Kazakh Independence and Nuclear Renunciation
Kazakhstan declared independence on 16 December 1991, the last Soviet republic to do so, and the Soviet Union ceased to exist nine days later. The reluctance was rational. Kazakhstan's population was almost evenly split between Kazakhs and Slavs, largely because of what had been done to it: the famine of 1930 to 1933, in which forced collectivisation and the destruction of nomadic herding killed something approaching 1.5 million Kazakhs, more than a third of the nation, and drove hundreds of thousands into China; then deportations of Volga Germans, Chechens, Koreans and others into the steppe; then Khrushchev's Virgin Lands campaign, which brought hundreds of thousands of Russian and Ukrainian settlers to plough the north. The republic also held the Semipalatinsk test site, where 456 nuclear devices had been detonated over forty years with populations living downwind, and the Baikonur cosmodrome. Nursultan Nazarbayev, party first secretary from 1989 and president from 1990, had argued for a reformed union to the end and negotiated for it after the August coup collapsed. Independence came with the fourth-largest nuclear arsenal in the world sitting on Kazakh soil — some 1,400 warheads — and Kazakhstan gave all of it up between 1993 and 1995 in exchange for security assurances from Russia, the United States and Britain. The test site had already been closed in 1991 after a mass movement. Nazarbayev ruled until 2019 and shaped the state around oil, a new capital in the north, and a careful balance between Moscow, Beijing and Washington. The famine is the part of the story that took longest to be told. It was not discussed publicly in Soviet times, the archives opened only in the 1990s, and a memorial went up in the capital in 2017. Kazakhs became a majority in their own country again only around the turn of the century.
- Year: 1991 CE
- Category: Political
