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1936–1991 | |||||||||
Flag (1953–1991) State emblem (1978–1991) | |||||||||
Motto: "Барлық елдердің пролетарлары, бірігіңдер!" "Barlyq elderdıñ proletarlary, bırıgıñder!"(transliteration) "Proletarians of all countries, unite!" | |||||||||
Anthem: "Қазақ Советтік Социалистік Республикасының мемлекеттік гимны" "State Anthem of the Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic" | |||||||||
Status | Soviet socialist republic | ||||||||
Capital | Alma-Ata | ||||||||
Largest cities | Karaganda Pavlodar Shymkent Semipalatinsk Nikolsk | ||||||||
Official languages | Kazakh · Russian | ||||||||
Minority languages | Uzbek · Uyghur · Tatar · Kyrgyz · Azerbaijani · Korean | ||||||||
Religion | State atheism | ||||||||
Demonym(s) | Kazakh Soviet | ||||||||
Government | Unitary Marxist-Leninist one-party soviet republic (1936–1990) Unitary presidential republic (1990–1991) | ||||||||
First Secretary | |||||||||
• 1936–1938 (first) | Levon Mirzoyan | ||||||||
• 1991 (last) [2] | Nursultan Nazarbayev | ||||||||
Head of state | |||||||||
• 1936–1937 (first) | Ukakbai Zeldirbayuly K. | ||||||||
• 1990 (last) | Nursultan Nazarbayev | ||||||||
Head of government | |||||||||
• 1936–1937 (first) | Uraz Isayev | ||||||||
• 1991 (Last) | Sergey Tereshchenko | ||||||||
Legislature | Supreme Soviet | ||||||||
History | |||||||||
• Elevation to a Union Republic | 5 December 1936 | ||||||||
16 December 1986 | |||||||||
• Sovereignty declared | 25 October 1990 | ||||||||
• Renamed Republic of Kazakhstan | 10 December 1991 | ||||||||
• Independence declared | 16 December 1991 | ||||||||
• Independence recognised | 26 December 1991 | ||||||||
HDI (1991) | 0.684 medium | ||||||||
Currency | Soviet rouble (Rbl) (SUR) | ||||||||
Time zone | (UTC+4 to +6) | ||||||||
Calling code | +7 31/32/330/33622 | ||||||||
ISO 3166 code | SU | ||||||||
Internet TLD | .su | ||||||||
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Today part of | Kazakhstan |
Eastern Bloc |
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History of Kazakhstan |
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The Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic, also known as Soviet Kazakhstan, the Kazakh SSR, KaSSR, or simply Kazakhstan, was one of the transcontinental constituent republics of the Soviet Union (USSR) from 1936 to 1991. Located in northern Central Asia, it was created on 5 December 1936 from the Kazakh ASSR, an autonomous republic of the Russian SFSR.
At 2,717,300 square kilometres (1,049,200 sq mi) in area, it was the second-largest republic in the USSR, after the Russian SFSR. Its capital was Alma-Ata (today known as Almaty). During its existence as a Soviet Socialist Republic, it was ruled by the Communist Party of the Kazakh SSR (QKP).
On 25 October 1990, the Supreme Soviet of the Kazakh SSR declared its sovereignty on its soil. QKP first secretary Nursultan Nazarbayev was elected president in April of that year – a role he remained in until 2019.
The Kazakh SSR was renamed the Republic of Kazakhstan on 10 December 1991, which declared its independence six days later, as the last republic to secede from the USSR on 16 December 1991. The Soviet Union was officially dissolved on 26 December 1991 by the Soviet of the Republics. The Republic of Kazakhstan, the legal successor to the Kazakh SSR, was admitted to the United Nations on 2 March 1992.
The republic was named after the Kazakh people, Turkic-speaking former nomads who sustained a powerful khanate in the region before Russian and later Soviet domination.
Established on 26 August 1920, it was initially called Kirghiz ASSR (Kirghiz Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic) and was a part of the Russian SFSR. On 15–19 April 1925, it was renamed Kazak ASSR (subsequently Kazakh ASSR) and on 5 December 1936 it was elevated to the status of a Union-level republic, Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic.
In September 1920, the Ninth Soviet Congress of Turkestan called for the deportation of illegal settler colonists in the Northern parts of the country. [3] The proposed land reform began in 1921 and lasted until 1927,targeting Russian settlers, Ukrainians and Cossacks in the region and from 1920 to 1922, Kazakhstan's Russian population dropped from approximately 2.7 to 2.2 million. [3] A further 15,000 Cossack settler colonists were deported between 1920 and 1921 as part of the process of returning control and sovereignty of land to the Kazakhs. [4]
On 19 February 1925 Filipp Goloshchyokin was appointed First Secretary of the Communist Party in the newly created Kazakh Autonomous Socialist Soviet Republic. From 1925 to 1933 he ran the Kazakh ASSR with virtually no outside interference. He played a prominent part in the construction of the Turkestan-Siberia railway, which was constructed to open up Kazakhstan's mineral wealth.
After Joseph Stalin ordered the forced collectivization of agriculture throughout the Soviet Union, Goloshchyokin ordered that Kazakhstan's largely nomadic population was to be forced to settle in collective farms. This caused the deadly Kazakh famine of 1930–1933 in Kazakhstan which killed between 1 and 2 million people. [5]
In 1937 the first major deportation of an ethnic group in the Soviet Union began, the removal of the Korean population from the Russian Far East to Kazakhstan. Over 170,000 people were forcibly relocated to the Kazakh and Uzbek SSRs. [6]
Kazakhstani Korean scholar German Kim assumes that one of the reasons for this deportation may have been Stalin's intent to oppress ethnic minorities that could have posed a threat to his socialist system or he may have intended to consolidate the border regions with China and Japan by using them as political bargaining chips. [7] Additionally, historian Kim points out that 1.7 million people perished in the Kazakh famine of 1931–33, while an additional one million people fled from the Republic, causing a labour shortage in that area, which Stalin sought to compensate for by deporting other ethnicities there. [7]
Over one million political prisoners from various parts of the Soviet Union passed through the Karaganda Corrective Labor Camp (KarLag) between 1931 and 1959, with an unknown number of deaths. [8]
During the 1950s and 1960s, Soviet citizens were urged to settle in the Virgin Lands of the Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic. The influx of immigrants, mostly Russians, skewed the ethnic mixture and enabled non-Kazakhs to outnumber natives. As a result, the use of the Kazakh language declined but has started to experience a revival since independence, both as a result of its resurging popularity in law and business and the growing proportion of Kazakhs. The other nationalities included Ukrainians, Germans, Jews, Belarusians, Koreans and others; Germans at the time of independence formed about 8% of the population, the largest concentration of Germans in the entire Soviet Union. Kazakh independence has caused many of these newcomers to emigrate.
Following the dismissal of Dinmukhamed Konayev, the First Secretary of the Communist Party of Kazakhstan by the last Soviet general secretary, Mikhail Gorbachev, riots broke out for four days between 16 and 19 December 1986 known as Jeltoqsan by student demonstrators in Brezhnev Square in the capital city, Alma-Ata. Approximately 168–200 civilians were killed in the uprising. The events then spilled over to Shymkent, Pavlodar, Karaganda and Taldykorgan.
On 25 March 1990, Kazakhstan held its first elections with Nursultan Nazarbayev, the chairman of the Supreme Soviet elected as its first president. Later that year on 25 October, it then declared sovereignty. The republic participated in a referendum to preserve the union in a different entity with 94.1% voted in favour. It did not happen when hardline communists in Moscow took control of the government in August. Nazarbayev then condemned the failed coup.
As a result of those events, the Kazakh SSR was renamed to the Republic of Kazakhstan on 10 December 1991. It declared independence on 16 December [9] (the fifth anniversary of Jeltoqsan), becoming the last Soviet constituency to secede. Its capital was the site of the Alma-Ata Protocol on 21 December 1991 that dissolved the Soviet Union and formed the Commonwealth of Independent States in its place which Kazakhstan joined. The Soviet Union officially ceased to exist as a sovereign state on 26 December 1991 and Kazakhstan became an internationally recognized independent state.
On 28 January 1993, the new Constitution of Kazakhstan was officially adopted.
According to the 1897 census, the earliest census taken in the region, Kazakhs constituted 81.7% of the total population (3,392,751 people) within the territory of contemporary Kazakhstan. The Russian population in Kazakhstan was 454,402, or 10.95% of total population; there were 79,573 Ukrainians (1.91%); 55,984 Tatars (1.34%); 55,815 Uyghurs (1.34%); 29,564 Uzbeks (0.7%); 11,911 Moldovans (0.28%); 4,888 Dungans (0.11%); 2,883 Turkmens; 2,613 Germans; 2,528 Bashkirs; 1,651 Jews; and 1,254 Poles.
Ethnic Composition of Kazakhstan (census data) [10] | ||||||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Nationality | 1926 | 1939 | 1959 | 1970 | 1979 | 1989 |
Kazakh | 58.5 | 37.8 | 30.0 | 32.6 | 36.0 | 40.1 |
Russian | 18.0 | 40.2 | 42.7 | 42.4 | 40.8 | 37.4 |
Ukrainian | 13.88 | 10.7 | 8.2 | 7.2 | 6.1 | 5.4 |
Belarusian | 0.51 | 1.2 | 1.5 | 1.2 | 1.1 | 0.8 |
German | 0.82 | 1.50 | 7.1 | 6.6 | 6.1 | 5.8 |
Tatar | 1.29 | 1.76 | 2.1 | 2.2 | 2.1 | 2.0 |
Uzbek | 2.09 | 1.96 | 1.5 | 1.7 | 1.8 | 2.0 |
Uyghur | 1.01 | 0.58 | 0.6 | 0.9 | 1.0 | 1.1 |
Korean | 0.8 | 0.6 | 0.6 | 0.6 |
The most significant factors that shaped the ethnic composition of the population of Kazakhstan were the 1920s and 1930s famines. According to different estimates of the effects of the Kazakh famine of 1930–1933, up to 40% of Kazakhs (indigenous ethnic group) either died of starvation or fled the territory. [11] Official government census data report the contraction of Kazakh population from 3.6 million in 1926, to 2.3 million in 1939. [12] [13]
Upon the start of the Second World War, many large factories were relocated to the Kazakh SSR.
The Semipalatinsk Nuclear Test Site and Baikonur Cosmodrome were also built here.
After the war, the Virgin Lands Campaign was started in 1953. This was led by Nikita Khrushchev, with the goal of developing the vast lands of the republic and helping to boost Soviet agricultural yields. However it did not work as promised, the campaign was eventually abandoned in the 1960s. [14]
In the early days of the Soviet Union, Kazakh culture was both developed and restrained, and later many Kazakh cultural figures were imprisoned, exiled, or killed in Joseph Stalin's purges. However, after the Stalinist era, Nikita Khrushchev's efforts to reinvigorate internationalism and furtherly weaken Kazakh culture were controversial in the Kazakh SSR. [15] Kazakhs viewed his internationalist goals as a call for "Russification". [15]
Beginning in 1937, the Soviet Government began a series of forced deportations of ethnic minorities, such as Soviet Koreans, the Volga Germans and various other minorities to the Kazakh SSR, a programme that ended only with Stalin's death in 1953.
Kazakhstan, the largest country fully within the Eurasian Steppe, has been a historical crossroads and home to numerous different peoples, states and empires throughout history. Throughout history, peoples on the territory of modern Kazakhstan had nomadic lifestyle, which developed and influenced Kazakh culture.
The Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic, also known as Soviet Uzbekistan, the Uzbek SSR, UzSSR, or simply Uzbekistan and rarely Uzbekia or Red Uzbekistan, was a union republic of the Soviet Union. It was governed by the Uzbek branch of the Soviet Communist Party, the legal political party, from 1925 until 1990. From 1990 to 1991, it was a sovereign part of the Soviet Union with its own legislation.
Dinmukhamed Akhmetuly "Dimash" Kunaev was a Kazakh Soviet communist politician who served as the First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Kazakh SSR.
The Volga German Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic, abbreviated as the Volga German ASSR, was an autonomous republic of the Russian SFSR. Its capital city was Engels located on the Volga River. As a result of the German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, the republic was abolished and Volga Germans were exiled.
An index of articles related to the former nation known as the Soviet Union. It covers the Soviet revolutionary period until the dissolution of the Soviet Union. This list includes topics, events, persons and other items of national significance within the Soviet Union. It does not include places within the Soviet Union, unless the place is associated with an event of national significance. This index also does not contain items related to Soviet Military History.
The deportation of Koreans in the Soviet Union was the forced transfer of nearly 172,000 Soviet Koreans (Koryo-saram) from the Russian Far East to unpopulated areas of the Kazakh SSR and the Uzbek SSR in 1937 by the NKVD on the orders of Soviet leader Joseph Stalin and Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars of the Soviet Union Vyacheslav Molotov. 124 trains were used to resettle them 6,400 km to Central Asia. The reason was to stem "the infiltration of Japanese espionage into the Far Eastern Krai", as Koreans were at the time subjects of the Empire of Japan, which was the Soviet Union's rival. However, some historians regard it as part of Stalin's policy of "frontier cleansing". Estimates based on population statistics suggest that between 16,500 and 50,000 deported Koreans died from starvation, exposure, and difficulties adapting to their new environment in exile.
The Germans of Kazakhstan are a minority in Kazakhstan, and make up a small percentage of the population. Today they live mostly in the northeastern part of the country between the cities of Astana and Oskemen, the majority being urban dwellers.
There has been a substantial population of Russian Kazakhstanis, or simply Russian Kazakhs, which are ethnic Russians living in Kazakhstan as their citizen, since the 19th century. Although their numbers have been reduced since the breakup of the Soviet Union, they remain prominent in Kazakh society today. Russians formed a plurality of the Kazakh SSR's population for several decades.
National delimitation in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was the process of specifying well-defined national territorial units from the ethnic diversity of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) and its subregions.
Soviet Central Asia was the part of Central Asia administered by the Russian SFSR and then the Soviet Union between 1918 and 1991, when the Central Asian republics declared independence. It is nearly synonymous with Russian Turkestan in the Russian Empire. Soviet Central Asia went through many territorial divisions before the current borders were created in the 1920s and 1930s.
After it was established on most of the territory of the Russian Empire, the Soviet Union remained the world's largest country until it was dissolved in 1991. It covered a large part of Eastern Europe while also spanning the entirety of the Caucasus, Central Asia, and Northern Asia. During this time, Islam was the country's second-largest religion; 90% of Muslims in the Soviet Union were adherents of Sunni Islam, with only around 10% adhering to Shia Islam. Excluding the Azerbaijan SSR, which had a Shia-majority population, all of the Muslim-majority Union Republics had Sunni-majority populations. In total, six Union Republics had Muslim-majority populations: the Azerbaijan SSR, the Kazakh SSR, the Kyrgyz SSR, the Tajik SSR, the Turkmen SSR, and the Uzbek SSR. There was also a large Muslim population across Volga–Ural and in the northern Caucasian regions of the Russian SFSR. Across Siberia, Muslims accounted for a significant proportion of the population, predominantly through the presence of Tatars. Many autonomous republics like the Karakalpak ASSR, the Chechen-Ingush ASSR, the Bashkir ASSR and others also had Muslim majorities.
The Jeltoqsan, also spelled Zheltoksan, or December of 1986, were protests that took place in Alma-Ata, Kazakh SSR, in response to CPSU General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev's dismissal of Dinmukhamed Kunaev, the First Secretary of the Communist Party of Kazakhstan and an ethnic Kazakh, and his replacement with Gennady Kolbin, an ethnic Russian from the Russian SFSR.
Levon Isayevich Mirzoyan was the First Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Azerbaijan from 21 January 1926 to 5 August 1929 and the First Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Kazakhstan from 1933 to May 1938. He succeeded Filipp Goloshschyokin as leader during the Soviet-imposed Kazakh Famine of 1930–1933, also known as the Goloshchyokin Genocide, in which at least 1.3 million ethnic Kazakhs died, an estimated 38 to 42 percent of all Kazakhs: the highest percentage of any ethnic group killed by the Soviet famine of 1930–1933. Historians have mixed evaluations of his term, both as a perpetrator of brutal policies against starving Kazakhs and the man who oversaw the nation's recovery.
Kazakhstan–Russia relations are the bilateral foreign relations between Kazakhstan and the Russian Federation. Kazakhstan has an embassy in Moscow, a consulate-general in Saint Petersburg, Astrakhan, and Omsk. Russia has an embassy in Astana and consulates in Almaty and Oral.
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Kazakhstan is the Kazakh government ministry which oversees the foreign relations of Kazakhstan.
The Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, previously known as the Russian Soviet Republic and the Russian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic, and unofficially as Soviet Russia, was an independent federal socialist state from 1917 to 1922, and afterwards the largest and most populous constituent republic of the Soviet Union (USSR) from 1922 to 1991, until becoming a sovereign part of the Soviet Union with priority of Russian laws over Union-level legislation in 1990 and 1991, the last two years of the existence of the USSR. The Russian SFSR was composed of sixteen smaller constituent units of autonomous republics, five autonomous oblasts, ten autonomous okrugs, six krais and forty oblasts. Russians formed the largest ethnic group. The capital of the Russian SFSR and the USSR as a whole was Moscow and the other major urban centers included Leningrad, Stalingrad, Novosibirsk, Sverdlovsk, Gorky and Kuybyshev. It was the first socialist state in history.
The Declaration and Treaty on the Formation of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics officially created the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), commonly known as the Soviet Union. It de jure legalised a political union of several Soviet republics that had existed since 1919 and created a new federal government whose key functions were centralised in Moscow. Its legislative branch consisted of the Congress of Soviets of the Soviet Union and the Central Executive Committee of the Soviet Union (TsIK), while the Council of People's Commissars composed the executive.
The Kazakh famine of 1930–1933, also known as the Asharshylyk, was a famine during which approximately 1.5 million people died in the Kazakh Autonomous Socialist Soviet Republic, then part of the Russian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic in the Soviet Union, of whom 1.3 million were ethnic Kazakhs. An estimated 38 to 42 percent of all Kazakhs died, the highest percentage of any ethnic group killed by the Soviet famine of 1930–1933. Other research estimates that as many as 2.3 million died. A committee created by the Kazakhstan parliament chaired by Historian Manash Kozybayev concluded that the famine was "a manifestation of the politics of genocide", with 1.75 million victims.
The Kazakhstan–Turkmenistan border is 413 kilometres (257 mi) in length and runs from the Caspian Sea to the tripoint with Uzbekistan. It is the shortest international boundary of both states.
The Kazakhstan–Uzbekistan border is 2,330 km (1,450 mi) long and runs from the tripoint with Turkmenistan to the tripoint with Kyrgyzstan. It is Uzbekistan's longest external boundary. The Uzbek capital Tashkent is situated just 13 km (8.1 mi) from this border.