The Place of Kazakhstan in the Study of Central Asia

Abstract

The Place of Kazakhstan in the Study of Central Asia Gulmira Sultangalieva (bio) Translated by Paul W. Werth Among the republics of Central Asia, Kazakhstan represents a distinct geographical, geopolitical, cultural, and historical entity.1 In the west and north, Kazakhstan constitutes a borderland belt (poias prigranich´ia) with Russia and its territories of the lower Volga, southern Urals, and Siberia. In the east, the region borders on China, while the southern and southeastern portions can be considered part of Central Asia. As a territory inhabited historically by nomads, Kazakhstan has seen its historical and cultural significance rise and fall, periodically becoming either the center or the periphery of ethno-political and ethno-cultural processes in the region. This history raises a series of questions: What place does Kazakhstan occupy in Central Asia? Has Central Asia existed as a single and coherent region? What role has the study of Central Asia and Kazakhstan played in attempts to understand the state organization, history, and culture of the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union? In my view, exploration of these questions should broaden academic interest in the history of Central Asia—a history that occupies a critical place in any effort to make sense of historical processes in neighboring countries such as China, Russia, Iran, and Afghanistan. A Complex Nomenclature Any attempt to answer these questions must begin with nomenclature, which proves to be especially complicated in the case of Kazakhstan and Central Asia. Indeed, considering the history of the term “Central Asia” allows us not only to see that there have been various names for the region and disagreement concerning the definition of its borders and to understand the significance [End Page 345] of Kazakhstan within a broader regional system.2 Such a consideration also shows that the meaning of “Central Asia” has changed over time, depending on such factors as the political context, the attitude of authors to particular geographical and historical phenomena, and so on. The term “Central Asia” first became a part of geographical and historical scholarship in the 19th century, thanks to the German natural scientist Alexander von Humboldt.3 Although his travels in the Russian Empire included only the middle and southern Urals, the Altai, the Volga delta around Astrakhan, and the nearby Kazakh steppe, Humboldt nonetheless defined the boundaries of the entire region, characterizing it as an internal space of the Asian continent extending from the Caspian Sea in the west to an indefinite border in the east. The German geographer Ferdinand von Richthofen offered a more exact definition of “Central Asia” while dividing the region into two parts. “Central Asia” proper, according to Richthofen, encompassed the space from Tibet in the south to the Altai in the north, and from the Pamir Mountains in the west to the Khingan range in the east.4 Richthofen described the lowlands between the Aral and Caspian Seas—which in the 18th and 19th centuries were dominated economically and culturally by Kazakhs of the tribal confederation of the Alimuli of the Little Horde—as a transitional zone.5 The intermediate space of the Kazakh steppe that Richthofen identified reveals a distinct geopolitical feature of Kazakhstan, which linked different parts of Central Asia into a regional system. For similar reasons, one may suppose, Russian researchers of the first half of the 19th century characterized the territories of the Little and Middle Hordes (the northern, western, and central parts of Kazakhstan) as the “Kirgiz-Kazak hordes and steppes” (kirgiz-kaisatskie ordy i stepi) but regarded the southern portions of the Kazakh steppe, controlled by the khanates of Kokand and Khiva and the emirate of Bukhara, as part of “Middle Asia.”6 It is significant that [End Page 346] whereas in the first half of the 19th century the term “Kirgiz steppe” was used with the qualifiers “of western Siberia” or “under the jurisdiction of Orenburg,” from 1882 on, Russian authorities used the more encompassing toponym the “Steppe,” once they had created the Steppe General-Governorship (Stepnoe general-gubernatorstvo) and decisively separated the northern, western, and eastern parts of the steppe zone of Kazakhstan from the southern portions. This kind of territorial division reflected the fact that the steppe transcended the...