Kazakhstan

From the Saka horsemen of the Great Steppe to the world's largest landlocked nation.

Kazakhstan occupies the heart of the Eurasian steppe, a vast grassland that for three millennia nourished mounted nomads, from the Iron Age Saka (the eastern Scythians) through the Turkic khaganates and the Silk Road towns of Otrar, Taraz, and Turkestan. Genghis Khan's armies stormed the region in 1219-1221 and folded it into the Mongol empire's western wing, the Golden Horde; out of the Horde's breakup the sultans Janibek and Kerei founded the Kazakh Khanate around 1465, an event Kazakhs regard as the root of their statehood, organised into three jüz (hordes). Russia gradually absorbed the steppe from the 1730s, and after 1917 it became the Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic, scene of the catastrophic 1930-33 collectivisation famine, the Virgin Lands campaign, the Gulag, and the Semipalatinsk nuclear test site. Kazakhstan was the last Soviet republic to declare independence, on 16 December 1991, and under Nursultan Nazarbayev built a new capital at Astana and a resource-driven economy before a turbulent succession to Kassym-Jomart Tokayev amid the January 2022 unrest.