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Soviet Union [USSR] Kazakhs
The origins of the Kazakh people and their name itself are
matters of historical debate. First emerging as an identifiable
group in the fifteenth century, they were a mix of indigenous
Turkic tribes, which had been in the area since the eighth century,
and nomadic Mongols, who invaded the area in the thirteenth
century. Originally they differed little from their Turkic
neighbors--the Uzbeks, the Kirgiz, and the Karakalpaks--but
political divisions and different economic development caused them
to enter the nineteenth century as distinctly different from the
other three peoples.
Russians had limited and intermittent contacts with the Kazakhs
between the mid-sixteenth century and the beginning of the
eighteenth century, when Russia began to exert control over them.
Harassed by their neighbors, particularly the Kalmyks, in 1731 the
nomadic Kazakhs placed themselves under the protection of the much
more powerful Russian state. Afterward, Russian penetration into
Kazakhstan was unremitting and included building a network of forts
and settling the land with Russian peasants. Despite a series of
Kazakh rebellions against them, Russian expansion continued, and by
the second half of the nineteenth century Kazakhstan was firmly
under Russian control. The tsarist policy of ending Kazakh nomadism
and of settling the land with Russians, Ukrainians, Germans, and
Jews continued. The new settlers received huge portions of the most
fertile land. An almost exclusively non-Kazakh class of workers
began to appear, and a budding industry, operated by the new
immigrants, began to grow. These developments threatened to destroy
the traditional form of existence of the Kazakh pastoral nomads.
The indigenous population's resentment against the settlers, as
well as against conscription of Muslims into the military, erupted
as a major rebellion in 1916 and, although quickly suppressed, set
the stage for the nationalist movement in Kazakhstan following the
February Revolution of 1917. Kazakh nationalists established a
national government and engaged in an armed struggle against both
pro- and anti-Bolshevik Russian forces. By mid-1919, however,
weakened by the struggle, Kazakh nationalists sought accommodation
with the Bolsheviks. In August 1920, the Kirgiz Autonomous Republic
was established for the Kazakhs (until the mid-1920s Russians
called them Kirgiz) within the Russian Republic. In 1925 it was
renamed the Kazakh Autonomous Republic and became a union republic
in 1936.
The Bolshevik Revolution and the Civil War that followed
further disrupted the traditional life of the Kazakhs. Many Kazakhs
left with their herds for China and Afghanistan. Almost a million
died from starvation in the famine of 1921-22. The rest were soon
faced with forced collectivization, and a continuous influx of
Russians and other people gradually reduced the Kazakhs to a
minority in their own land. Kazakh leaders, even Kazakh communists,
who protested these policies were purged or executed, first in the
late 1920s and then during the purges of the Great Terror in the
1930s.
In 1989 the 8.1 million Kazakhs constituted the fifth most
populous nationality in the Soviet Union. Over 6.5 million, or 80
percent of the Kazakhs, lived in the Kazakh Republic, by far the
largest of the five Soviet Central Asian republics. In fact, after
the Russian Republic, it was the second largest republic and had a
territory of over 2.7 million square kilometers. It was also the
least homogeneous of all the union republics. No nationality
constituted a majority of the 16.5 million people in the Kazakh
Republic. The Kazakhs, with nearly 40 percent of the population,
did not even have a plurality. Russians, with about 38 percent,
were the second most populous nationality in the Kazakh Republic.
From 1959 to 1989, however, the Kazakhs have shown a steady
increase in their share of the republic's population.
Simultaneously, the percentage of Russians in the total population
has declined. Ukrainians and Germans, the next two largest national
minorities, whose individual shares made up about 5 percent and 6
percent of the population, respectively, also declined from 1959 to
1989. More than 1.5 million Kazakhs lived in other parts of the
Soviet Union, with the largest concentrations in the Uzbek and
Russian republics.
The language of the Kazakhs belongs to the same family of
Turkic languages as the languages of the Kirgiz, the Uzbeks, and
the Turkmens. Kazakh, a mix of spoken Kazakh with Arabic and Tatar
elements, became a literary language in the 1860s. Until 1926,
Kazakh had an Arabic script; from 1926 until 1940, it had a Latin
alphabet; and since 1940, it has had a Cyrillic alphabet. In spite
of the significant numbers of Russians and other nationalities in
the republic, the Kazakhs have retained very high usage of their
own language. In 1989 about 98 percent of the Kazakhs living in the
republic regarded Kazakh as their native tongue. Of the non-Kazakh
residents of the Kazakh Republic, only 1 percent could converse
fluently in the Kazakh language.
In 1987 the great majority of the Kazakhs lived in rural areas.
Nevertheless, because of the large numbers of urban Russians and
other nationalities, 58 percent of the Kazakh Republic's population
was urban. Many large cities were scattered throughout the
republic. The capital city of Alma-Ata, for example, had a
population of over 1.1 million in 1989. Other large cities included
Karaganda (about 650,000) and five others having populations over
300,000.
In the 1980s, the Kazakh Republic ranked ninth among the
fifteen union republics in the educational level of its residents.
But the educational achievements of Russians residing in the
republic were considerably higher than those of the indigenous
Kazakhs. In 1970 forty-two Russians for every thirty-one Kazakhs
studied in institutions of higher learning; and in special
secondary schools the ratio was eighty-six Russians to thirty-six
Kazakhs. Kazakhs ranked sixth among all nationalities in the number
of students in higher education institutions and thirteenth in the
number of scientific workers per thousand.
Between 1969 and 1989, Kazakh membership in the CPSU was
considerably below their share of the country's population. In the
Kazakh Republic, however, their membership in the party was
somewhat higher than their share of the republic's population.
Kazakhs also held a relatively high percentage of the leadership
positions in the republic's party organization, with Russians or
other Slavs generally acting as their deputies. Kazakh
representation in the CPSU Central Committee nearly equaled their
share of the population in the Soviet Union.
Data as of May 1989
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