Russians in Kazakhstan - Soviet Period

Soviet Period

Russians of Kazakhstan together with other ethnic groups of the region suffered heavily during the Russian Civil War and Collectivisation in the USSR and endured repeated famines and unrest. In 1918-1931 Basmachi Revolt affected areas of southern Kazakh SSR often taking a form of an ethnic conflict between Russian and Ukrainian farmers and native Muslim nomads. Thousands of Russian settlers are thought to have been killed by the Kazakhs in the violence and this was followed by equally bloody reprisals against the nomadic population by the Red Army. In the 1920s and the 1930s, some Russians in Kazakhstan felt discriminated against by Communist authorities who promoted Kazakh language and culture in the region and targeted many local ethnic Russians as either kulaks or Cossacks.

In 1925, despite local objections, ethnic Russian North Kazakhstan Province as well as parts of Akmola Province, Aktobe Province, West Kazakhstan Province, Pavlodar Province, Kostanay Province and East Kazakhstan Province, formerly considered southern Ural and Siberian oblasts of RSFSR, were transferred to Kazakh SSR. Local Russians who opposed the land transfers were criticized by the Bolshevik leaders in Moscow as "chauvinists".

Many European Soviet citizens and much of Russia's industry were relocated to Kazakhstan during World War II, when Nazi armies threatened to capture all the European industrial centers of the Soviet Union. These migrants founded mining towns which quickly grew to become major industrial centers such as Karaganda (1934), Zhezkazgan (1938), Temirtau (1945) and Ekibastuz (1948). In 1955, the town of Baikonur was built to support the Baikonur Cosmodrome to this day its administered by Russia.

Many more Russians arrived in the years 1953-1965,during the so-called Virgin Lands Campaign of Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev. Still more settlers came in the late 1960s and 70s, when the government paid bonuses to workers participating in a program to relocate Soviet industry close to the extensive coal, gas, and oil deposits of Central Asia. By 1979 ethnic Russians in Kazakhstan numbered about 5,500,000, almost 40% of the total population.

In December 1986, Soviet premier Mikhail Gorbachev appointed Gennady Kolbin, with no ties to the republic, as the first secretary of the Central Committee of Communist Party of Kazakh SSR, breaking with a tradition of ethnic Kazakh dominance in the local administration. Following several incidents of ethnic unrest in 1989, Kolbin was replaced by Nursultan Nazarbayev who following the dissolution of the Soviet Union became the president of independent Kazakhstan.