Kazakhstan

The ninth largest country on earth, mostly steppe, and the republic that least wanted the Soviet Union to end. Kazakh identity formed among nomadic pastoralists organised into three zhuz or hordes, and the khanate that emerged in the fifteenth century accepted Russian protection piecemeal from the 1730s. Russian and Ukrainian peasant settlement took the best grazing, and the revolt of 1916 against wartime conscription was crushed with heavy loss. Forced collectivisation and settlement between 1930 and 1933 killed perhaps a third to a half of all Kazakhs and destroyed the nomadic economy permanently - proportionally among the worst famines of the century. Stalin then used the republic as a destination, deporting Volga Germans, Chechens, Koreans and others there, and the Virgin Lands campaign of the 1950s brought hundreds of thousands more settlers, leaving Kazakhs a minority in their own republic until the 1990s. Semipalatinsk hosted over four hundred and fifty nuclear tests, and Baikonur remains Russia's launch site under lease. Nazarbayev declared independence last of all fifteen, in December 1991, and gave up the inherited nuclear arsenal. Oil at Tengiz and Kashagan carries the economy. The capital was moved north to Astana in 1997 and has been renamed repeatedly. Astana is the capital and Almaty the largest city. The country is larger than western Europe and has about twenty million people. It is the world's largest landlocked state. The steppe here is where horses were first domesticated. Kazakh, a Turkic language, has been written in Arabic, Latin and Cyrillic script and is being moved back to Latin. Apples originated in the mountains near Almaty, whose name refers to them.

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