MAPS OF HISTORY · HISTORY OF · Kazakhstan

ONE LAND · 6 ATLASES

Kazakhstan, on the map of history

What was Kazakhstan before it was Kazakhstan? Below, every era of this land in the Maps of History collection — who ruled it, what it was called, and when control changed — each line linked to the dated map that shows it. Modern borders stand in as an honest approximation; every atlas says so on the map itself.

The Qipchaq steppe (mod. Kazakhstan) · The Mongol Empire, 1206–1294

The Qipchaq steppe — the corridor itself. Its Cuman-Qipchaq confederations were broken by the Great Raid and absorbed wholesale after 1236: the Golden Horde’s armies, language and successor peoples are substantially Qipchaq. The steppe did not so much fall to the Mongols as merge with them — and its boys, sold to Cairo, became the Mamluks who stopped their conquerors.

OPEN THE MONGOL EMPIRE ON THE LIVING MAP →

Russian Turkestan (mod. Kazakhstan) · The Russian Revolution, 1905–1924

The Kazakh steppe saw its own national movement (Alash Orda) caught between Reds and Whites, and was drawn into Soviet Turkestan by 1920. Shown here as part of Russian Turkestan, its nomadic society would be shattered by the famines of Soviet collectivization a decade later.

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Soviet Central Asia (mod. Kazakhstan) · China in Revolution, 1911–1949

Soviet Central Asia along Xinjiang’s whole western border: the Turkestan the Tsars took and the Soviets reorganized into republics, collectivized at terrible cost (the Kazakh famine of 1930–33 killed a third of the Kazakh people). For this atlas it is the pressure that made Xinjiang lean Soviet — Sheng Shicai’s 1930s warlord regime ran on Soviet arms, advisers and trade down these roads, complete with purges to match — until Moscow’s wartime distraction let Chungking claw the province back in 1942–44. Empires do not need to cross a border to govern what is behind it.

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Kazakhstan · The Great War, 1914–1918

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Soviet Kazakhstan · The Road to War, 1931–1941

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Kazakhstan · The Cold War, 1945–1991

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