Kazakhstan - Central Asia - page 115

which had misguidedly murdered 450 of
his merchants at Otrar. The biggest-ever
Mongol army (200,000 or so) sacked the
Khorezmian cities of Otrar, Bukhara and
Samarkand, then swept on towards Europe
and the Middle East. Central Asia became
part of the Mongol empire.
On Chinggis Khan's death in 1227, his
enormous empire was divided between his
sons. The lands farthest from the Mongol
heartland - north and west of the Aral Sea -
went to the descendants of his eldest son Jo-
chi and became known as the Golden Horde.
Southeastern Kazakhstan was part of the
Chaghatai khanate, the lands that went to
Chinggis' second son Chaghatai. In the late
14th century far southern Kazakhstan was
conquered by Timur from Samarkand, who
constructed Kazakhstan's one great surviv-
ing Silk Road building, the Yasaui Mauso-
leum at Turkistan.

eventually elected khan of all three hordes
in 1771, but by that time they were well on
the way to becoming Russian vassals.

The Russians Arrive
Russia's expansion across Siberia ran up
against the Zhungars, against whom they
built a line of forts along the Kazakhs' north-
ern border. The Kazakhs sought tsarist pro-
tection from the Zhungars, and the khans of
all three hordes swore loyalty to the Russian
crown between 1731 and 1742. Russia gradu-
ally extended its 'protection' of the khanates
to their annexation and abolition, despite re-
peated Kazakh uprisings. By some estimates
one million of the four million Kazakhs died
in revolts and famines before 1870. Mean-
while, the abolition of serfdom in Russia and
Ukraine in 1861 stimulated peasant settlers
to move into Kazakhstan.

Communist Takeover &
'Development'
In the chaos following the Russian Revo-
lution of 1917, a Kazakh nationalist party,
Alash Orda, tried to establish an independ-
ent government, based in Semey. As the
Russian Civil War raged across Kazakhstan,
Alash Orda eventually sided with the Bol-
sheviks, who emerged victorious in 1920 -
only for Alash members soon to be purged
from the Communist Party of Kazakhstan
(CPK). Meanwhile several hundred thou-
sand Kazakhs fled to China and elsewhere.
The next disaster to befall the Kazakhs
was denomadisation, between 1929 and
1933. Under Soviet government, the world's
biggest group of seminomadic people was
pushed one step up the Marxist evolution-
ary ladder to become settled farmers in new
collectives. Unused to agriculture, they died
in their hundreds of thousands from famine
and disease.
In the 1930s and '40s more and more peo-
ple from other parts of the USSR - prison-
ers and others - were sent to work in labour
camps and new industrial towns in Kaza-
khstan. They included entire peoples de-
ported en masse from western areas of the
USSR around the time of WWII. A further
800,000 migrants arrived in the 1950s when
Nikita Khrushchev decided to plough up
250,000 sq km of north Kazakhstan steppe
to grow wheat in the Virgin Lands scheme.
The labour camps were wound down in
the mid-1950s, but many survivors stayed

The Kazakhs
The story of the Kazakhs starts with the Uz-
beks, a group of Islamised Mongols named
after leader Özbeg (Uzbek), who were left
in control of most of the Kazakh steppe as
the Golden Horde disintegrated in the 15th
century.
In 1468 an internal feud split the Uzbeks
into two groups. Those who ended up south
of the Syr-Darya ruled from Bukhara as the
Shaybanid dynasty and ultimately gave
their name to modern Uzbekistan. Those
who stayed north remained nomadic and
became the Kazakhs, taking their name
from a Turkic word meaning free rider
or adventurer. The Kazakh khanate that
resulted was a confederation of nomadic
peoples that by the 18th century stretched
over most of southern, western and central
Kazakhstan, descendants of the Mongols
and earlier Turkic inhabitants.
The Kazakhs grouped into three 'hordes'
(zhuz), with which Kazakhs today still
identify: the Great Horde in the south, the
Middle Horde in the centre, north and east,
and the Little Horde in the west. Each was
ruled by a khan and comprised a number
of clans whose leaders held the title axial,
bi or batyr .
The Zhungars (Oyrats), a warlike Mon-
gol clan, subjugated eastern Kazakhstan
between 1690 and 1720 in what Kazakhs
call the Great Disaster. Abylay Khan, a Mid-
dle Horde leader who tried to unify Kazakh
resistance to the Zhungars after 1720, was