When Kazakhstan declared independence in December 1991, it inherited not only the Soviet state’s institutions but also its historical frameworks. The first major post-Soviet history of the country, published in 1997, reproduced the Soviet paradigm almost unchanged. Ak Orda, presented as a vassal state within the Golden Horde that fought for its independence and eventually gave rise to the Kazakh Khanate in the 15th century, remained the official foundation of the nation. The Golden Horde itself was treated as foreign history: a conquering empire with no direct lineage to Kazakh civilization. For nearly three decades, that framework defined how Kazakhstan explained its origins to its own citizens. Kazakhstan is now revising that explanation – not by rejecting the milestone of 1991, but by making it considerably less significant than it once was.
There were practical reasons for making 1991 the starting point of Kazakhstan’s statehood. It reflected the genuine constraints of a country building itself from scratch. At independence, ethnic Kazakhs accounted for just 39.7 percent of the population, making Kazakhstan the only Soviet republic to enter independence without its titular nationality forming a majority. Ethnic Russians represented 37.8 percent of the country’s population, concentrated mostly in the industrialized north. Linguistic divisions ran deep. Under the conditions of the 1990s, a civic nationhood model represented the most practical means of building a new state and preventing fragmentation in a diverse society.
