CIC Special Briefing - Peoples, Religions and Traditions

Kazakhstan's turbulent past has produced a mosaic of ethnic and religious groups. According to the 2002 figures, the present population of 14.8 million comprises more than 100 ethnic groups, including Kazakhs (55.8 per cent), Russians (28.3 per cent), Ukrainians (3.3 per cent), Uzbeks (2.6 per cent), Germans (1.8 per cent), Uigur (1.4 per cent) and others (five per cent). Forty?seven per cent of the population are Sunni Muslims, but radical Islam does not pose a threat either to the State or to other groups. Relations between Muslims and Russian Orthodox (44 per cent) and Protestants (two per cent) remain harmonious, as visitors to Kazakhstan quickly observe.

This mosaic of peoples and religions is partly explained by the fact that, from Tsarist times onwards, Kazakhstan was regarded as an 'empty' part of the earth which could be used for agricultural and social experiments, often involving the re-settlement of large numbers of people. During the early part of the last century, there was an annual inflow of around 140,000 Russians and Ukrainians as part of the agricultural reforms implemented by the Russian Tsarist Prime Minister, Pyotr Stolypin. Although many were unable to adapt and subsequently returned to their homelands, an estimated 1.2 million remained.

The impact of Stalin's forced collectivisation of agriculture was as brutal and as far-reaching in its consequences for Kazakhstan as for any other part of the USSR. During the 1920s and early 1930s, a quarter of a million kulaks were stripped of their holdings and sent to work on collective farms, many thousands of them dying en route. In all, more than a million people, nomadic Kazakhs as well as Russian kulaks, died as a consequence of Stalin's disastrous pro-gramme of collectivisation of Kazakh lands. Stalin dispatched a further 1.2 million people from Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, the Baltic States and Moldavia, to work in heavy industry. In addition, a network of prisons and camps was built across the country to house the alleged opponents of Soviet communism, a great number of them quite innocent of the crimes of which they were accused. Even when their sentences were completed, many of the survivors were refused permission to return to their homes, and thus became citizens of the autonomous Soviet Republic of Kazakhstan.

The tradition of depositing unwanted ethnic groups into what became a full union republic in 1936 continued following the outbreak of the Second World War when, after being accused en masse of harbouring anti-Soviet sentiments, whole nations were dumped in Kazakhstan. These included Volga Germans, Crimean Tartars, and the entire Chechen population. As the German army advanced into Russia, another 350,000 people were evacuated, along with factories, to Kazakhstan.

Mass immigration continued under Kruschev's "Virgin Land" programme between 1954-1962, during which time at least two million people, mostly from European parts of the USSR, were settled on land that was supposedly unused or abandoned. In fact, much of the land had been left fallow by Kazakh herders who worked the land and knew how to prevent its being over-exploited. As President Nazarbayev has pointed out in his autobiography, this new wave of immigration disturbed the traditional methods of Kazakhs herders and thus destroyed an important source of food.

As a result of these successive waves of immigration, the Kazakhs, who had accounted for 90 per cent of the population at the end of the nineteenth century, represented only 30 percent by 1960. They once again became a majority as a result of emigration, mostly back to Russia, in the 1990s.