Across the boundless steppe, the Kazakhs rode on horseback, moving with their herds in search of water and pasture. Their way of life was mobile and self-sufficient.

Yet nomadic society was also vulnerable. Without a standing army and with limited military technology, it was easily exposed to invasion by outside powers. In the nineteenth century, the Kazakhs were gradually brought under the rule of Tsarist Russia.¹ Russian authorities established administrative units across the steppe, fixed clan boundaries, and disrupted the stable migration patterns that had long sustained Kazakh society.

In the 1920s, the Soviet Union² imposed agricultural collectivization,³ confiscating Kazakh livestock on a massive scale and forcing people into collective farms. This violent institutional transformation triggered a devastating famine,⁴ in which roughly one-third of the population died. It also severed the Kazakhs’ connection to nomadic life, oral tradition, and ethnic identity.

Though deeply wounded, the Kazakhs had to integrate into the Soviet system in order to survive. They sought work in factories, mining areas, and newly built cities. The Soviet state destroyed the structure of Kazakh nomadic society and defined the Kazakhs as a backward people, yet it also offered a path of upward mobility: those who learned Russian well and identified themselves as Soviet citizens could gain access to better jobs and living conditions.

The Kazakh nomad who could recite the genealogy of at least seven generations of ancestors disappeared. In his place emerged a people cut off from their own past, with a fractured sense of history and identity.

1 The Russian Empire, which existed from 1721 to 1917.

2 The federal socialist state that succeeded the Russian Empire and existed across Eurasia from 1922 to 1991.

3 A state-led, coercive transformation of rural society in which small, family-run farms and privately held livestock were merged into state-run or collective farms. Farmers were no longer landowners or independent cultivators, but collective laborers, while food production and distribution came under centralized state control.

4 Grain quotas had to be fulfilled regardless of the actual harvest. When harvests were poor, the state still collected the required quota, resulting in famine.

Prayer

Heavenly Father, may Your mighty power come upon the Kazakh people and heal the deep wounds they endured under Tsarist Russian and Soviet rule. Language forms the foundation of a person’s thought, reasoning, and way of life. Through the learning of the Kazakh language, lead them to recover their worldview, collective memory, cultural roots, and ethnic identity. Grant wisdom to the government to establish fitting policies that preserve the Kazakh oral tradition, so that the younger generation may know their own history, reconnect with their ancestors, and understand where they come from. May the Kazakh people have the opportunity to know the Savior, Jesus Christ, who understands the historical suffering they have endured. In the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, Amen.