KazakhstanҚазақстан

The Kazakh steppe is a belt of grass, semi-desert and salt flats running from the Caspian to the Altai. For most of history the way to live here was to move: herders shifted sheep, horses, camels and goats between winter shelters in river valleys and summer pastures in the hills, carrying felt yurts on camels. The Saka, called Scythians by the Greeks, left gold-covered burials; the 'Golden Man' found near Almaty in 1969 is now a national symbol.

Turkic khaganates ruled from the sixth century, and towns grew on the southern Silk Road branch at Otrar, Taraz and Turkistan. The Mongol conquest of the 1220s absorbed the steppe into the empire of Genghis Khan's descendants. In the mid-fifteenth century two Chinggisid princes, Kerey and Janibek, led their followers away from the Uzbek khan; the breakaway became the Kazakh Khanate, and 'Kazakh' is often explained as 'free wanderer'.

The Kazakhs organised themselves into three hordes or zhuz — Senior in the south-east, Middle in the centre and north, Junior in the west — and into clans whose genealogy (shezhire) every Kazakh was expected to know back seven generations. You still hear people ask which zhuz someone belongs to, and seven-generation knowledge is part of marriage custom.

Pressed by the Dzungars in the east, Kazakh khans of the Junior and Middle hordes swore allegiance to Russia in the 1730s. Protection became annexation: by the 1860s Russia had forts across the steppe, including Verny, the town that became Almaty. Russian and Ukrainian settlers took the best land, and the 1916 revolt against conscription was put down brutally.

Soviet rule was harder still. Forced collectivisation in 1930–33 took the herds and banned nomadism; the famine known as Asharshylyk killed over 1.5 million people, a larger share of the population than in any other Soviet republic. Many survivors fled to China and Mongolia. In the late 1930s and 1940s the steppe became a place of exile: Koreans, Germans, Chechens, Poles and others were deported here, and the Karlag and ALZHIR camps held political prisoners, including the wives of 'enemies of the people'.

Two other Soviet projects left marks you can visit. From 1949 to 1989 the Semipalatinsk Polygon near Semey hosted more than 450 nuclear tests, and a protest movement led by the poet Olzhas Suleimenov helped close it in 1991. In the 1950s Khrushchev's Virgin Lands campaign ploughed up the northern steppe for wheat, bringing hundreds of thousands of settlers and leaving Kazakhs a minority in their own republic until the 1990s.

At independence in 1991 Kazakhs made up only about 40% of the population. Russian was the language of the cities, and many urban Kazakhs spoke little Kazakh. Since then emigration of Russians and Germans and a higher Kazakh birth rate have made Kazakhs about 70% of the population, and government policy has promoted the Kazakh language in schools, media and signage.

Russian remains official and is the lingua franca; people switch between the two in the same sentence. Kazakh is being moved from Cyrillic to a Latin alphabet in stages, a change that has been redesigned several times since 2017 — expect mixed signage. The state also invited ethnic Kazakhs from China, Mongolia and Uzbekistan (oralmans, now called kandas) to return.

Nomadic heritage is now celebrated as national culture: the yurt, eagle hunting (berkutchi), horse games like kokpar, and the dombra, a two-stringed lute. Many urban Kazakhs have never lived in a yurt, but they set one up for Nauryz and weddings.

Islam reached the southern towns early, but the nomads converted slowly, and older beliefs in Tengri, the sky god, spirits of ancestors and sacred places lasted alongside it. The poet-saint Khoja Ahmed Yasawi, who died in 1166, spread a Sufi Islam in Turkic verse; Timur built the mausoleum over his grave in Turkistan, and three visits there were once said to equal the hajj.

Today most Kazakhs identify as Muslim, many Russians as Orthodox Christian, and practice is relaxed for most. Visitors see tied rags on trees by springs, shrines to saints on hilltops and new mosques built with state or foreign money. The government regulates religion closely and bans groups it considers extremist.

Almaty's wooden Ascension Cathedral in Panfilov Park survived the 1911 earthquake; Astana's Palace of Peace and Reconciliation was built to host a congress of world religions. These buildings show the official idea of a multi-faith state.

In 1997 President Nursultan Nazarbayev moved the capital from Almaty to Akmola, a mid-sized town on the northern steppe, and renamed it Astana ('capital'). The reasons given were Almaty's earthquake risk and lack of room; the northern location also anchored a region with many Russian speakers.

The new city was laid out by the Japanese architect Kisho Kurokawa and filled with landmark buildings: the Bayterek tower (a tree holding a golden egg from a Kazakh legend), Norman Foster's pyramid and the tent-shaped Khan Shatyr mall, and ministries in gold and blue. In 2019 the city was renamed Nur-Sultan after the retiring president; in 2022, after the January unrest, it became Astana again.

For a visitor Astana is two days of architecture, museums and wide avenues, best in summer. In winter it is one of the coldest capitals in the world, and locals move between buildings in heated walkways and taxis.

Oil from the Caspian, uranium, gas and metals made Kazakhstan the wealthiest state in Central Asia. Nazarbayev ruled for almost thirty years, and even after handing the presidency to Kassym-Jomart Tokayev in 2019 kept wide powers as 'Leader of the Nation'.

In January 2022 protests over fuel prices in the west spread across the country and turned violent in Almaty; over 200 people died, and troops from a Russian-led alliance were briefly called in. Tokayev then stripped the Nazarbayev family of its role, amended the constitution to a single seven-year presidential term, and restored the name Astana.

The country balances between Russia, China and the West, hosting firms that left Russia after 2022 and serving as a transit corridor for trade across the Caspian. For visitors, the practical changes are visa-free entry for many passports, low-cost flights, a unified time zone and digital payments nearly everywhere.