Sweeping ethno-demographic changes in Kazakhstan during the 20th century: A dramatic story of mass migration waves. Part I: From the turn of the 19th century to the end of the Soviet era

Abstract

For quite some time, the population dynamics in Kazakhstan have largely depended on migration processes. At the end of the 19th century, the territory of the country became the main migration space for a large part of Eurasia which was under the governance of the Russian Empire, and later of the Soviet Union. The large scale resettlement of Russian and Ukrainian peasants following the integration of the Kazakh Khanate (name of the Kazakh state in the territory of present-day Kazakhstan and neighbouring countries in 1465–1847) into the Russian Empire, as well as different forms and types of voluntary and involuntary mass movements of populations during the Soviet period, completely changed the demographic picture of Kazakhstan. At the same time, the economic and political conditions established after the end of the Russian Civil War (1917–1920), along with new economic policies implemented in Soviet Central Asia in the 1920s and 1930s and their tragic consequences, resulted in massive outflows of population, namely Kazakhs. All these movements had a significant direct impact on population development within the territory, and on the size, ethno-demographic and other social characteristics of the population. The aim of the paper is to trace the changes in the total population and its ethno-demographic structure in Kazakhstan from the end of the 19th century to the very end of the 1980s, and to determine the role of migration in these changes. Systematization of migration policies is presented, and the effect of past migration processes in Kazakhstan is discussed. The presented research is based on census data.

Keywords

• Kazakhstan
• population
• migration
• ethnic structure
• Russian Empire
• Soviet Union