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Kazakhs, probably more than any other Central Asian people, show the impact of nearly two centuries of close contact with Russians. Unlike Central Asians to the south of them, Kazakhs look more to Russia than to Islamic countries for inspiration in the post-Soviet period. At the same time, Kazakh scholars and other intellectuals actively work to reclaim Kazakh traditions and distinctive ways of life, including the literary and spoken language of a people whose experience emphasized Russian culture, literature, language, and ways of thinking.
Urban Kazakhs of both sexes tend to wear modern clothing, but the women of remote villages continue to wear traditional dresses and head scarves. Kazakh-made carpets are a common sight, and less-Russified Kazakhs often decorate their homes with qoshmas, bright-coloured felt rugs.
Oral epics formed the main literary genre among the largely illiterate Kazakhs until the 19th century. In the 18th century, as a series of Russian outposts arose along the border of Kazakhstan’s plains on the north, Kazakhs added other written, poetic forms to their literature. Poetry remained the primary genre until prose stories, short novels, and drama were introduced in the early 20th century, before the end of the tsarist era in 1917. Abay Ibrahim Kūnanbay-ulï (Kunanbayev) in the late 19th century laid the basis with his verse for the development of the modern Kazakh literary language and its poetry. (Aqmet) Baytūrsyn-ulï, editor of the influential newspaper Qazaq, led the advance of modern Kazakh writing in the early 20th century. Baytūrsyn-ulï, along with Aliqan Nūrmuhambet Bokeyqan-ulï, Mir Jaqib Duwlat-ulï, and, later, Maghjan Jumabay-ulï, represented the cream of Kazakh modernism in literature, publishing, and cultural politics in the reformist decades before Sovietization set in after 1920. All these figures disappeared into Soviet prisons and never returned, as a result of Joseph Stalin’s purges, which destroyed much of the Kazakh intelligentsia. An early Soviet Kazakh writer, Mukhtar Auez-ulï, won recognition for the long novel Abay, based on the life and poetry of Kūnanbay-ulï, and for his plays, including Änglik-Kebek.
Kazakhstan has a number of modern theatres and offers Uighur, Korean, and Russian musicals, opera, ballet, and puppet performances. Cinemas and art schools, dance ensembles, and music groups are active, as are radio and television broadcasting, the last being especially important in communications with distant farms and villages. Reception from outside Kazakhstan, especially from broadcasting stations in nearby Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan and by way of relays from Moscow, enables listeners and viewers to follow programs from many sources.
Edward AllworthHistory
Kazakhstan to c. 1700 ce
The immense size and varied landscape of Kazakhstan exclude the possibility of a unified prehistoric culture covering the whole area. The Bronze Age Andronovo culture (2nd millennium bce) spread over much of Kazakhstan; it was followed by periods dominated by nomads, producers of the “animal art” later identified with the Scythians. One can only speculate concerning the ethnic or linguistic identities of these populations; whether or not they were Turkic, they cannot be directly linked with the Kazakhs.
In the course of centuries, various parts of present-day Kazakhstan were incorporated into different empires. During the empire of the Mongols (13th–14th century ce), most of the territory was part of the ulus (“polity”) of Chagatai. About 1465, under the leadership of Karay and Jani Beg, some 200,000 dissatisfied subjects of the Uzbek khan Abū’l-Khayr (Abū al-Khayr) moved into Mughulistān, whose khan, Esen Bogha (Buga), settled them between the Chu and Talas rivers. These separatist Uzbeks became known as Kazakh (“Independent” or “Vagabond”) Uzbeks, and over time a significant differentiation developed between them and the nonseparatist Uzbeks in their respective ways of life: that of the Kazakhs was more nomadic, that of the Uzbeks more sedentary.
During the late 15th century and throughout the 16th century, the Kazakhs were able to consolidate a nomadic empire stretching across the steppes east of the Caspian and north of the Aral Sea as far as the upper Irtysh River and the western approaches to the Altai Mountains. Under Burunduk Khan (ruled 1488–1509) and Kasym Khan (1509–18), the Kazakhs were the masters of virtually the entire steppe region, reportedly able to bring 200,000 horsemen into the field and feared by all their neighbours. The prevailing view is that the rule of Kasym Khan marked the beginning of an independent Kazakh polity. Under his rule Kazakh power extended from what is now southeastern Kazakhstan to the Ural Mountains.
Under the successive rule of three of the sons of Kasym Khan (1518–38), however, there was a partial weakening of the khan’s authority, accompanied by a trend, later to become more pronounced, for the khanate to disintegrate into three separate “hordes.” These were, from east to west, the Great Horde, in present-day southeastern Kazakhstan north of the Tien Shan; the Middle Horde, in the central steppe region east of the Aral Sea; and the Little Horde, between the Aral Sea and the Ural River. In each horde the authority of the khan tended to be curtailed by the power exercised by tribal chieftains, known as sultans, and perhaps even more by the beys and batyrs (the heads of the clans that were the components of each tribe). Nominally, the khans commanded a formidable force of mounted warriors, but, in reality, they depended on the loyalty of the beys and batyrs. The last son of Kasym Khan to rule the Kazakh steppes, Ḥaqq Naẓar (1538–80), overcame these obstacles and, having succeeded in reuniting the three hordes, embarked upon systematic raids into Transoxania, a trend that continued under his immediate successors down to the reign of Tevkkel Khan (1586–98), who even temporarily occupied Samarkand. By the beginning of the 17th century, the fragmentation halted by Kasym Khan resumed and became endemic; Kazakh central power was weak or nonexistent amidst a plethora of petty rulers.
From the 1680s to the 1770s the Kazakhs were involved in a series of wars with the Oyrats, a federation of four western Mongol tribes, among which the Dzungars were particularly aggressive. In 1681–84 the Dzungars, led by Dga’-ldan (Galdan), launched a devastating attack against the Great Horde. The unification by Teüke Khan (1680–1718) of the three hordes brought a temporary reversal in the fortunes of war, and in 1711–12 a Kazakh counteroffensive penetrated deep into Dzungar territory. Teüke’s achievements were not limited to war; he also was responsible for the creation of a Kazakh law code, an amalgam of Kazakh customary and Islamic laws.
In 1723 Dga’-ldan’s successor, Cevang Rabtan, was again on the attack. Aided by Swedish officers who had been Russian prisoners at the Battle of Poltava (1709) and found their way to these distant parts, the Dzungars launched a devastating invasion of the eastern Kazakh lands. The memory of this national catastrophe, the “Great Disaster,” has never faded among the Kazakhs. The next and last Dzungar invasion hit the Middle Horde, but—thanks to the skills of that horde’s khan, Abū al-Khayr (1718–49), who managed to forge a temporary all-Kazakh alliance—it was less devastating. The elimination of the Dzungar threat came in the form of Chinese (Manchu) intervention; in 1757–58 the Qianlong emperor launched two major campaigns, in the course of which the Dzungars were, for all practical purposes, exterminated and their land incorporated into China. For a time, Ablai Khan of the Middle Horde had shrewdly chosen not to take sides in the Dzungar-Chinese conflict. But, once the scores were settled, Ablai found it prudent to offer his submission to the Qianlong emperor. Then, in 1771, Ablai was confirmed as ruler by both the Chinese and the Russians. As a result of the collapse of Dzungar power, the Chinese inherited a vast territory that extended to Lake Balkhash and beyond, far into the Kazakh steppes.
The brunt of the Dzungar wars was carried by the Great Horde; the Middle and Little hordes fared better, partly because they moved westward toward Russian-held territories. In 1730 Abū’l-Khayr, khan of the Little Horde, swore allegiance to the Russian empress Anna.
Russian and Soviet rule
The reverses experienced by the Kazakhs at the hands of the Dzungars undoubtedly retarded the emergence of a unified Kazakh state and further depressed the prevailing level of Kazakh cultural life. They also rendered the Kazakhs even less able to resist the encroachments of Russia from the north. The advance onto the Kazakh steppe began with the construction of a line of forts—Omsk in 1716, Semipalatinsk in 1718, Ust-Kamenogorsk in 1719, and Orsk in 1735—which was then steadily advanced southward. The Russian advance into Kazakh territory was slow and seldom violent but ineluctable; it made full use of Kazakh internal divisions and dissensions but was, in its essence, the typical encroachment of sedentary agriculturalists into the lands of nomads. Russian occupation of the Kazakh steppe would prove essential for the conquest of Muslim Central Asia.
Some Kazakhs believed that the Russian presence might at least provide some security against Dzungar raids, and in 1731 the Little Horde accepted Russian protection, followed by the Middle Horde in 1740 and by part of the Great Horde in 1742, although its effect upon the Dzungars was to prove minimal. Finally, after a series of ineffectual Kazakh uprisings of which the most extensive was that of Batyr Srym in 1792–97, Russia resolved to suppress such autonomy as the Kazakh khans still possessed. In 1822 the khanate of the Middle Horde was abolished, in 1824 the Little Horde, and in 1848 the Great Horde.
Because of Kazakhstan’s incorporation into Russia, modern ideas found a more fertile ground among the Kazakhs than in the semi-independent Uzbek khanates. Russian schooling brought these ideas into Kazakh life, and Russian-formed intellectuals such as Chokan Valikanov and Abay Kūnanbay-ulï adapted them to specific Kazakh needs and created a secular culture unparalleled in other parts of Asian Russia.
The Kazakhs were onlookers rather than participants in the Russian Civil War that followed the fall of the tsarist regime in 1917. A Kazakh provisional government formed by the ephemeral Alash Orda political party existed only in name. In 1919–20 the Bolsheviks’ Red Army defeated White Russian forces in the region and occupied Kazakhstan. On August 26, 1920, the Soviet government established the Kirgiz Autonomous Republic, which in 1925 changed its name to the Kazakh A.S.S.R. From 1927 the Soviet government pursued a vigorous policy of transforming the Kazakh nomads into a settled population and of colonizing the region with Russians and Ukrainians.
Despite their nomadic rural existence, the Kazakhs were the most literate and dynamic indigenous people in Central Asia. But the collectivization brutally imposed by the Soviet regime resulted in a shocking decrease in the Kazakh population: between 1926 and 1939 the number of Kazakhs in the Soviet Union fell by about one-fifth. More than 1.5 million died during this period, the majority from starvation and related diseases, others as a result of violence. Thousands of Kazakhs fled to China, but fewer than one-fourth survived the journey; about 300,000 fled to Uzbekistan and 44,000 to Turkmenistan.
Kazakhstan formally became a constituent (union) republic of the Soviet Union on December 5, 1936. During the first secretaryship of Nikita Khrushchev, the role of Kazakhstan within the Soviet Union increased dramatically. The Virgin and Idle Lands program launched in 1953 opened up the vast grasslands of northern Kazakhstan to wheat farming by Slavic settlers, a program that, over the course of several decades, led to an ecological disaster (see Aral Sea). Kazakhstan’s significance in the Soviet period also increased through the location on its territory of the main Soviet space-launch centre and a substantial part of the Soviet Union’s nuclear weaponry and the sites associated with nuclear testing.
For a quarter of a century Kazakh politics were dominated by Dinmukhamed Kunayev, first secretary of the Communist Party of Kazakhstan from 1959 to 1986. The only Kazakh ever to become a member of the Soviet Politburo, Kunayev proved to be a masterful Soviet politician. Realizing that Kazakhs constituted a minority of Kazakhstan’s population, he looked with equal care after the needs of both Russians and Kazakhs. His dismissal in 1986 by the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev caused the first serious riots of the 1980s in the Soviet Union.