Kazakhstan

• 1. Introduction

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  Kazakhstan is the largest landlocked country on Earth, a place where you can stand west of the Ural River in Europe, then travel east into Asia without leaving the same nation. Spread across 2,700,000 square kilometers, roughly the size of Western Europe, it holds just 20.5 million people. That gives it one of the lowest population densities in the world, fewer than 8 people per square kilometer. Its very name carries the idea of open space. The Turkic root behind qazaq means free, independent, or wanderer, and the same origin gave us the word Cossack. This is a country whose ground was used for the first nuclear bomb test in the Soviet arsenal, and whose steppe launched the first human into space. How does a land of nomads become a state that supplies 60 percent of Central Asia's economic output? Why did its rulers keep a Turkic word for the homeless and the exile as the badge of a nation? And how did a republic that was the very last to leave the Soviet Union turn its oil and gas into political dominance over an entire region?

• 2. Horse And Steppe

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  The Botai culture, dated from 3700 to 3100 BC, is credited with the first domestication of horses anywhere. Archaeologists believe humans first tamed the horse in the vast steppes of this region. The Botai people drew most of their ancestry from a deeply European-related population called the Ancient North Eurasians, with some Ancient East Asian admixture mixed in. The Kazakh territory sat at the heart of the Eurasian Steppe Route, the ancestor of the overland Silk Roads. Long before any state existed, nomadic Iranian peoples held the land. The Saka, the Massagetae, and the Scythians dominated the territory, while the Achaemenid Persian Empire pushed up from the south. The Andronovo and Srubnaya cultures, ancestors of the Scythian peoples, carried mixed ancestry from Yamnaya steppe herders and Central European Middle Neolithic groups. The character of the land itself rewards the wanderer. The Kazakh Steppe covers around 804,500 square kilometers, occupies a third of the country, and is the world's largest dry steppe region. Inside that emptiness sit strange survivors. The Charyn Canyon runs 80 kilometers through a red sandstone plateau, its slopes and arches rising 150 to 300 meters, and its inaccessibility sheltered a rare ash tree, Fraxinus sogdiana, that outlived the Ice Age there.

• 3. The Khanate Years

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  Kerei and Janibek founded the Kazakh Khanate after the Golden Horde collapsed by the mid-15th century. According to Vasily Bartold, the Kazakhs likely began using their name during the 15th century, and the term Özbek-Qazaq first surfaced in the mid-16th century in the Tarikh-i-Rashidi by Mirza Muhammad Haidar Dughlat. The new state could field astonishing force. During the reigns of Burunduk Khan, who ruled from 1488 to 1509, and Kasym Khan, who ruled from 1509 to 1518, the Kazakhs reportedly brought 200,000 cavalry into the field and were feared by all their neighbors. Many historians treat Kasym Khan's leadership as the starting point of a distinct and sovereign Kazakh state, stretching authority from the southeast of the modern country to the Ural Mountains. Kasym Khan left behind a legal code remembered as The Bright Path of Khan Kasym, and Esim Khan gave his name to The Ancient Road of Khan Yesim. Both codes are wrapped in legend and neither has survived to the present day. Unity proved fragile. By the 17th century, Russian sources describe the Khanate split into three Zhuzes, the Senior, Middle, and Junior hordes, each with its own nomadic territory. The 18th century opened with both a peak and a crisis. After surviving the Dzungar Great Disaster invasion, the Kazakhs under Abul Khair Khan won major victories at the Bulanty River in 1726 and at the Battle of Anyraqai in 1729. Ablai Khan later balanced between Russia and China to hold relative independence, but his son Vali Khan abandoned that policy and recognized the supreme authority of the Russian Empire.

• 4. Under The Tsars

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  Sultan Kenesary Qasymov made the final attempt to restore the Khanate, proclaiming himself khan in 1837 and fighting Russian authorities until his death in 1847. His memory has been pulled in every direction since. Between 1917 and 1953, Soviet, Russian, and Kazakh historians reclassified him several times, from hero of national liberation to reactionary and back. The drama of his struggle even reached Western Europe, echoing in Jules Verne's novel Michael Strogoff, published in 1876. The empire arrived first as a line of forts. In the first half of the 18th century, Russia built a chain of forty-six forts and ninety-six redoubts, among them Omsk in 1716, Semipalatinsk in 1718, Pavlodar in 1720, Orenburg in 1743, and Petropavlovsk in 1752, all meant to block Kazakh and Oirat raids. Then came the settlers. From the 1890s, growing numbers of colonists moved into present-day Kazakhstan, especially the province of Semirechye, and the flow rose further after the Trans-Aral Railway from Orenburg to Tashkent was finished in 1906. About 400,000 Russians arrived during the 19th century, and roughly a million Slavs, Germans, Jews, and others in the first third of the 20th century. Competition for land and water bred deep resentment. The most serious uprising, the Central Asian revolt of 1916, brought attacks on settlers and garrisons and brutal massacres on both sides. Resistance did not simply collapse. In the wake of the Russian Revolution, the Alash Orda government formed in 1917 to secure Kazakh autonomy, and it represented the push for self-rule even as the Bolshevik Red Army moved to defeat White forces in the region by 1920.

• 5. The Soviet Century

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  On the 26th of August 1920, the Kirghiz Autonomous Socialist Soviet Republic was established inside the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, with its administrative center in the mostly Russian town of Orenburg. The name and the seat both kept shifting. In June 1925 it became the Kazak ASSR with its center at Kyzylorda, in April 1927 the center moved to Alma-Ata, and on the 5th of December 1936 it was raised to a full union republic of the USSR. The human cost of Soviet policy was staggering. Forced collectivization and repression of the traditional elite in the late 1920s and 1930s produced famine and an estimated 1.5 million deaths between 1926 and 1939, mostly from starvation and related disease. Thousands of Kazakhs fled toward China, but many did not survive the journey. The republic became a destination for deportation and imprisonment. Around 400,000 Volga Germans were deported here in September and October 1941, followed later by Greeks and Crimean Tatars. The ALZhIR camp outside Astana was reserved for the wives of men branded enemies of the people. Decades of privation and resettlement reshaped the population. By 1959, ethnic Kazakhs had become a minority at 30 percent, while ethnic Russians made up 43 percent. The land also became a stage for the atomic age. In 1947 the USSR founded a test site near Semipalatinsk, conducted its first nuclear test there in 1949, and ran hundreds of tests until 1989. Resentment finally erupted openly. In December 1986, mass demonstrations by young ethnic Kazakhs, the Jeltoqsan riot, broke out in Almaty after Dinmukhamed Konayev was replaced with Gennady Kolbin from the Russian SFSR; troops suppressed the unrest, several people were killed, and many were jailed.

• 6. Building A New State

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  On the 16th of December 1991, Kazakhstan proclaimed full independence, the last Soviet republic to do so. Ten days later, the Soviet Union itself dissolved. Nursultan Nazarbayev, the communist-era leader, became the first president and steered the country from a planned economy toward a market one through privatization and foreign investment. By 2006 the country contributed around 60 percent of the region's GDP, largely through oil exports, yet political reform lagged and Nazarbayev kept an authoritarian grip. He reshaped the map of power itself. On the 10th of December 1997 the government moved the capital from Almaty, the largest city, to Astana, a decision meant to assert control over the country's vast territories. The political system stayed tightly managed. In the 2004 parliamentary elections the pro-government Otan Party dominated the Majilis, while parties sympathetic to the president, including the Asar party founded by Nazarbayev's daughter, took most remaining seats. International observers, among them the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, said the elections fell short of democratic standards. After nearly three decades, Nazarbayev announced his resignation on the 19th of March 2019. His successor, Kassym-Jomart Tokayev, won the 2019 presidential election and took office on the 12th of June 2019, his first act renaming the capital Nur-Sultan in Nazarbayev's honor. The break came soon after. In January 2022, large-scale protests followed a sharp rise in fuel prices, and Tokayev responded by taking control of the Security Council, removing Nazarbayev from that post and consolidating his own power. In September 2022 the capital's name reverted to Astana, read widely as distancing the country from the former president.

• 7. Oil And Influence

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  Kazakhstan holds the 11th largest proven reserves of both petroleum and natural gas, the foundation of its regional weight. Development of petroleum, gas, and mineral extraction has drawn most of the more than 40 billion dollars in foreign investment since 1993 and accounts for some 57 percent of industrial output. The country ranks among the world's top producers of iron and silver, and by some estimates holds the second largest uranium, chromium, lead, and zinc reserves. The giants of its energy map carry distinct names and partners. The Tengiz Field was developed in 1993 as a 40-year Tengizchevroil venture, with Chevron Texaco holding 50 percent, ExxonMobil 25 percent, KazMunayGas 20 percent, and LukArco 5 percent. KazMunayGas itself, the national oil and gas company, was created in 2002 to represent the state's interest in the industry. The country has set itself a cleaner target as well. The Green Economy Plan, launched in 2013, committed Kazakhstan to meet 50 percent of its energy needs from alternative and renewable sources by 2050, a shift projected to add 3 percent to GDP and create some 500,000 jobs. Trade has widened the reach of all this output. Kazakhstan joined the World Trade Organization in 2015, exports 800 products to 120 countries, and has attracted 330 billion dollars in foreign direct investment from more than 120 countries since independence.

• 8. Balancing The Powers

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  The multi-vector foreign policy has guided Kazakhstan since 1991, seeking equally good relations with Russia, China, the United States, and the wider Western world. The country leases about 6,000 square kilometers enclosing the Baikonur Cosmodrome to Russia, the launch site of the first human in space and of the Soviet shuttle Buran and the space station Mir. The arrangement runs deep into the future, with the city of Baikonur held under lease to Russia until 2050. Membership has multiplied across the globe. Kazakhstan chaired the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe in 2010, was elected to the UN Human Rights Council in 2012, and on the 28th of June 2016 won a non-permanent seat on the UN Security Council for a two-year term. It has backed UN peacekeeping in Haiti, Western Sahara, and Cote d'Ivoire, and signed the UN treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons in 2018. The war next door tested the balance. Following Russia's invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Kazakhstan increasingly pursued an independent line, opening economically to all willing investors while avoiding excessive dependence on any single power. The most recent turn looks outward again. In November 2025, after establishing diplomatic relations with Israel, the Kazakh Foreign Ministry announced that the nation had become a participant in the Abraham Accords, framing the move as consistent with its balanced and peaceful foreign policy.