Who ruled Almaty?

Almaty lies on the northern foot of the Trans-Ili Alatau, a range of the Tian Shan, where snow-fed rivers spill onto the steppe of south-eastern Kazakhstan. The well-watered slopes made it a natural oasis for farmers and a waystation for caravans, and the wild apple forests of the surrounding hills, thought to include the ancestors of the domestic apple, are traditionally linked to its name, from the Kazakh word for apple. Its modern history is short and dramatic: a Russian frontier fort, twice flattened by earthquakes, became the Soviet capital of Kazakhstan and is still the country's largest city.

In the first millennium BCE the foothills were home to the Saka, nomadic horsemen related to the Scythians, whose burial mounds dot the region; the most famous, the Issyk kurgan east of the city, yielded the gold-covered "Golden Man". Later the Wusun and a succession of Turkic peoples held the area. By the tenth century a town stood here on a northern branch of the Silk Road, and coins struck under the name Almatu in the thirteenth century show that it had a mint. The region passed from the Qara Khitai to the Mongols in 1218 and then to the Chagatai Khanate and its successor Moghulistan, but the town itself declined and had disappeared by the later Middle Ages.

The plain then belonged to Kazakh nomads of the Senior Horde within the Kazakh Khanate. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries they fought long wars against the Dzungar Khanate, and after the Qing destroyed the Dzungars in the 1750s the region lay on the uncertain fringe between Qing China, the Khanate of Kokand and the advancing Russians.

In 1854 the Russian Empire built a fortification on the Malaya Almatinka river, soon named Verny, as a base for its push into Central Asia. Cossacks and peasant settlers followed, and the town became the centre of the Semirechye region. Earthquakes struck in 1887 and again in January 1911, when the Kebin earthquake brought down most brick buildings; a wooden cathedral that survived the second quake still stands.

Soviet power was established in 1918, and in 1921 the town was renamed Alma-Ata. The Turkestan-Siberia railway reached it around 1930, and the capital of the Kazakh autonomous republic moved there from Kyzylorda in 1929. In 1928 and 1929 the city briefly held the exiled Leon Trotsky. During the Second World War factories, institutes and film studios were evacuated there from the European part of the Soviet Union, and the post-war decades brought broad avenues, earthquake-resistant blocks and a large Russian population.

In December 1986 young Kazakhs demonstrated in the main square after Moscow replaced the long-serving Kazakh party leader Dinmukhamed Kunayev with a Russian outsider. The protests, known as Jeltoqsan ("December"), were suppressed by force and are often counted among the first signs of the Soviet collapse. In December 1991 leaders of eleven former Soviet republics met in the city to sign the Alma-Ata Protocol, confirming the end of the USSR.

Under independence the city took the Kazakh form of its name, Almaty, in 1993, but in 1997 the government moved the capital north to Akmola, now Astana. Almaty kept its role as the country's financial and cultural centre. In January 2022 nationwide unrest turned violent in the city, with government buildings burned and many killed before order was restored. With more than two million people, Almaty remains Kazakhstan's largest city.