Nursultan Nazarbayev - Early Life

Early Life

Nazarbayev was born in Alma-ata, a rural town near Almaty, when Kazakhstan was one of the republics of the Soviet Union. His father was a poor labourer who worked for a wealthy local family until Soviet rule confiscated the family's farmland in the 1930s during Joseph Stalin's collectivization policy. Following this his father took the family to the mountains to live out a nomadic existence. His father avoided compulsory military service due to a withered arm he sustained when putting out a fire. At the end of World War II the family returned to the village of Chemolgan, and Nazarbayev began to pick up the Russian language. He performed well at school, and was sent to a boarding school in Kaskelen. After leaving school he took up a one year, government-funded scholarship at the Karaganda Steel Mill in Temirtau. He also spent time training at a steel plant in Dniprodzerzhynsk, and therefore was away from Temirtau as riots over working conditions enveloped the town. By aged 20, he was earning a relatively excellent wage doing "incredibly heavy and dangerous work" in the blast furnace. He joined the Communist Party in 1962, and quickly became a prominent member of the Young Communist League. He soon became a full-time worker for the party, and picked up a college education at the Karagandy Polytechnic Institute. He was appointed secretary of the Communist Party Committee of the Karaganda Metallurgical Kombinat in 1972, and four years later became Second Secretary of the Karaganda Regional Party Committee. In his role as a bureaucrat, Nazarbayev spent his days dealing with legal papers, solving logistical problems and industrial disputes, as well as meeting workers to solve individual issues. He later wrote that "the central allocation of capital investment and the distribution of funds" meant that infrastructure was poor, workers were demoralized and overworked, and centrally set targets were unrealistic; he saw the steel plant's problems as a microcosm for the problems for the Soviet Union as a whole.