On the Construction of Kazakhstan’s National State From the Factor of “Immigration” Between Kazakhstan and Russia

Abstract

Kazakhstan is the only country in Central Asia with a common border with Russia. Since the tribal Khanate period, the whole grassland has almost borne the pressure of “reclamation immigrants” from Russia, and this colonial memory from the Tsarist Russian period has also been deeply embedded in the history of Central Asia. After the establishment of the Soviet regime, the Kazakh grassland was incorporated into the territory of the Soviet Union. Stalin quickly divided Central Asia into five parts by “language family”. Historical immigrants and indigenous people obtained the identity of “Soviet citizen”, and the unified political identity weakened their national consciousness. In 1992, the five Central Asian countries declared independence as new countries, and the five “language families” became the main ethnic groups and embarked on a new path of political development. After three decades, Kazakhstan, as a neighbor of Russia, “immigration” is one of the factors that cannot be ignored in the construction of its nation-state and involves the issue of demarcation and identification. This paper mainly investigates the history and reality of immigrants from Kazakhstan and Russia and tries to analyze its influence on the construction of Kazakhstan's nation-state.

Translated by Zhu Ruiqing.

The construction of a nation-state is all about “what is an ethnic majority” which involves discussions of nation and nationalism. The contemporary discussions about “immigrants” focus more on the international movement of people with its dominant influence mainly on the economy. However, originating in European countries, immigration is essentially an act of invasion and ethnic assimilation. It is “the principle of nationality” that is all about annexation and territory management, which can be found in both of Frederick Engels’ works: A New Partition of Poland and The Frankfurt Assembly Debates the Polish Question. The characteristics of immigration, as mentioned above, have been repeated during the Russian Empire’s territorial expansion with the spread of Germanization to the Slavic regions. The Slavic immigrants moving toward the Central Asia grassland have not only extended its empire border southward but also paved the way for all of the Soviet Union’s activities in terms of “the principle of nationality”. Hence, Central Asian regions were now completely under the governance of the Great Slavic Nation.

Kazakhstan, as the only modern country among Central Asian nation-states that shares a continuous border with Russia, stands both as a “leading country” and a “geographic obstruction” in Central Asia. It has historically taken in the first group of Slavic immigrants and is for the first time confronted with handling the conflict between “ethnic majority” and “Russian nationality” when forming the nation-state. In Kazakhstan, “immigrants” refers not only to the movement of people but intrinsically, its language choice, nationalism, identification, and political development combined have affected the formation of Kazakhstan nation-state. Therefore, this paper will elaborate on “immigrants”.

1 The Cossack Immigrants: Military Reclamation in Tsarist Russia

The Cossacks,¹ an important group of immigrants that helped to extend the empire’s southern border into Central Asia in Russian history, mainly inhabited in Ural, Orenburg, Siberia, and Semirechye Oblast. The Cossack immigrants, so to speak, not only played the role of integration and infiltration and deeply affected the demographic distribution and production patterns and lifestyles of the Nomadic people in Central Asia in various ways, peaceful or violent, during immigration, but also guarded the frontier as the irregulars² of Russian Empire.

Ural (Yakutsk) Cossack, the first immigrants that entered the northwestern steppe of Kazakhstan, have been sent by the Grand Duchy of Moscow to station in the southeastern border as military emigrants since the fourteenth century. This group of immigrants actively engaged in the Peasants’ War (1773–1775) and after that they founded an army called “the Cossack Army”, which was later officially renamed as “Ural Cossacks Army”.³ The population of Ural Cossacks has amounted to 123,000 at the beginning of the twentieth century and they implemented the customary system of “forming an alliance” in the steppes⁴, i.e., to establish a friendly, close, and mutually beneficial relationship between the Cossack and Kazakhstan families. This institution helped the Cossacks rapidly grasp Kazakh language and establish trading relations with the indigenous Kazakhstan tribes.⁵ Founded between 1748 and 1755, the Orenburg Cossack Army was more ethnically complicated than the Ural Cossacks Army. Consisting of Ukrainians, Tartars, Bashkirs, and Kalmyks, the Orenburg Cossack Army was mainly responsible for safeguarding the southern and southeastern border of Orenburg. In 1870, the Orenburg Cossack has gained “institutional autonomy” and set up a military-graded management system. The Orenburg Cossack immigrants, with a population in 1916 of approximately 533,000, were mainly engaged in agriculture, animal husbandry, and fisheries. In “the time of famine”,⁶ they would conflict with Kazakhstan nomads over grasslands.⁷ The conflicts and trading of Ural and Orenburg Cossack immigrants with Kazakhstan tribes had a huge impact on the daily lives and clans’ cultural structures of the tribes in the northwest and southwest Kazakhstan steppes.

Belonging to the policing system of the Tsarist Russia, the Siberian Cossack Army was actually the border guards set up in the eighteenth century to prevent Dzungar and Kazakh refugees from entering southern west Siberia of Russia. On August 19, 1808, the Cossacks in southern Siberia were officially named the “Siberian Cossacks” before they gradually expanded their migration range from the south to the southeast.

At the end of the nineteenth century, required by the administrative planning of the Tsarist Russian government, the Siberian Cossacks were divided into two General Governments of the Steppes: Akmolinsk and Semipalatinsk, and Tomsk Governorate in Biysky District. In 1894, there were 170 households in the Siberian Cossack settlement, of whom 96% were Christians and 4% Muslims. There were 152 educational institutions in the district, 149 of which were Cossack village and township middle schools. The natural conditions in this region were relatively favorable. The Cossack immigrants’ settlements bordering the Kazakh residential areas were basically peaceful. Fruits, vegetables, and tobacco have become the main trading products between the Cossacks and Kazakhs.⁸ Originally belonging to the 9th and 10th regiments of the Siberian Cossack Army, the Seven Rivers Cossack Army officially became one of the independent branches of the Cossack Army on July 13, 1867, and they established 13 settlements in Sarkan, Kopal, Koksu, Karskkin, Grubovsk, Nadezhdinsk, Sufisk, Greater Almaty, Lesser Almaty, and Nikolayevsk⁹ with a total of 32,500 inhabitants¹⁰ as of 1894. Its main task was to defend the southern border of Turkestan, while playing a part in guarding the area. The Seven Rivers Cossacks began to colonize the countryside on a large scale since 1869, declaring their identities as “regional rulers” in terms of from clothing to the entire civil society.¹¹

Ever since the disintegration of the Soviet Union, the Russian Federation has always been ambiguous about the definition of “Cossack immigrants” in the southern frontier.¹² Meanwhile, the Seven Rivers Cossacks in Kazakhstan have been very active in participating in the “Cossack Revival” campaign. Founded in 1991 in Almaty, the “Seven Rivers Cossack Association” was officially renamed “Cossack Union of the Seven Rivers” in July 1992. In November 1994, its leader, Nikolai Kungen, tried to unite all the Cossacks for gatherings, calling for “the return of the Seven Rivers to Russia and reinstatement of Russian as the official language”. In fact, during the first ten years after Kazakhstan’s independence, there were anti-government incidents organized by Cossack societies in north Kazakhstan. Some Russian nationalists re-established paramilitary organizations in the name of “Cossacks”. They not only communicated and conspired with the “Cossacks” in the Russian Federation to demand “autonomy”, but even proposed a motion to incorporate North Kazakhstan into the Russian Federation.¹³ In the winter of 1993, “Russian-speaking” residents in the northern Kazakhstan city of Pavlodar clashed with Kazakh residents.¹⁴ Therefore, on April 17, 1996, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Kazakhstan sent a diplomatic note to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation, stating that “if Moscow acquiesced in the inclusion of the Cossacks into an unofficial military organization and ignored its activities, it would seriously undermine the friendship between the two peoples and the tradition of good-neighborliness. It was an irrational act. The participation of the Cossacks in the Non-military Guards would inevitably lead to tensions among the border residents, which would result in conflicts of serious consequences”. Russia finally gave up taking non-military border defense measures and incorporated the Cossacks into the regular troops responsible for border defense.¹⁵ So far, the border tension between Kazakhstan and Russia has been defused.

The historical presence of Cossack immigrants in the Kazakh steppe proves that there are obvious benefits of the “military reclamation and colonization” adopted in the imperial Russian period.

Central Asia, though it has always been a relatively independent political civilization, has maintained the original “Khanate-tribe” structure after the conquest of the Arab Empire and the Mongol Empire. The Cossack military immigrants of the Russian Empire, however, entered the Kazakh steppe and they had been advancing the southern fortress line. This has completely changed the geopolitical structure of the entire Central Asia. Meanwhile, it historically foreshadowed a complex relationship between the “Russian-speaking” and the “Turkic-speaking” ethnic groups. It then has become one of the remaining issues in the border area after Kazakhstan’s independence.

2 Russian Immigrants: A Remaining Issue of the Soviet Union

In the 1880s, the agricultural problems in the Central oblasts of Russia intensified. The imperial Russian authorities decided to restrict the migration of farmers from the border areas to the center. Only farmers with rich materials had the right to move to Akmolinsk and Semipalatinsk. In 1888, the population of the Kazakh Bucheyev tribe in Astrakhan Oblast, located near the west of the Kazakh-Russian border, grew rapidly to 237,500.¹⁶ The main reason for the rapid growth of agricultural production in the steppe oblasts and Lower Volgao oblasts was that in the post-reform era, the large vacant land in the steppe frontier attracted a large inflow of immigrants and rapidly expanded the planting area, becoming the main immigrant region in Central Europe and Russia.¹⁷ During this period, the border between the Kazakh steppe and Russia gradually moved southward. Russia has completely incorporated what is now north Kazakhstan into its southern frontier, and the Cossacks, Ukrainians, Belarusians, and Poles in the Central regions of Russia began to migrate southward. According to the research of Savin (Савин И.С.), in 1897, based on the immigration flow of the Kazakh steppe and its natural increase rate, the number of “Europeans” (Slavs) accounted for 11% of the residents of the southern border region. Russian population increased from 539,700 to 1,439,100, with an increase of proportion to 18.9%.¹⁸ Although immigration¹⁹ did not have much impact on the demographic structure of the Caspian coastal area, with the imperialist Russia’s implementation of policies that encouraged immigration, a large number of Russian and Ukrainian peasants in the 1990s, poured into Central Asia, which greatly changed the indigenous ethnic structures, especially in north Kazakhstan steppes where the Russians along the Irtysh River have always been the absolute majority and regarded as settlements of the historical and traditional culture of Russians.

In November 1917, the Bolsheviks won the revolution and seized power from the provisional government, but also inherited various unsolved problems from the Tsarist Russia. After the decisive victory in the civil war in 1919, the issue of the formation of a national republic in the Central Asian steppe was extensively studied and discussed in the leading decision-making bodies of the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks) in Moscow, Orenburg, Tashkent, and other places. In August 1920, the “Kyrgyz Soviet Socialist Republic” (Киргизская АССР) was established,²⁰ with the capital of Orenburg, belonging to the Russian Federation. Though it was claimed as the first “republic”, it was actually an ethnic autonomous region of the Soviet Union. In 1924, there were disputes over the border regions of the Kyrgyz (Kazakh) Republic with Russia. Moscow finally decided to incorporate parts of Omsk, Tomsk, Tyumen, and Altay into the administrative jurisdiction of the Kyrgyz (Kazakh) Republic, but Russians at that time made up the vast majority of the 625,900 people in the eastern part of the frontier regions. The Central Committee of the Soviet Union established “republics” based on the distributions of ethnic groups (in fact, language boundaries), but the actual Kazakh Republic was still dominated by multi-ethnic settlements. According to the first census in 1926, the Kazakhs, the ethnic majority, only accounted for 57% of the total population of the Kazakh Republic. This was because for a fledgling regime like the Soviet Union, the economy and politics were facing a new round of revival, whereas the European part of Soviet Union was suffering from a serious agricultural crisis at that time and massive unemployment and famine in cities resulted in population migration. These immigrants were mainly categorized into 3 groups: planned agricultural immigrants, industrial immigrants, and expelled migrants. Among them, planned agricultural immigration was the key part because these residents spontaneously migrated toward Siberia and Kazakhstan even before the Soviet People’s Committee adopted the immigration policy amid the civil war at that time. Another reason for the migration was the great famine that broke out in Kazakhstan in 1921–1922. Between 1920 and 1922, the population of the Urals and Aktobe oblast plummeted to 213,500 people (21.8%), of which nearly 95.8% were Kazakhs rural population. On one hand, with the implementation of “collectivization” and the outbreak of the Great Famine, a large number of Kazakhs died or fled abroad, which resulted in a heavy loss of Kazakh population, the “nation majority”. On the other hand, new immigrants, of whom were mainly Russians, from the European part of the Soviet Union had flown into the region: First, people were relocated by the Soviet Union in an organized manner with the goal of “industrialization”; secondly, the slogan of “eliminating the rich peasants” was used to clean out the population, and a large number of “rich peasants whose means of production and land had been confiscated” were forcibly relocated to the Republic of Kazakh.²¹ At the end of the 1930s, the Kazakh population in the Kazakh Republic dropped to 37.84%, 2 percentage points less than the Russian population. These factors combined elicited significant changes in the demographic structures of the Kazakh Republic (Fig. 1).

Fig. 1

Changes in the proportion of Kazakh and Russian populations in Kazakhstan (%).Footnote

According to the data of Kazakhstan’s official demographic. http://www.gpedia.com/ru/gpedia/Население_Казахстана.

(哈萨克人: Kazakhs 俄罗斯人: Russians)

During the Great Patriotic War in the 1940s, the whole Central Asia had become the rear area to support the front line, and Kazakhstan, as the main region, had received the evacuated population from the European part of the Soviet Union. In the 1950s, a massive land reclamation was carried out in Kazakhstan, and a large number of immigrants were mobilized from the European Soviet Union under the rule of Khrushchev. Data has shown that from 1897 to 1961, the number of Russian residents moving to Kazakhstan rose from 539,700 to 1,439,100,²³ with the proportion of Kazakhs in the republic once dropping to 30%. By 1989, Russian population in Kazakhstan had reached nearly 6 million.²⁴ This is the staged result of Soviet Russia's implementation of the “Russianization of the frontier regions”, which persisted until Kazakhstan gained its independence.

3 The Issue of Ethnic Percentages in Kazakhstan

Kazakhstan inherited 2.66 million km² of land from the Soviet Union after its independence so it has become the largest country among the five countries in Central Asia. It successfully resolved the historical issue left by China and the Soviet Union by actively participating in China's “one-on-four” (i.e., China and post-Soviet Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan) border negotiations before and after the disintegration of the Soviet Union, the ethnic conflicts within the Central Asian countries, however, continued to intensify in the wake of the disintegration of the Soviet Union as the awareness of “nationality” enhanced. Some descendants of Cossack immigrants from northern Kazakhstan, which had just gained its independence, were impacted by extreme nationalism and had showed signs as national separatists of “returning” to the Russian Federation. During this period, the political proposition of the “National Reunification Harmony Campaign” was proposed in Kazakhstan mainly to oppose the “Kazakhization” of the Russians in the Kazakh society. Therefore, it is particularly important to note that it remains a thorny problem for Kazakhstan in the process of building a modern country to demarcate a 7000 km border with the Russian Federation as an equal sovereign state.

The immigration problems faced by contemporary Kazakhstan are mainly manifested in the following three aspects: first, the more than 6 million Russians left in the country makes Kazakhstan one of the countries with the largest number of “Russians” in the post-Soviet region; secondly, the total domestic population of Kazakhs is relatively low, which is a disadvantage for a single-ethnic state named after Kazakh. As the main ethnic group, Kazakhs especially do not occupy a dominant position in politics and society; thirdly, right after Kazakhstan's independence the northern border witnessed a flow of migration in opposite directions. To a large extent, these two waves of emigration have again had an impact on Kazakhstan's ethnic structure.

As stated at the end of the second part above, the year 1989 was a turning point for the reversal of the Kazakh-Russian percentage in Kazakhstan (see Table 1). On the eve of independence, Kazakhs living in North Kazakh and Akmolinsk in the Irtysh River Basin, and in Karaganda, East Kazakh, Pavlodar, and Kostanay regions accounted for only 20% of the total population, and Russians living here viewed these regions as their historical living areas.

Table 1 The distribution of Russians and Kazakhs in the northern region of Kazakhstan in 1989Footnote

Жаркенова А. М., “Полиэтнический состав населения Северного Казахстана в конце XIX—начале XXI вв.: исторические особенности, современные тенденции и перспективы”, https://articlekz.com/article/29631?ysclid=l7smmgm4m0358098209.

The number of Kazakhs in Kazakhstan has risen from 6,496,900 to 7,985,000 (an increase of 23%) from 1989 to 1999, but the growth rate could not compensate for the loss of the immigrant population, and the increased death rate and the decreased birth rate combined resulted in a population actually 1.6 times less than the expected total population.²⁶ In fact, the obvious changes in the domestic demographic structure after Kazakhstan’s independence are mainly about “identity”; first, “Slavic-speaking” immigrants of Russian origin, such as Russians, and their descendants, considered themselves “second-class citizens” and desperately desired to return to their home countries (European countries such as Russia). In 1992 alone, 175,000 Russians left Kazakhstan, 170,000 in 1993, and 250,000 in 1994.²⁷ Russians dropped from 6,225,000 in 1989 to 5,100,000 in 1997, a decrease of 1,123,200. During the same period, Ukrainians dropped from 896,000 to 720,300, a drop of 175,700; the German population plummeted from 957,000 in 1989 to 680,000 in early 1996²⁸; Secondly, the collapse of the Central Asian economic system after the fall of the Soviet Union forced a large number of Kazakhs to give up their “identities” and emigrate for a better living environment. The percentage of Kazakh citizens who emigrated to the Russian Federation from 1995 to 1999 accounted for 60–75% of the total number of immigrants. From 2001 to 2011, nearly 650,000 Kazakh immigrants became Russian citizens, constituting 40% of the total number of naturalized immigrants in the Russian Federation.²⁹ Therefore, facing the reality of a large-scale emigration of Russians and the main ethnic population at the same time, Kazakhstan in the early to mid-independence period began to call for the return of Kazakhs left outside the new republic. In 1992, Kazakhstan established the “ the World Association of Kazakhs” and Nazarbayev was elected the chairman of the association, and convened the first “World Kazakhs Conference”, which fully demonstrated the Kazakh leaders’ strong commitment to “national construction”. Since Kazakhstan's independence, the Kazakhs have risen from less than 40% to 66% (2015), while the Russian population has dropped to 21% (2015).³⁰ Hargiobayev, deputy director of the Employment and Immigration Committee of the Ministry of Health and Development of Kazakhstan, revealed that from 1992 to 2016, a total of 955,894 Kazakhs from more than 260,000 households returned including some self-relocated people. The total number of Kazakhs who have returned to Kazakhstan has exceeded one million, accounting for about one-seventeenth of Kazakhstan total population and one-seventh of the domestic Kazakh population.³¹ Based on the analysis above, the emergence of immigration flows from two directions on the northern border of Kazakhstan has largely solved the historical issue of “Kazakh ethnic vacancy”, and the Kazakh government has actively promoted the dual policies of encouraging Kazakhs to have more children and relenting on the outbound migration of Russians, which have been greatly changing the ethnic structures of Kazakhstan’s domestic population.

The impact of Tsarist Russia's colonial history in the Kazakh steppe on the racial percentage of Kazakhs has always attracted the attention of Kazakhstan leaders. For new countries, solving the “personal” issue is as equally prominent as solving “territoriality”. In the nearly 30 years since the independence of Central Asian countries, scholars from both Kazakhstan and Russia have two schools of thought on the formation of the territoriality of the two countries: one is that the radicals interpret the “merger” of some areas as “annexation”, and believe that this is a “negative period” for both countries, whereas the other is an attempt by moderates to analyze and observe the process from different perspectives. But in fact, the problems that need to be solved between Kazakhstan and Russia in the stage of modern state construction are not only about the historical issue of whether Russia “annexed” Kazakhstan but also about the impact of historical and contemporary immigration on the construction of state, among which the “immigration issue” in northern Kazakhstan has always been an important factor affecting national identity and border demarcation.

In 1997, former US politician Brzezinski warned that “Kazakhstan will face the danger of territorial dismemberment if Kazakhstan-Russia relations deteriorate”.³² In 2002, the total population of the border regions between Kazakhstan and Russia exceeded 25 million.³³ There are 5.8 million inhabitants in Kazakhstan's regions bordering Russia, of which more than 1.6 million live in the areas adjacent to Russia.³⁴ Located in what is now Kazakhstan West, the population of three frontier regions—Atyrau, Siha and Aktobe—is basically Kazakhs. Kostanay, Beiha, Pavlovdar, and East Kazakhstan, in the central, northern, and eastern part of Kazakhstan, have a Russians-dominated population. The residents in the border regions adjacent to the Russian Federation and Kazakhstan are basically all Russians with small Kazakhs percentages of only 14.2% and 5.8% in Astrakhan and Orenburg respectively. The combined percentage of Kazakhs in Astrakhan, Volgograd, Saratov, and Orenburg regions constitutes 30% of the total population of the Russian Federation frontier territory.³⁵ In general, an overwhelming majority of the people in the northern regions bordering Russian Federation speak Russian as their native language³⁶ and the percentage of Russian-speaking people in the North Kazakhstan Region is even as high as 50%, similar to that of eastern Ukraine.

In 2014, the “Crimea Annexation by Russia” and the subsequent secession crisis in the eastern part of Ukraine, where the Russian population is highly concentrated, were delivering silent warnings to the Kazakhstan.³⁷ Rembayev, the former deputy director of the Institute of World Economics and Politics (IWEP) at the Foundation of the First President of the Republic of Kazakhstan also proposed that “we are too close to Russia and we must cling to the ‘polar bear’ tightly without being hurt by it”.³⁸ Although Kazakhstan has maintained friendly bilateral relations with the Russian Federation since its independence, the potential threat to sovereignty caused by the disproportion of ethnic groups still raised warnings to Kazakhstan leaders so that they took the initiative to advance substantive negotiations on the border demarcation with the Russian Federation and completed it in terms of international law. This has become the primary task of safeguarding the territorial and sovereign integrity of Kazakhstan. In fact, like the Romanization of the Kazakhstan’s official language, the “return” of immigrants and the integration of population are more political rather than technical issues for the construction of the Kazakh nation-state featuring prioritization of Kazakhs.

4 Contemporary Kazakhstan: Population Proportion Adjustment and Demarcation

“Immigration affairs” have always been Kazakhstan leaders’ top priority after the independence of the country. It urged, on one hand, the “return” of Kazakhs abroad, and on the other hand, it relented on the “return” of ethnic minorities such as Russians in the country to their historical motherland. Meanwhile, residents of the South Kazakhstan region were relocated to the northern regions. The former can be described as “external immigration”, while the latter “internal immigration”. It was essentially designed to adjust the percentages of ethnic groups with the ultimate goal to rebuild the national identity.

4.1 Measures to Adjust the Domestic Ethnic Demographic Structures

In 1997, the Kazakh authorities made a significant decision to move the capital to Nur-Sultan, 1000 km north to Almaty. This move was considered a purposeful measure to strengthen the control over the northern region and to balance Russian influence over north Kazakhstan.³⁹ The relocation of the capital led to the migration of Kazakhs from the south to the north of the country, which changed the Kazakhstan ethnic distribution featuring “Kazakhs-dominated South and Russian-dominated North “. The rising percentage of Kazakhs in north Kazakhstan reduces the potential risks of secession in the region and lays a solid foundation for stability in the northern border area.⁴⁰

On July 22, 2011, the Republic of Kazakhstan promulgated “Law No. 477-IV on Migration”. In 2012, the former President Nursultan Nazarbayev proposed the “Kazakhstan-2050” national strategic plan, in which the “population potential development” was listed as a long-term priority for the government’s work. It is stated in the document that: on one hand, the “immigration wave” may cause an imbalance of continued growth, which increases social tensions or instability in the local labor market; on the other hand, Kazakhstan faces a problem that some residents cannot integrate into the local society, resulting in an increase in the number of migrant workers.⁴¹ The official document stated that the relevant departments of Kazakhstan must take measures to stop the increase of “outbound migration”. On January 16, 2013, Kazakhstan president promulgated Decree No. 466 “On Further Improvement of Kazakhstan’s National Governance System”, which specifically requires the Ministry of National Economy to formulate relevant policies concerning “immigration” and ask the Ministry of Healthcare, the Ministry of Internal Affairs and its departments, and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, The Border Service of the National Security Committee of the Republic of Kazakhstan, and the local executive agencies of Almaty and Nur-Sultan, regional immigration departments and social planning departments to jointly participate in the implementation of the policy. Between 2014 and 2016, Kazakhstan reduced the possibility of its flow to other countries by prioritizing domestic market licensing for “highly-skilled labor resources”, which has been listed as a long-term task for the Kazakhstan government.⁴² Meanwhile, the Kazakhstan government put forward the “2017–2021 Kazakhstan Immigration Policy”⁴³ initiatives. At present, the Kazakh government is implementing a policy concerning the migration of labor resources from south to north in order to adjust the imbalance of the domestic demographic structure, which are the countermeasures mainly aiming at the residents population decline in Pavlodar. East Kazakh, Kostanay, and North Kazakh. The four states have lost 167,000 people in the past five years.⁴⁴ Jambul, South Kazakh, Almaty, Kyzylorda, and Mangstao, however, are labor-intensive areas. Currently, 114 households (about 461 persons) are temporarily relocated to the north. As planned by the government, 59,000 households will be “relocated from south to north” within five years between 2018 and 2022.⁴⁵ Experts estimate that the population of southern Kazakhstan will rise to 5.2 million by 2050, and its resettlement density will be as high as four times that of the same index in the northern region.⁴⁶

From January to December 2019, Kazakhstan’s internal migration population reached 1.1 million, an increase of 25.6% compared with the same period in 2018 (888,400); the number of foreign immigrants reached 12,260 (down 4.1% in one year) and the emigration population reached 45,200 (an increase of 8% in one year) (see Table 2). With regard to citizen types, there are 1700 children and adolescents, 9500 working-age residents, 1100 retirees among inbound immigrants; 11,700 children and adolescents, 31,500 laborers, and 2100 retirees among the outbound immigrants. With regard to the percentage of ethnic groups, the largest proportion of the immigrants goes to Kazakh (7000), Russian (2650), and Karakalpak (301); among the immigrant population, there are 32,800 Russians and 3200 Germans as well as 3000 Ukrainians. In terms of distribution area, the main settlements of immigrants are Mangstau (2500) and Almaty Region (2100), as well as Almaty (1400); the outbound immigrants are mainly from East Kazakhstan Region (7100), Karaganda (5800), and Costanay (5700). In terms of countries of origin for immigrants, among the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), most of the immigrants to Kazakhstan are from Uzbekistan (4160), the Russian Federation (3400), and Turkmenistan (874); most of the outbound immigrants from Kazakhstan went to the Russian Federation (39,800), Uzbekistan (435), and Belarus (356).

Table 2 Number of residents moving in and out of Kazakhstan from January to December 2019Footnote

Data from the Statistics Committee of the Ministry of National Economy of Kazakhstan, https://kaz.zakon.kz/5010952-migratsiya-naseleniya-rk-za-2019-god.html.

4.2 Demarcation of Borders and Establishment of Border Systems

The immigration issue in the demarcation of the border between Kazakhstan and Russia has basically been resolved. As for whether immigration from northern Kazakhstan will affect the progress of the demarcation work between Kazakhstan and Russia, the leaders of the two countries have basically reached a consensus: First, the border between the two countries is the longest land border in the world and it requires a long process of negotiation and site investigation. Secondly, the original border between the two countries has existed for a long time. Although there are cultural differences between the immigrants and the indigenous inhabitants, the regional economic relations are closely intertwined. The immigrants have also maintained exchanges with their countries of origin. The new borders may hamper exchanges, so financial and security administrative systems reforms are required in the original border areas⁴⁸; thirdly, the socioeconomic situation in Kazakhstan still needs to be restored; fourthly, of the two countries, the ethnically-identified residents have been anxious about their relations with their neighbor. Based on this consensus, the two countries have endeavored to press on with resolving border and immigration issues. On December 12, 1998, the two countries signed a memorandum of intent for demarcation negotiations to determine the current status of demarcation and its direction. From 2000 to 2005, Kazakhstan and Russia conducted 50 rounds of negotiations concerning the preparatory work for border demarcation, of which as many as 26 plenary meetings, 13 working group meetings, and 11 closed-door meetings were held. By the end of November 2019, the joint border demarcation commissions of the Russian Federation and Kazakhstan have held 100 meetings in Moscow, and 86.7% of the border demarcation work between the two countries has been completed, including the completion of the border relocation of all arterial roads.⁴⁹ At present, a total of 50 border crossings have been set up on the Kazakh-Russian border, of which 49 are in normal operation, including 30 road crossings, 18 railway crossings, and 1 river crossing.⁵⁰

After more than ten years of the first phase of the demarcation negotiations between the two countries, the joint demarcation committee of the two countries has started the actual demarcation process. Throughout the process of demarcation between Kazakhstan and the Russian Federation, the two countries have gone through a very heavy and lengthy negotiation process. The negotiation process for the demarcation of the border is basically over.

After more than ten years of the first stage of demarcation negotiations between the two countries, the joint demarcation commissions of the two countries have embarked on the actual demarcation process. The demarcation process conducted by the Kazakhstan and the Russia Federation has been very hectic and lengthy. The two sides conducted strict accounting in terms of politics, economy, judiciary, geography, history, culture, nationalities, etc. The negotiations over border demarcation were not completed until 2009.

As of 2019, the only remaining disputed section is the village of Ogneupol (Огнеупол) in Kostanay Region on the border between Kazakhstan and Russia. During the Soviet period, the Magnitogorsk Iron and Steel Works of Russia has been engaging in the mining of refractory clay in Poskuri open-pit mines in the area, and the construction period is until 2023. Located in Kazakhstan, Ogneupol village has been long settled by the Russians. There are 700 households in the mining area, 96 of which are Kazakhs ethnicity, but they are all Russian citizens working in steel companies. Russia is responsible for most of the life services transportation and socioeconomic infrastructures in the mining construction area. Therefore, Russia offered to exchange 293 hectares of fertile arable land in the Chesmensky District of Chelyabinsk Oblast on an equal basis for the village of Ogneupol in Kostanay Region, Kazakhstan. The leaders of both sides arranged a meeting to discuss the future ownership of the Poskuri open-pit mine. Kazakhstan made it clear that the village of Ogneupol could be exchanged but only on condition that the Poskuri deposit be still owned by Kazakhstan. Considering the economic importance of the mineral resources, neither side has made any substantial concessions, and the two sides have so far not reached an agreement on the issue of the long-term or lifetime lease of Poscuri.⁵¹

As of February 2015, the border demarcation between Kazakhstan and Russia has been completed.⁵² The foreign minister of the Republic of Kazakhstan announced: “The work on the 14,000 km border map between Kazakhstan and its neighboring countries has been completed, and the site investigation and ground demarcation work have now been completed. We must learn the lessons of the Ukraine crisis that Russia and Ukraine do not have a demarcation agreement”. But in fact, Kazakhstan's border issue is significantly different from the Ukraine crisis in the fact that Kazakhstan, unlike Ukraine, has not been emboldened by NATO to constantly challenge Russia’s bottom line after independence. Therefore, following the official demarcation after Kazakhstan and Russia maintained good-neighborly and friendly relations, railway traffic from Kazakhstan can transit visa-free from the western Urals to Aktobe and Almaty. Likewise, the same humane practice will apply when the Trans-Siberian Railway crosses the territory of Kazakhstan near Petropavlovsk.⁵³ The aforementioned shows that a relatively deep mutual trust has actually been established between Kazakhstan and Russia, and Russia has not intentionally hindered Kazakhstan’s state-building process on the issues of historical immigration, demarcation, and territory.

5 Conclusion: Kazakhstan’s “Nation” Construction

As one of the largest unitary nation-states in Central Asia, Kazakhstan’s “identity construction” in building a modern state has always been subject to the “immigration problem” in the northern border area. These “Russian-speaking” Slavic ethnic groups have had a profound impact on the economy, culture, and production life of Kazakh steppes. The indigenous steppe people characteristic of the early Kazakhstan nomadic tribes has no actual concept of “border”. Russia has penetrated into the steppe in the geopolitical outlook to the east pushing the boundary of “people” and “territoriality” rapidly into the hinterland of Central Asia with its natural geographical advantages. During the process of conquering, annexing, reforming, and developing, the “Slavs” gradually influenced and changed the identity and country borders of the “Turkic”. However, in the process of the promotion of agricultural capitalism and frontier colonial policies, the Kazakh steppe nomads gradually developed a “national consciousness”. The frontier people who participated in the proletariat revolution during the Lenin period obtained the “The right of a people to self-determination”. The demand for autonomy in Russia’s southern frontier areas has become the main driving force in determining the border between Kazakhstan and Russia. Influenced by historical factors, the border between the two countries didn’t function well in several years following the fall of the Soviet Union.

In fact, the “immigration factor” has always been influencing the nation-building process from the Kazakh Khanate in the Tsarist Russia to the Republic of Kazakhstan. The border is the most direct way of expression, and the problem of identity is the most serious challenge. Kazakhstan’s identity building was mostly influenced by immigration, and its development was more or less influenced by ideological elements: the Russian Empire era was dominated by colonialist “reclamation theory”, and the Soviet era featured an attempt at “national self-determination” and Russian Marxist national equality. Nationalism is manifested in the Utopia of the early “Alashites”, while contemporary immigration is completely determined by the country’s policy guidelines and political system trends. Thirty years after the disintegration of the Soviet Union, Kazakhstan has solved the border issue through relentless efforts while maintaining friendly relations with Russia. However, from the perspective of “identity”, Kazakhstan's national (modern) state-building has not completely deviated from being a “unitary nation state”. As a de facto multi-ethnic country, Kazakhstan needs to face the next challenge, which is about how to continue to build a “national” identity while balancing the relationship between domestic minorities and the main ethnic group.