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WEEKLY NEWSLETTER
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Kazakstan
Index
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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