Mapping the Peoples of Kazakhstan

Between 1928 and 1958 the population of the Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic changed radically. Joseph Stalin’s collectivization drive of 1930–33 caused a famine that killed approximately 1.5 million Kazakhs. Approximately two million people were forcibly deported to Kazakhstan from the Caucasus, the western borderlands, and the Korean far east from 1934 to 1944. Nikita Khrushchev’s “Virgin Lands” campaign brought another 300,000 voluntary settlers to the northwestern part of the republic in the mid-1950s. Another one million people passed through the Karaganda Gulag camp complex. Many former prisoners stayed after Khrushchev closed Karaganda in 1959, because they had nowhere else to go.

In the late 1950s Khrushchev allowed many forced settlers to return home. In the 1960s, persecution of Dungans and Uyghurs in the People’s Republic of China pushed tens of thousands of new involuntary migrants into the Kazakh republic.

Between the famine and the influx of forced settlers, by 1959 Kazakhs accounted for only 30.69% of the population of “their own” republic, while Russians and Ukrainians made up 50.7%. Kazakhs did not become a majority of the population until after the collapse of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) in 1991.

Western scholars have had access to the population data for Soviet Kazakhstan for decades, but we have not looked at where the many peoples of Kazakhstan formed communities. This project explores the spatial dimensions of demographic change: did different nationalities predominate in different areas? Where did national enclaves form, dissolve, and move?

Soviet census data for 1926 to 1989 can be found at the  Institute of Demographics  attached to the Higher Economic School National Research University in Moscow. 

I am not using the earliest censuses, for 1926 and 1939, because they are not reliable. In 1926 nomadic Kazakh groups often evaded census takers. The Soviet government carried out a census in 1937, after collectivization and during the purges and mass arrests of Stalin’s Terror. Stalin thought the 1937 numbers were too low. He had the census takers shot and the data suppressed. The 1939 census came in with data that were more to his liking. By the 1959 census Stalin was dead and demographers were freer to provide accurate data. That said, no census is entirely accurate.

Russian demographers have organized the data in helpful and unhelpful ways. There are downloadable tables that categorize the population by sex, age, urban and rural habitation, marital status, and nationality.  Great! 

HOWEVER, if you want to know about the population structure of a particular republic, you had better know the names of all of its oblasts (counties), because the table does not tell you which oblasts are in which republic. There are no data on nationalities available below the oblast’ level.

Furthermore, while tables list the nationalities in a consistent order, the logic of that order is not clear. It is neither alphabetic, nor based on size, nor on region. You have to do a lot of poking around. The Soviets changed the names and borders of oblasts repeatedly through the surveyed period: in 1959 Kazakhstan had 15 oblasts, and in 1979 it had 21. I have added the data together to match the 14 oblasts on contemporary GIS basemaps as closely as possible.

In 1959 the Kazakh SSR had a total population of 8,810,945. By 1989 the population had grown to 16,464,464. Throughout this thirty year period Russians and Kazakhs were the dominant populations by several million people, but other nationalities formed significant communities (numbering more than 100,000 or 1% of the population). Ukrainians, Germans, Tatars, and Uzbeks were consistently in this category. Chechens numbered 128,853 in 1959, then dropped. Belarusians and Uyghurs surpassed 100,000 in 1970.

Despite the heavy hand of the Soviet state—with its labor camps, “special settlements,” and residence permit (прописка) requirements—population sorting on the basis of nationality did occur. In 1959, 52% of all Kazakhs lived in the six southwestern oblasts, 1,418,694 out of 2,704,119 people. Meanwhile 79% of Russians and Ukrainians (3,531,075 out of 4,470,045 people) were concentrated in the seven northeast oblasts and the capital city Almaty. In general, either Russians were the dominant group or Kazakhs were. Only in Almaty and Zhambyl oblasts did the two populations approach parity.

Kazakhs speak a Turkic language, and have always shared their territories with other Turkic-speaking groups. Some of these Turkic peoples, such as Tatars and Uyghurs, were already in the Kazakh republic when it was created in 1920. Others immigrated voluntarily, and others were moved in by force. The two biggest Turkic communities after the Kazakhs were Tatars and Uzbeks. The three groups were related, since they were descendants of the Turko-Mongol “Golden Horde” of the 14 ^th  century. The Tatars were unusual in that they did not form national enclaves, but spread pretty evenly across all oblasts. The 1959 census did not distinguish between Volga Tatars and exiled Crimean Tatars, but later censuses showed that the number of Crimean Tatars in Kazakhstan was very small. Uzbeks, however, concentrated heavily in South/Chimkent/Turkestan Oblast, growing from 12.6% to 15.6% of the population. They made up 2% of the population in neighboring Zhambyl, but were barely represented in other oblasts. I am including in this group the Tajiks, who speak an Iranian language but have lived in Central Asia for thousands of years. Culturally, they are very close to Uzbeks.

The Russian Empire and Soviet Union included many peoples usually considered European, who had been incorporated into the expanding empire or had immigrated voluntarily. In the 1780s and 1790s Catherine the Great annexed the north shore of the Black Sea and eastern Poland. These conquests added many Poles, Jews, and Greeks to the empire. Catherine invited Germans to come settle and farm the new territories. In 1812 Tsar Alexander I seized Bessarabia from the Ottoman Empire, adding the Romanian-speaking people now known as Moldovans. As Russia gradually absorbed Kazakh lands in the 19 ^th  century, a sizable German population moved in to farm the northern Kazakh steppes. In the Soviet 1930s Stalin deported dozens of peoples who lived near the borders of the USSR into the interior, on the grounds that they could betray the country to Nazi Germany when war came. After World War II, the Soviet Union annexed Moldavia and what had been eastern Poland, while imposing communist governments on the rest of Poland and on Bulgaria. Many of those who resisted Soviet conquest were arrested and sent to the Gulag camp system, to join earlier waves of deportees.

As the Soviet Red Army liberated the Caucasus and Crimea from Nazi occupation in 1944, Stalin accused Chechens, Ingush, Karachey, Cherkess, Kabards, and Balkars, as well as Crimean Tatars and Kalmyks, of mass collaboration with the Nazis. Hundreds of thousands of people were loaded onto freight trains and sent east, many dying of starvation and disease in the process. Even North Caucasians who lived elsewhere at the time were deported. They were dumped into “special settlements” in Kazakhstan and Siberia. These settlements were supposedly farming villages, but local officials had been given only a month to prepare, and exiles found far too little food and shelter available. Many more died: Aqmola/Tselinograd Oblast received 60,000 North Caucasian exiles in 1944, of whom 23,700 had died by 1949. The survivors were settled in small, dispersed communities to break up their solidarity. While all of the forced migrants to Kazakhstan suffered, the North Caucasians were especially cursed.

For more, see Michaela Pohl, “‘It cannot be that our graves will be here’: the Survival of Chechen and Ingush deportees in Kazakhstan, 1944–1957.” Journal of Genocide Research, Vol. 4, No. 3 (2002): 401–430.

After Stalin died in March 1953, thousands of North Caucasians, especially Chechens and Ingush, began to return to their homes. They created pressure that the Communist Party could not ignore. In 1956 Nikita Khrushchev formally allowed exiles to go back, with the major exception of Crimean Tatars.

Western travelers to Central Asia are often surprised to meet a robust Korean community. As Imperial Russia colonized the west coast of the Sea of Japan, in 1896 the state completed building the Trans-Siberian Railway, which ended at Vladivostok (founded 1860). Russian construction attracted large numbers of Koreans, who sought work or wanted to escape Japanese colonial encroachment on Korea. Gradually, they adopted Russian as their main language. Another significant East Asian population are the Dungans. They are ethnic Han Chinese who converted to Islam in earlier centuries. In China they are called the Hui. Dungans began to migrate into Kazakh territory in the later 19 ^th  century, pushed out by Qing Dynasty oppression. Their migration accelerated with decades of war in republican China.

In 1937 Stalin, fearing that borderland nationalities would betray the USSR, forced the entire Korean population to move to collective farms in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. According to the (suspect) 1939 census, there were 96,453 Koreans in Kazakhstan and 72,944 in Uzbekistan.