Population politics in Kazakhstan.

• Author: Sinnott, Peter
• Position: Pressing Issues

There may be a Kazakh majority not because of [Nazarbayev's] attempts to create a Kazakh homeland, but because of Kazakhstan's desperate economic conditions. Echoing the Kazakh flight during Soviet collectivization, many Kazakhs appear to have left along with the Slavs to look for jobs.

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Kazakhstan achieved independence through administrative means that transformed its last Communist Party first secretary, Nursultan Nazarbayev, into the president of Kazakhstan, a position he has retained through at least two national elections that have lacked the imprimatur of "free and fair" by international monitoring groups such as the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE). To maintain his legitimacy, Nazarbayev has championed himself as uniquely qualified to prevent ethnic conflict between the dominant nationalities of Kazakhstan, broadly interpreted to mean Kazakh and Slavic. More important, he has attempted to establish Kazakhstan as an "ethnic homeland," providing incentives for Kazakhs abroad to return to the country. However, to assert himself as head of a Kazakh state, Nazarbayev has needed the majority of Kazakhstan's population to be, in fact, Kazakh. According to the results of the 1999 census, Nazarbayev got his wish. In 1992 and 1993, there were reports of great migrations northward to Russia. These were accompanied by yearly estimates of the major ethnic groups' population percentages, which incrementally showed Kazakhs becoming the majority around 1996 or 1997. Why did this happen? The dramatic and ongoing emigration of Russians and other peoples is hard to deny (see Table 1), but it is possible that Kazakhs are also leaving the country--undermining Nazarbayev's desire to establish Kazakhstan as an ethnic homeland and threatening his efforts to strengthen its authority.

It also could be, however, that the results of the 1999 census are themselves inaccurate, and the census was manipulated to serve Nazarbayev's political agenda. On the other hand, international and domestic pressure for accurate census results may have limited the regime's ability to skew the numbers in its favor. Complicating matters still further, this tension between politics and accuracy was played out in a country where censuses are--and historically have been--extremely difficult to conduct. Nazarbayev's first official census since the breakup of the Soviet Union is the latest episode in a long history of difficulties with censuses.

The 1999 census places Kazakhstan's population at 14,953,126, a drop of almost 1.25 million people from the Soviet census of 1989 (see Table 2). The ethnic Kazakh population has grown by about 1.5 million, an increase of 22.9 percent. Kazakhs now represent 53.4 percent of the total population, up from 40.1 percent in 1989. Meanwhile, the Russian population has fallen to only 29.96 percent of the total population; combined with other Europeans, the total reaches only 37.05 percent of the population total. This sharp realignment of population and ethnicity seemingly is related to two processes: an increase in the number of Kazakhs and Slavic emigration.

ORGANIZATION AND PLANNING

A census provides an important check of both vital statistics and population registration systems. Both were severely strained by the Slavic emigration because Slavic peoples dominated the statistical administrations in all republics of the former Soviet Union (FSU). The census was intended to provide a strong degree of continuity with the previous census when it was initially approved on 3 April 1995 by the Council of Ministers. At that time, they envisioned continued contact and some coordination of census development with Russia's State Committee for Statistics, Goskomstat, in Moscow.

Even in the development stages, the census was seen as a political and economic tool. The State Committee for Statistics in Kazakhstan was to take the lead role in organizing, administering and processing the census, but the Ministry of Labor and Social Welfare was involved in the development of census labor classifications, and the Ministry of Internal Affairs expressed interest in the development of the migration questions as well as citizenship issues.

Despite the late date for its authorization, a test census was planned for one region--the smallest administrative unit of Saryagash--in Southern Kazakhstan oblast in September 1997, but it did not occur until the following year. The census was conceived and carried out in approximately four years, a difficult task in a country that has experienced tremendous economic and population shifts in its short period of independence. It could only be achieved because of the region's long history of census taking and social statistics gathering in general. Nonetheless, the regional statistical agency personnel who worked on the census data were typically Russian, many of whom left with the large Slavic emigration that occurred during Kazakhstan's first five years of independence. The loss of these specialists affected the statistical agency involved in the preparation and conduct of the census, hurting their ability to address problems that census-takers have had in Kazakhstan for more than a hundred years.

HISTORY OF CENSUSES ON KAZAKH TERRITORY

1897

A so-called "Mecca census" of Muslims in the 1870s in Central Asia only counted the number of Muslim families and cannot be considered a modern census. Modern national censuses were conducted by Imperial Russia in 1897, and then by the Soviet regime in 1926, 1937, 1939, 1959, 1970, 1979 and 1989. Population change by nationality is tabulated below in Table 3.

The 1897 census was actually begun among the nomadic population of the Kazakh steppe before other areas within the Russian Empire. While it serves as the basis of much research on the growth of Kazakhs, it did not effectively capture the ethnic composition of the country, for it categorized respondents not according to what ethnic group they belonged to, but rather according to what language they spoke. This resulted in both miscounting and undercounting as "many representatives of national minorities indicated the language dominant in their locality conversationally" or related to work "as observed by the predominance of the Russian language in zones of common inhabitation." (1) Knowledge of linguistic and ethnic distinctions was also weak: "Kazakhs and Kyrgyz in many regions were registered under the general ethnonym, `Kyrgyz'" and "in entire uezds the language of the local Turkic tribe ... was enumerated as `Tiiurk', an expression of little accuracy generally substituted because of the great degree of illiteracy among local census enumerators." (2) Another Kazakhstan demographer compared 1897 census results and district-level data from surveys of oblast governors of newly settled Slavic migrants. He found undercounts as large as 21.4 and 14.5 percent for Syrdarya and Uralsk oblasts and a general undercount for all regions despite the assessment of some Soviet population specialists that the 1897 census "data over represented the number of Russians in the population." (3)

During the Soviet period, the census, dating back to the first territorially comprehensive census of December 1926, was considered to be primarily a planning tool and "had as its goal the collection of data about the population necessary for the compilation of the first Five-Year Plan." (4) This approach to the census during the Stalin period led to complete census data being available only to a select few. More comprehensive publishing of data only returned in the late Gorbachev period, and even then ethnic data related to job stratification was not published.

1926

In a change from the census of 1897, the 1926 census asked to what narodnost' the respondent considered himself to belong. "Narodnost'" as a term for people was chosen over natsional'nost', which was used in all subsequent Soviet censuses "because the term `narodnost' was thought to reflect better the notion of ethnic origins. It was believed that people would more readily claim affiliation with a narodnost' or ethnic group of the population than with a natsional'nost'--a concept closely linked to that of natsiya...