Kazakhstan's dominant ethnic group, the
Kazakhs, traces its origin to the 15th century, when after disintegration of
Golden Horde, number of
Turkic and
Turco-Mongol tribes united to establish the
Kazakh Khanate. With a cohesive culture and a national identity, they constituted an absolute majority on the land until Russian colonization. Russian advancement into the territory of Kazakhstan began in the late 18th century, when the Kazakhs nominally accepted Russian rule in exchange for protection against repeated attacks by the western Mongolian
Kalmyks. In the 1890s, Russian peasants began to settle the fertile lands of northern Kazakhstan, causing many Kazakhs to move eastwards into Chinese territory in search of new grazing grounds.
Drastic changes during the 20th century The
famines of the 1920s and
1930s greatly influenced the ethnic composition of Kazakhstan. According to one estimate, up to 40% of Kazakhs either died of starvation or emigrated in the 1930s. Official government census data reports the contraction of Kazakh population from
3.6 million in 1926 to
2.3 million in 1939. By the mid 20th century, Kazakhstan was home to virtually all ethnic groups that had ever come under the Russian sphere of influence. This diverse demography stemmed from the country's central location and its historical use by Russia as a place to send colonists,
dissidents, and minority groups from its other frontiers. From the 1930s until the 1950s, both Russian opposition (and Russians who were "accused" of being part of the opposition) and certain minorities (especially
Volga Germans,
Greeks,
Poles, Ukrainians,
Crimean Tatars and
Kalmyks) had been interned in labour camps, often merely due to their heritage or beliefs, mostly on collective orders by
Joseph Stalin. This makes Kazakhstan one of the few places on
Earth where normally-disparate
Germanic,
Greeks,
Indo-Iranian,
Koreans,
Chechen, and
Turkic groups live together in a rural setting and not as a result of modern immigration. After the
fall of the Soviet Union, the
German population of Kazakhstan(
Kasachstandeutsche) proceeded to emigrate en masse during the 1990s, as
Germany was willing to repatriate these so-called
Spätaussiedler, and many Russians went back to
Russia. Some groups have fewer good options for emigration, but because of the economic situation are also leaving at rates comparable to the rest of the former
East bloc.
Table of historic ethnic composition of Kazakhstan Table: ==Demographic data==