Ethnic Kazakhs in Northern Part of Kazakhstan Very Different from Ethnic Kazakhs in South, Zen.Yandex Central Asia Portal Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Jan. 6 – Russians and others who write about Kazakhstan inevitably talk about the different between the division in that country between the North which until recently has been dominated by ethnic Russians and the South which has always been more Kazakh in ethnic terms and is increasingly so.

            But such discussions fail to capture something else that may be even more important for the future of that Central Asian state, the differences between ethnic Kazakhs living in the North and ethnic Kazakhs living in the South, differences related to the Russian presence but not exhausted by that (zen.yandex.ru/media/centralasia/chem-severnye-kazahi-otlichaiutsia-ot-iujnyh-61e5959777b7ce520ae019a6?&).

            According to the Zen.Yandex Central Asia portal, the differences between the Kazakhs of the North and those of the south predate the Soviet period, reflecting different rates of the settlement of the nomadic population – far more quickly in the south than in the north – and a Russian presence that predated the absorption of Kazakh lands into the Russian Empire.

            Until the 1990s, ethnic Russians “exceeded the number of the titular nation” across the northern portion of Kazakhstan, but “with rare exceptions, that is not the case at present. Nevertheless, the outflow of ethnic Russians has not had much of an impact on the mentality of Kazakhs” regionally.

            Kazakhs in the north are more educated, more secular, and less Islamic than are the longer-time sedentary Kazakhs in the south where with the exception of a small number of “isolated enclaves,” ethnic Russians form “an insignificant minority” in the population and have not had the same impact.

            “In the south,” the portal continues, the Kazakhs are “believers in the eastern sense.” Here too are where Kazakhs returning from Mongolia and China who do not know Russian have settled. And as a result, Southerners have retained their language, their culture, and their traditional divisions far more strongly than the Northerners.

            The two regional groups treat each other “in a condescending manner,” with the Northerners viewing Southerners as backward, and Southerners viewing Northerners as “’incorrect’ Kazakhs [shala kazakhi].” And those attitudes have real world consequences: sometimes employers in one region won’t hire Kazakhs from another.

            Sometimes Moscow has exploited these differences, but they remain serious challenges for the central government of Kazakhstan even if there is no manipulation of such a divide from the outside.