Ethnic demography of Kazakhstan

Ethnic map of Kazakhstan, 2010.

Kazakhstan is multiethnic country where indigenous ethnic group - the Kazakhs, comprise the majority of the population. According to the 2009 census there are two dominant ethnic groups in Kazakhstan: ethnic Kazakhs (63.1%) and ethnic Russians (23.7%) with a wide array of other groups represented, including Ukrainians, Uzbeks, Germans, Chechens, Koreans, and Uyghurs.

History

Kazakhstan demographics 1897-1970. Major ethnic groups. Famines of 1920s and 1930s are marked with shades.

Kazakhstan is home to virtually any ethnic group that has ever come under the Russian sphere of influence. This diverse demography is due to countries's central location and its historical use by Russia as a place to send colonists, dissidents, and minority groups from its other frontiers - one can almost not understand Kazakhstan without understanding population transfer in the Soviet Union. From the 1930s until the 1950s, both Russian opposition (and such Russians "accused" of being part of the opposition) and certain minorities (especially Volga Germans, Poles, Ukrainians, Crimean Tatars, Kalmyks) had been interned in labor camps often merely due to their heritage or beliefs, mostly on collective orders by Joseph Stalin. This makes Kazakhstan one of the few places on Earth where normally-disparate Germanic, Indo-Iranian, Koreans, Chechen, and Turkic groups live together in a rural setting and not as a result of modern immigration. Most of the population speaks Russian; only half of ethnic Kazakhs speak Kazakh fluently, although it is enjoying a renaissance. Both Kazakh and Russian languages have official status.

After the fall of the Soviet Union, the German population of Kazakhstan proceeded to emigrate en masse during the 1990s , as Germany was willing to repatriate them. Also much of the smaller Greek minority took the chance to repatriate to Greece, so did many Russians move to Russia. Some groups have fewer good options for emigration but because of the economic situation are also leaving at rates comparable to the rest of the former East bloc.

Famines

Other big factor that greatly shaped the ethnic composition of Kazakhstan was 1920s and 1930s famines, caused by Collectivization in the Soviet Union. According to different estimates only in famine of 1930s up to 40% of Kazakhs (indigenous ethnic group) either died of starvation or fled the territory.^[1] Official government census data report the contraction of Kazakh population from 3.6 million in 1926, to 2.3 million in 1939.

Ethnic Composition of Kazakhstan

Table:^[2][3][4][5]

* For 1897 and 1911 "Russians" includes Ukrainians and Belarusians.

Census of 1999

Table: Ethnic Composition of Kazakhstan (Detailed Census Data)^[6]

Total Slavic/European population 27.0% in 2009 (compared with 60.3% in 1959, 57.3% in 1970, 54.5% in 1979, 49.8% in 1989 and 39.0% in 1999).^[2]

Decline of Slavic and Germanic population

Kazakhstan ethic composition by age in 2013.

There is a huge disparity in the birth rates and mortality rates for the various ethnic clusters. The first ethnic cluster (composing of ethnic Kazakhs and other Central Asian groups) show a very high birth rate and lower mortality (BR of 26.1 and DR of 6.7 per 1,000 in 1999). The demographic characteristics of this group has changed little since the 1980s and 1990s.

The second cluster, consisting of Eastern Slavs and Tatars are characterized by steep demographic decline (BR of 8.8 and DR of 16.7 per 1,000 in 1999). The birth rates for this cluster has halved since 1990 and death rates shot up by as much as 70%. The natural decrease of population alone was approaching -0.74% in 1999 (improved slightly during the next decade).

The third cluster, consisting of ethnic Germans and related smaller ethnic groups show little change in demographic characteristics since 1990. Their birth rates and death rates has remained more or less stable during the 1990s and improved during the first decade of 21st century, despite huge loss of population through immigration. The birth rate for ethnic Germans was measured at 21.8 per 1,000 (almost thrice of that in Germany) and mortality rate was measured at 11.9 per 1,000 (despite a somewhat elderly population due to emigration). Birth rates much higher than Slavic population and the mortality much less.^[7]

Demographic data

Vital statistics

As explained above, the Slavic groups have been declining ever since the 1960s, due to low birth rates and high death rates. Germans are characterized by very high birth rates, but it is mostly due to the high proportion of rural population and the presence of conservative religious factions like Mennonites and Evangelical Lutherans among them.

Table: Demographic characteristics of various ethnic groups of Kazakhstan^[8]

Inter-ethnic marriages

Most of the inter-ethnic marriages in Kazakhstan has been between various Slavic or Germanic groups (Russian - Ukrainian, German - Ukrainian, Russian - Polish or German - Russian). Inter-marriages between Turkic and European ethnic groups are increasing, but still quite rare.

Table: Number of individuals married outside their ethnic group^[8]

Mechanical population movement

Slavic and Germanic groups have been emigrating en masse since the 1960s, and the movement accelerated during the 1990s after the breakup of the Soviet Union. This has resulted in the reduction of the proportion of European ethnic groups in the population by more than half. More than 50% of the European Soviet ethic groups have left Kazakhstan since 1989, and just 15% of the pre-1989 ethnic German population remains now in the country.

Most of the immigration has been directed towards Russia, but small numbers have been immigrating to Ukraine, Belarus and Armenia also. Before the German authorities stopped the repatriation of ethnic Germans and their non-German relatives, Germany was one of the most favored destination for all the ethnic groups. It is estimated that close to half of the 4.5 million Soviet Germans and their Slavic kin who now live in Germany are originally from Kazakhstan. Currently on average close to 2,000 ethnic Germans emigrate from Kazakhstan to ethnic German dominated areas in Russia such as Azovsky Nemetsky National District (Deutsche Nationalkreis Asowo) and Nationalkreis Halbstadt. Also, out of the 1.2 million Russian speaking Jews and Slavs who live in Israel, a significant portion is from Kazakhstan.

On the other hand, ethnic Kazakhs and Uzbeks have been immigrating to large numbers to Kazakhstan ever since the collapse of the USSR. These immigrants come not only from the southern Central Asian states such as Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, but also from the Kazakh dominated areas in Xinjiang and Mongolia. The Kazakh government is actively encouraging the settlement of these compatriots (known as Oralman) in Slavic dominated North and East Kazakhstan as well as the German dominated Karaganda Region, in order to dilute the minority populations there. There is also a low intensity immigration of ethnic Slavs from the less tolerant neighboring nations like Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan into Kazakhstan. An estimated 400,000 Uzbeks have migrated to Kazakhstan in recent years ^[9]

Table: Data on immigration in Kazakhstan^[8]

Religion

According to the 2009 Census data, almost all the Central Asian Turkics are Muslims and Slavs are Orthodox:^[10]

See also

• Demographics of Kazakhstan

References