protests were broken up by force, with deaths and thousands of arrests, and they are remembered as an early sign of the national awakening that helped bring the Soviet system down. In 1989 the poet Olzhas Suleimenov founded the Nevada-Semipalatinsk anti-nuclear movement, and Nursultan Nazarbayev, an ethnic Kazakh, became party leader.

Kazakhstan declared sovereignty in October 1990, closed the Semipalatinsk test site in August 1991, and on 16 December 1991, during the dissolution of the Soviet Union, became the last republic to declare independence. Nazarbayev was elected president unopposed. The new state inherited some 1,400 Soviet nuclear warheads, which it gave up, returning them to Russia by 1995 and joining the Non-Proliferation Treaty as a non-nuclear state. A 1995 constitution, adopted by referendum, concentrated power in the presidency, and Nazarbayev ruled for nearly three decades through managed elections and a dominant party, Nur Otan; no election under him was judged free and fair by international observers.

The 1990s brought economic collapse and the emigration of millions of Russians, Germans and Ukrainians, so that the population fell from 16.4 million to under 15 million. Foreign investment in the giant Tengiz and Kashagan oil fields then brought rapid growth, and Kazakhstan became the richest economy of Central Asia. In 1997 Nazarbayev moved the capital from Almaty to Akmola in the north, renamed Astana in 1998, and built a futuristic city there. He pursued a "multi-vector" foreign policy, keeping close ties with Russia while building pipelines to China and the West and joining the Eurasian Economic Union. Dissent was tightly controlled: in December 2011 police opened fire on striking oil workers in the town of Zhanaozen, killing at least 14 people.

In March 2019 Nazarbayev resigned the presidency but kept the title Leader of the Nation and control of the Security Council, and his chosen successor Kassym-Jomart Tokayev renamed the capital Nur-Sultan in his honour. In January 2022 a sharp rise in fuel prices set off protests that began in the western oil town of Zhanaozen and turned into violent riots in Almaty. Tokayev called in troops of the Russian-led Collective Security Treaty Organisation, ordered security forces to fire without warning, and blamed the unrest on terrorists and an attempted coup; according to official figures 227 people were killed and nearly 10,000 arrested. In the aftermath Tokayev removed Nazarbayev and his relatives from their remaining posts.

A referendum in June 2022 stripped Nazarbayev of his special status, and in September the capital's name returned to Astana. The presidential term was changed to a single seven-year term, and in a snap election in November 2022 Tokayev was re-elected with 81 per cent of the vote. After Russia's invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Kazakhstan refused to recognise the annexations of Ukrainian territory while keeping close economic ties with its northern neighbour, and in November 2025 it announced it was joining the Abraham Accords. In a referendum on 15 March 2026 about 90 per cent of voters, according to official results, approved a new constitution that replaces the two-chamber parliament with a single chamber, the Kurultai, and restores the office of vice-president. Kazakhstan now has about 21 million people, roughly 70 per cent of them Kazakhs and 14 per cent Russians.