When Kazakhstan declared independence in December 1991, it inherited not solely the Soviet state’s establishments but in addition its historic frameworks. The primary main post-Soviet historical past of the nation, revealed in 1997, reproduced the Soviet paradigm virtually unchanged. Ak Orda, introduced as a vassal state throughout the Golden Horde that fought for its independence and ultimately gave rise to the Kazakh Khanate within the fifteenth century, remained the official basis of the nation. The Golden Horde itself was handled as overseas historical past: a conquering empire with no direct lineage to Kazakh civilization. For practically three many years, that framework outlined how Kazakhstan defined its origins to its personal residents. Kazakhstan is now revising that rationalization – not by rejecting the milestone of 1991, however by making it significantly much less vital than it as soon as was.
There have been sensible causes for making 1991 the start line of Kazakhstan’s statehood. It mirrored the real constraints of a rustic constructing itself from scratch. At independence, ethnic Kazakhs accounted for simply 39.7 % of the inhabitants, making Kazakhstan the one Soviet republic to enter independence with out its titular nationality forming a majority. Ethnic Russians represented 37.8 % of the nation’s inhabitants, concentrated principally within the industrialized north. Linguistic divisions ran deep. Below the circumstances of the Nineteen Nineties, a civic nationhood mannequin represented probably the most sensible technique of constructing a brand new state and stopping fragmentation in a various society.
Kazakhstan’s first president, Nursultan Nazarbayev, lengthy considered the architect of impartial Kazakhstan however largely sidelined from politics after the January 2022 disaster, bolstered that framework by nation-building efforts that grew to become inseparable from his personal persona. Official commemorations, instructional curricula, state media, and public symbolism converged on a single picture: Nazarbayev because the founding father of the trendy republic.
That method helped ship stability throughout a turbulent interval. However the historic narrative it generated was intentionally compressed. Independence stood triumphant on the middle, whereas earlier durations served largely as a backdrop. The Soviet period was handled as formative slightly than contested. This was a practical mannequin for the early years of independence, but it surely left one query unanswered: the place did Kazakhstan’s statehood actually start?
An off-color comment from Russian President Vladimir Putin at a youth discussion board in August 2014 injected recent urgency into that query. Putin provided his view that Kazakhstan had by no means possessed real statehood earlier than independence, claiming Nazarbayev had “created a state in a territory that had by no means had a state earlier than.” The comment uncovered a vulnerability in Kazakhstan’s official historic narrative. It was not an remoted remark. Senior Russian officers and politicians have periodically questioned Kazakhstan’s territorial integrity and the legitimacy of its borders. The implicit message has been constant: Kazakhstan’s statehood is conditional, latest, and depending on Russian goodwill.
Nazarbayev’s preliminary response to Putin’s assertion was to raise the Kazakh Khanate because the principal historic precursor of recent Kazakhstan. The massive-scale celebration of its 550th anniversary in 2015 grew to become some of the necessary symbolic occasions of the late Nazarbayev period, signaling that Kazakh statehood predated each the Soviet Union and the Russian Empire. However the brand new official narrative lacked a preamble. It took a change of president for that chronology to be prolonged additional.
Kassym-Jomart Tokayev delivered to nation-building the identical warning that has lengthy characterised Kazakhstan’s overseas coverage. In his first State of the Nation Tackle in September 2019, lower than three months after his election within the wake of Nazarbayev’s resignation, Tokayev introduced the commemoration of the 750th anniversary of the Golden Horde’s formation. It was the primary time a Kazakhstani president had formally integrated this sprawling medieval empire into the nationwide narrative. The commemoration was geared toward a home viewers, however the sign it despatched traveled significantly additional.
In 2022, Kazakhstan established a analysis institute in Astana devoted to the examine of the Ulus of Jochi – the Golden Horde’s formal designation. The federal government has restored the long-neglected Jochi Mausoleum advanced in Ulytau, central Kazakhstan, now one of many nation’s most distinguished websites of historic reminiscence. Tokayev furthermore selected Ulytau because the venue for the inaugural assembly of the Ulttyq Qurultay (Nationwide Congress), his signature consultative meeting, a gesture that related up to date governance on to the medieval steppe panorama. A UNESCO-backed discussion board in Could 2026 drew 300 students from over 20 international locations, the place Tokayev described the empire as “the Rome of the Steppe.” Such an outline is bolder than it would first seem. Russian historiography has lengthy portrayed the Golden Horde because the “Tatar-Mongol Yoke,” a darkish age of overseas conquest and struggling.
Kazakhstan’s new seven-volume nationwide historical past, produced by greater than 250 students together with a considerable contingent of overseas consultants, devotes a complete quantity to the Golden Horde interval. Six of the seven volumes at the moment are authorized and nearing publication.
The development has reached widespread tradition too. “The Golden Empire,” a dramatic collection on Jochi Khan, is at the moment in manufacturing and certain for Netflix. So is the seven-volume nationwide historical past, with each initiatives beneath the purview of Erlan Karin, one in every of Tokayev’s senior officers chargeable for the ideological coverage. “The Golden Empire” isn’t an outlier. In 2024, Kazakhstan’s movie output grew by 58 %, with home productions accounting for half of the nation’s high ten field workplace releases – a surge Tokayev had demanded on the Ulttyq Qurultay.
If the shift was top-down, then long-term demographic and cultural developments have ready the bottom for it to take root. Kazakhstan’s 2021 census recorded ethnic Kazakhs at 70.4 % of the inhabitants – up from 53.4 % in 1999 and 63.1 % in 2009. State statistics present a gradual enhance within the variety of residents claiming proficiency in Kazakh, and two-thirds of faculty graduates now sit their nationwide college examination in Kazakh, a share that has grown persistently since independence. Throughout tv, print, and digital platforms, Kazakh has turn into the dominant language of media consumption – a reversal that will have appeared implausible to anybody who knew Kazakhstan within the Nineteen Nineties. In late 2023, the federal government authorized a Idea for the Growth of Language Coverage for 2023-2029, setting targets that embrace elevating Kazakh-language proficiency amongst non-Kazakh faculty graduates from 45 to 75 % by 2029.
Even in 2019, earlier than Astana had absolutely dedicated to the Golden Horde undertaking, a survey discovered that solely 24 % of Kazakh residents recognized 1991 as the start line of nationwide statehood, and practically 45 % considered the Golden Horde positively. The state’s funding since then has solely accelerated these developments. A separate survey carried out in 2023 discovered that youthful residents, a lot of whom haven’t any lived reminiscence of the Soviet interval, are extra inclined to view the nation’s historical past by pre-Soviet slightly than Soviet reference factors.
How the Golden Horde is being introduced issues as a lot as the truth that it’s being promoted. Tokayev has persistently introduced the empire as a multiethnic and multilingual political system emphasizing governance, diplomacy, authorized administration, and Eurasian connectivity slightly than ethnic exclusivity. This issues as a result of Kazakhstan continues to outline itself as a multiethnic civic state. Kazakhstan’s new structure, which went into impact on July 1 following a March referendum, retains Russian as an official language in state establishments, however notably demotes it from “equal” to “alongside” Kazakh, a fastidiously calibrated revision that Moscow accepted with out protest. Forward of his Could 2026 state go to to Astana, Putin revealed an article in a Kazakh newspaper calling the brand new structure “in step with the spirit of the occasions.”
Whether or not that consensus proves sturdy is a separate query. What issues for Kazakhstan’s nation-building undertaking is that the Golden Horde is being invoked not as an ethnic homeland, however as a historic precedent for a various and interconnected state. That distinction displays the demographic and political realities of a state that can’t afford ethnic nationalism.
Some three many years after independence, Kazakhstan’s official story is being prolonged, not changed. Independence stays the cornerstone of the trendy republic, however it’s now framed as one chapter in a for much longer story – one which begins not in 1991, and even with the founding of the Kazakh Khanate in 1465, however with the Golden Horde greater than two centuries earlier.
