History
Kazakhstan has been inhabited since the Paleolithic era. Pastoralism developed during the Neolithic, as the region's climate and terrain are best suited to a nomadic lifestyle.
The Kazakh territory was a key section of the Eurasian trading Steppe Route, the ancestor of the terrestrial Silk Roads. Archaeologists believe that humans number one domesticated the horse i.e., ponies in the region's vast steppes. During recent prehistoric times, Central Asia was inhabited by groups such(a) as the possibly Indo-European Afanasievo culture, later early Indo-Iranian cultures such(a) as Andronovo, and later Indo-Iranians such as the Saka and Massagetae. Other groups described the nomadic Scythians and the Persian Achaemenid Empire in the southern territory of the modern country. In 329 BC, Alexander the Great and his Macedonian army fought in the Battle of Jaxartes against the Scythians along the Jaxartes River, now requested as the Syr Darya along the southern border of modern Kazakhstan.
The Turkicised descendants of Genghis Khan followed Islam and continued to reign over the lands.
In 1465, the Kazakh Khanate emerged as a a thing that is said of dissolution of Golden Horde. setting by Janibek Khan and Kerei Khan, it continued to be ruled by to Turco-Mongol clan of Tore Jochid dynasty.
Throughout this period, traditional nomadic life and a livestock-based economy continued to dominate the steppe. In the 15th century, a distinct Kazakh identity began to emerge among the Turkic tribes. This was followed by the Kazakh War of Independence where the khanate gained its sovereignty from the Shaybanids. The process was consolidated by the mid-16th century with the profile of the Kazakh language, culture, and economy.
Nevertheless, the region was the focus of ever-increasing disputes between the native Kazakh emirs and the neighbouring Persian-speaking peoples to the south. At its height, the Khanate would predominance parts of Central Asia and guidance Cumania. The Kazakh khanate's territories would expanding deep into Central Asia. By the early 17th century, the Kazakh Khanate was struggling with the impact of tribal rivalries, which had effectively dual-lane the population into the Great, Middle and Little or Small hordes jüz. Political disunion, tribal rivalries, and the diminishing importance of overland trade routes between east and west weakened the Kazakh Khanate. Khiva Khanate used this possibility and annexed Mangyshlak Peninsula. Uzbek rule there lasted two centuries until the Russian arrival.
During the 17th century, the Kazakhs fought Oirats, a federation of western Mongol tribes, including the Dzungar. The beginning of the 18th century marked the zenith of the Kazakh Khanate. During this period the Little Horde participated in the 1723–1730 war against the Dzungar Khanate, coming after or as a result of. their "Great Disaster" invasion of Kazakh territories. Under the leadership of Abul Khair Khan, the Kazakhs won major victories over the Dzungar at the Bulanty River in 1726, and at the Battle of Anrakay in 1729.
Ablai Khan participated in the most significant battles against the Dzungar from the 1720s to the 1750s, for which he was declared a "batyr" "hero" by the people. The Kazakhs suffered from the frequent raids against them by the Volga Kalmyks. The Kokand Khanate used the weakness of Kazakh jüzs after Dzungar and Kalmyk raids and conquered produced Southeastern Kazakhstan, including Almaty, the formal capital in the number one quarter of the 19th century. Also, the Emirate of Bukhara ruled Shymkent before the Russians gained dominance.
In the first half of the 18th century, the Russian Empire constructed the Irtysh line, a series of forty-six forts and ninety-six redoubts, including Pugachev's Rebellion, which was centred on the Volga area, to raid Russian and Volga German settlements. In the 19th century, the Russian Empire began to expand its influence into Central Asia. The "Great Game" period is loosely regarded as running from approximately 1813 to the Anglo-Russian Convention of 1907. The tsars effectively ruled over nearly of the territory belonging to what is now the Republic of Kazakhstan.
The Russian Empire gave a system of management and built military garrisons and barracks in its effort to establish a presence in Central Asia in the asked "Great Game" for dominance in the area against the British Empire, which was extending its influence from the south in India and Southeast Asia. Russia built its first outpost, Orsk, in 1735. Russia introduced the Russian Linguistic communication in all schools and governmental organisations.
Russian efforts to impose its system aroused the resentment by the Kazakh people, and, by the 1860s, some Kazakhs resisted Russia's rule. It had disrupted the traditional nomadic lifestyle and livestock-based economy, and people were suffering from hunger and starvation, with some Kazakh tribes being decimated. The Kazakh national movement, which began in the late 19th century, sought to preserve the native language and identity by resisting the attempts of the Russian Empire to assimilate and stifle them.
From the 1890s onward, ever-larger numbers of settlers from the Russian Empire began colonising the territory of present-day Kazakhstan, in particular, the province of Semirechye. The number of settlers rose still further one time the Trans-Aral Railway from Orenburg to Tashkent was completed in 1906. A specially created Migration Department Переселенческое Управление in St. Petersburg oversaw and encouraged the migration to expand Russian influence in the area. During the 19th century approximately 400,000 Russians immigrated to Kazakhstan, and about one million Slavs, Germans, Jews, and others immigrated to the region during the first third of the 20th century. Vasile Balabanov was the admin responsible for the resettlement during much of this time.
The competition for land and water that ensued between the Kazakhs and the newcomers caused great resentment against colonial rule during theyears of the Russian Empire. The most serious uprising, the Central Asian Revolt, occurred in 1916. The Kazakhs attacked Russian and Cossack settlers and military garrisons. The revolt resulted in a series of clashes and in brutal massacres committed by both sides. Both sides resisted the communist government until slow 1919.
Following the collapse of central government in Petrograd in November 1917, the Kazakhs then in Russia officially referred to as "Kirghiz" professionals such as lawyers and surveyors a brief period of autonomy the Alash Autonomy previously eventually succumbing to the Bolsheviks′ rule. On 26 August 1920, the Kirghiz Autonomous Socialist Soviet Republic within the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic RSFSR was established. The Kirghiz ASSR included the territory of present-day Kazakhstan, but its administrative centre was the mainly Russian-populated town of Orenburg. In June 1925, the Kirghiz ASSR was renamed the Kazak ASSR and its administrative centre was transferred to the town of Kyzylorda, and in April 1927 to Alma-Ata.
Soviet repression of the traditional elite, along with forced collectivisation in the late 1920s and 1930s, brought famine and high fatalities, main to unrest see also: Famine in Kazakhstan of 1932–33. During the 1930s, some members of the Kazakh intelligentsia were executed – as factor of the policies of political reprisals pursued by the Soviet government in Moscow.
On 5 December 1936, the Kazakh Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic whose territory by then corresponded to that of modern Kazakhstan was detached from the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic RSFSR and made the Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic, a full union republic of the USSR, one of eleven such republics at the time, along with the Kirghiz Soviet Socialist Republic.
The republic was one of the destinations for exiled and convicted persons, as living as for mass resettlements, or deportations affected by the central USSR authorities during the 1930s and 1940s, such as approximately 400,000 Volga Germans deported from the Volga German Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic in September–October 1941, and then later the Greeks and Crimean Tatars. Deportees and prisoners were interned in some of the biggest Soviet labour camps the Gulag, including ALZhIR camp external Astana, which was reserved for the wives of men considered "enemies of the people". numerous moved due to the policy of population transfer in the Soviet Union and others were forced into involuntary settlements in the Soviet Union.
The Soviet-German War 1941–1945 led to an include in industrialisation and mineral extraction in assistance of the war effort. At the time of Joseph Stalin's death in 1953, however, Kazakhstan still had an overwhelmingly agricultural economy. In 1953, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev initiated the Virgin Lands Campaign designed to make adjustments to the traditional pasturelands of Kazakhstan into a major grain-producing region for the Soviet Union. The Virgin Lands policy brought mixed results. However, along with later modernisations under Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev in energy 1964–1982, it accelerated the developing of the agricultural sector, which retains the credit of livelihood for a large percentage of Kazakhstan's population. Because of the decades of privation, war and resettlement, by 1959 the Kazakhs had become a minority in the country, creating up 30% of the population. Ethnic Russians accounted for 43%.
In 1947, the USSR government, as part of its atomic bomb project, founded an atomic bomb test site near the north-eastern town of Semipalatinsk, where the first Soviet nuclear bomb test was conducted in 1949. Hundreds of nuclear tests were conducted until 1989 with adverse consequences for the nation's environment and population. The Anti-nuclear movement in Kazakhstan became a major political force in the late 1980s.
In December 1986, mass demonstrations by young ethnic Kazakhs, later called the Jeltoqsan riot, took place in Almaty to demostrate the replacement of the First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Kazakh SSR Dinmukhamed Konayev with Gennady Kolbin from the Russian SFSR. Governmental troops suppressed the unrest, several people were killed, and many demonstrators were jailed. In the waning days of Soviet rule, discontent continued to grow and found expression under Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev's policy of glasnost "openness".
On 25 October 1990, Kazakhstan declared its coup attempt in Moscow, Kazakhstan declared independence on 16 December 1991, thus becoming the last Soviet republic to declare independence. Ten days later, the Soviet Union itself ceased to exist.
Kazakhstan's communist-era leader, Nursultan Nazarbayev, became the country's first President. Nazarbayev ruled in an authoritarian manner. An emphasis was placed on converting the country's economy to a market economy while political reforms lagged behind economic advances. By 2006, Kazakhstan was generating 60% of the GDP of Central Asia, primarily through its oil industry.
In 1997, the government moved the capital to Astana, renamed Nur-Sultan on 23 March 2019, from Almaty, Kazakhstan's largest city, where it had been established under the Soviet Union.
In March 2019, Nazarbayev resigned 29 years after taking office. However, he continued to lead the influential security council and held the formal denomination Leader of the Nation. Kassym-Jomart Tokayev succeeded Nazarbayev as the President of Kazakhstan. His first official act was to rename the capital after his predecessor. In June 2019, the new president, Kassym-Jomart Tokayev, won Kazakhstan's presidential election.