Could Kazakhstan Be Next on Russia's Hitlist?
- thesongbirdinfo
- Nov 16, 2025
- 6 min read
Updated: Feb 6
In the early 1990s, as the Soviet Union collapsed, 2 million ethnic Russians left Kazakhstan for the newly formed Russian Federation. Yet three decades later, Russian influence remains deeply ingrained in the country’s language and institutions. Russian is still more widely spoken than Kazakh in urban centres, and Russian Orthodox churches in every city centre would make you think you are in Russia.
This lingering presence is not just cultural - it is political. Since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Kazakhstan has found itself walking an increasingly precarious tightrope: asserting its sovereignty while managing a powerful neighbour that has shown a willingness to weaponise history, nostalgia, and revisionism.
Kazakhstan and Ukraine possess many frightening similarities: large ethnic Russian minorities, Russian-language dominance in frontier regions, centuries of Russian rule. In Ukraine, exactly these conditions became the pretext for invasion. For Kazakhstan—which sits on the world’s longest uninterrupted border with Russia and around 15% of its population ethnic Russians—this parallel is quietly becoming difficult to ignore.
A Colonial Past Rarely Named
Russian and Soviet colonialism in Kazakhstan is rarely discussed in the same breath as British India or French Algeria, yet its impact has been just as pervasive.
During my own visit to Almaty, its largest city, it was easy to forget that the modern skyline of immense oil refineries, sweeping boulevards, and Khrushchyovka housing blocks that have come to define the young petrostate are scarcely older than a lifetime. Only a century ago, that same landscape was home to migrating auls, navigating the endless steppe with the seasons. Beneath such a profound transformation, however, lies a cost as immense as the steppe itself.
Colonial social engineering - including forced sedentarisation, collectivisation, and famine - killed an estimated 38% of the Kazakh population in the early 20th century. By the end of the USSR, something unprecedented happened: Russians outnumbered Kazakhs in their own country.
Under the rule of the Soviets and the Tsar before them, Kazakhstan was transformed into a major producer of raw materials, described by historians as a “raw material appendage of the entire Soviet Union”. By the structure of the Soviet planned economy, oil, uranium, and agricultural output flowed north to Russia, while Kazakhstan bore the huge environmental and human costs of extraction. The draining of the Aral Sea for Soviet cotton production devastated southern Kazakhstan, while nuclear testing at the Semipalatinsk site exposed up to half a million people to radiation.
Russification accompanied this extraction. Literacy campaigns were conducted almost exclusively in Russian. Religion, particularly Islam, was suppressed as backward. By 1991, only 40% of the Kazakh population spoke Kazakh fluently, while 95% spoke Russian. Much of Kazakhstan’s nomadic culture was lost or destroyed due to forced sedentarisation, collectivisation, and state-engineered famines killing millions, wiping out a way of life that had endured for centuries.
Independence Without a Revolution
Kazakhstan declared independence on December 16, 1991, the last Soviet republic to do so. This was not because it clung to Soviet ideology, but because no other republic was so systematically embedded in its system. Independence arrived not through revolution, but rupture, a sudden rift that a new nation had to be built from a Union it never expected to outlive. Kazakhstan inherited 1,400 Soviet nuclear warheads on day one, placing it in a surreal juxtaposition of fragility—a state that had not asked for independence, still highly intertwined with the old Soviet systems—and apocalyptic nuclear capability.
Nursultan Nazarbayev, who led the Kazakh SSR, became the country’s first president and remained in power until 2019, establishing a highly centralised, authoritarian system. The country transitioned into a market economy, with foreign investment pouring into its rich oil and gas deposits, driving impressive GDP growth now per capita larger than Russia’s, but political pluralism remains tightly controlled. Facing significant risk from dependence on oil and increasing social unrest, sovereignty is real, but fragile.
A Nation Arguing With Its Past
In speaking with Kazakhs today, Russian influence remains a deeply divisive issue.
Rick, a creative director who grew up during the Soviet collapse, rejects what he sees as a one-sided narrative. Soviet rule, he argues, brought electricity, railways, housing, and industrial capacity. “Kazakhstan had to enter the modern world,” he told me. Without Soviet institutions, he suggests, the country may never have been able to manage its resource wealth.
“Every race, every nation had the same fate… It was just the way of modernisation that Russians became the majority [in Kazakhstan]. Now we live in a place where Russians are now a minority.” Rick represents a Russophone, urban professional milieu in which the Soviet Union is remembered less as a colonial project than as a force of modernisation - not blind nostalgia, but a cost-benefit memory of empire.
But others see that same infrastructure as evidence of domination rather than development. Railways were built to serve Moscow, not to connect Kazakh regions to each other. Cities, factories, and refineries overwhelmingly bear Russian names. Progress arrived, but on someone else’s terms.
Aigerim, a psychologist from Almaty, frames today’s cultural revival as healing rather than rejection. “It’s about people, it’s about nation,” she said. “We are making it alive right now.” Ana, an ethnic Russian born in Kazakhstan, described lingering daily “colonial thinking” among ethnic Russians - from workplace hierarchies to casual condescension - that continues to privilege Russian norms.
Where Rick sees inevitability, Ana and Aigerim see trauma and recovery.
Ukraine Changes Everything - Russians Are Coming Back
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has reframed these tensions. Both Ukraine and Kazakhstan share large Russian minorities and a history of being framed by Russian elites as integral to imperial identity. As many Kazakhs pointed out to me, if Ukraine could be invaded under the banner of “protection,” why not Kazakhstan?
After 2022, tens of thousands of Russians fled to Kazakhstan to avoid conscription. Cities like Almaty absorbed an influx of highly skilled migrants working in IT, finance, and consulting. The economic effects were mixed: a short-term “brain gain,” increased consumption, and growing service sectors — but also severe housing shortages.
In Almaty, rents nearly tripled between 2021 and 2022. Young Kazakhs bore the brunt. This sudden demographic shock became a lived reminder that Russian movements — even civilian ones — can destabilise Kazakh society.
Social tensions followed. Echoing Ana’s words, many migrants arrived with an “entrenched colonial mindset”: speaking only Russian, refusing to learn Kazakh, and expressing frustration that Almaty did not cater to Moscow tastes. The war was something they had escaped, not necessarily opposed.
Disregard for Kazakh Nationhood
In Moscow’s political imagination, Kazakhstan is seen less as a legitimate independent nation than a historical byproduct of Russian state-building. Putin himself gibed in 2014 “the Kazakhs never had any statehood”, crediting Nazarbayev with having “created” it. In 2020, two Russian State Duma deputies described Kazakhstan’s current territory as a “gift” from Russia. Of course, if a gift is given, it can be taken back.
This discourse sounds familiar. Gennady Zyuganov, General Secretary of the Communist Party of Russia, said that northern Kazakhstan was historically Russian territory and that Russia needs to “protect the Russian-speaking population against the national arbitrariness that is happening in Kazakhstan”. This is no different from Russia’s pretext of ‘denazifying’ and ‘protecting Russians’ for its special military operation in Ukraine, which marks its fourth year of fighting this month.
Analysts note a broader pattern in Russian discourse since the onset of the Ukraine War: that post-Soviet borders are provisional constructs, subject to change where the Kremlin sees fit. Only last month, popular TV presenter Vladimir Solovyov argued on air that if Russia could launch a “special military operation” in Ukraine, it could do the same elsewhere in its “zone/sphere of influence”, explicitly saying “to hell with international law”.
In 2005, Alexei Yurchak coined the term “hypernormalisation” to describe the late Soviet condition in which people knew the system was failing yet kept pretending because no alternative felt imaginable. Watching and talking with some of the post-2022 Russian relokanty in Almaty, I was struck by a similar moral numbness: the war is treated as disastrous but also oddly ordinary, something to flee rather than confront, and politics a danger zone best avoided. If that learned fatalism is a product of modern Russia, it certainly doesn’t stop at the border.
At the Crossroads
Kazakhstan today is by far the most prosperous Central Asian country. It has leveraged natural gas and oil for growth while diversifying into services and technology. Yet prosperity does not equal security.
Russian language dominance, demographic legacies, economic interdependence, and historical narratives all remain pressure points. The question is not whether Russia wants influence in Kazakhstan—it already has it—but whether it would ever seek to further that influence by force.
Kazakhstan’s government has responded cautiously. It has avoided endorsing Russia’s war while deepening ties with China and the West. Russian influence is being quietly restricted in language policy, education, and media, but never confrontationally. The fear is clear: provoke Moscow too directly, and Ukraine’s fate no longer seems far away.
The nation’s future depends on whether it can continue threading the needle: asserting a distinct national identity without triggering imperial reflexes next door. The country is no longer a Soviet appendage, but history has shown how quickly Moscow can decide that sovereignty is conditional.
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