Kazakhstan

The territory of modern Kazakhstan was inhabited from antiquity by nomadic peoples of the Eurasian steppe, including the Saka and the Massagetae, whose burial mounds and goldwork have been recovered from sites in the Altai foothills and along the Syr Darya. From roughly the sixth century BCE onward the region formed part of a broader steppe culture linked by trade with Achaemenid Persia, the Greco-Bactrian successor states, and the oasis cities of Transoxiana. In the early medieval period Turkic confederations rose to dominance: the First and Second Turkic Khaganates, followed by the Karluks, Oghuz, and Kimek, established the linguistic and cultural foundations that would shape later Kazakh identity. Caravan routes of the Silk Road threaded through cities such as Otrar and Taraz, drawing Kazakhstan into commercial and religious exchange with the Islamic world from the eighth century.

The Mongol invasions of the early thirteenth century absorbed the region into the empire of Genghis Khan, and after its fragmentation the lands fell largely under the Golden Horde and its successor, the Chagatai Ulus. From these Turco-Mongol fragments the Kazakh Khanate emerged in the mid-fifteenth century, traditionally dated to 1465, when the sultans Kerei and Janibek led their followers into the Zhetysu region. The khanate consolidated into three loose tribal divisions known as the Senior, Middle, and Junior Zhuz, which together defended the steppe against the Oirats and the expanding Dzungar Khanate. The catastrophic Dzungar wars of the early eighteenth century, remembered as the Years of the Great Disaster, weakened Kazakh independence and prompted successive khans to seek Russian protection.

Russian imperial authority advanced steadily across the steppe through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with the Junior Zhuz accepting suzerainty in 1731 and the remaining khanates progressively abolished by 1847. Tsarist rule introduced peasant colonisation, fortified lines, and administrative reorganisation, while a Kazakh intellectual movement, the Alash, emerged in the late imperial period. Following the Russian Revolution of 1917, Kazakh nationalists briefly proclaimed the Alash Autonomy, but Bolshevik forces incorporated the territory into Soviet structures. The Kazakh Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic was established in 1925 and elevated to a full union republic, the Kazakh SSR, in 1936. Soviet policies of forced sedentarisation and collectivisation during the late 1920s and 1930s caused a devastating famine that killed a substantial portion of the Kazakh population, while later decades brought the Virgin Lands campaign, mass deportations of other nationalities to the republic, and the establishment of the Semipalatinsk nuclear test site and the Baikonur Cosmodrome.

Kazakhstan declared independence on 16 December 1991, the last Soviet republic to do so, with Nursultan Nazarbayev, who had led the republic since 1989, becoming its first president. His administration oversaw the surrender of inherited Soviet nuclear weapons, the relocation of the capital from Almaty to Astana in 1997, and a market transition built on extensive hydrocarbon exports. Nazarbayev resigned in March 2019 and was succeeded by Kassym-Jomart Tokayev, whose tenure was marked by widespread unrest in January 2022, known as Qandy Qantar or Bloody January, after which constitutional amendments curtailed the powers of the former president and adjusted presidential terms.

Kazakhstan today is a unitary presidential republic with a bicameral Parliament, pursuing a multi-vector foreign policy that balances ties with Russia, China, the European Union, and the United States.