Kazakhstan’s population reaches 20m milestone

Kazakhstan’s population has reached a 20m milestone, MP Kazybek Isa said on Monday.

Demographic growth is much more than a factor of economic planning for Kazakhstan. It is an issue of sovereignty and national revival.

The Kazakhs suffered tragic demographic losses, through mass deaths and migration, as a consequence of Russian colonisation and the Bolshevik-Soviet policies of forced sedentarisation and collectivisation.

“Had we not lost four to five million of our people in the 1921 and 1931-1933 famines, and the 1937 bloody repressions, the number of Kazakhs would have been over 60m now,” MP Isa said in a Facebook post, after announcing that a 20-millionth Kazakh has been born.

The famines took an estimated 2m Kazakh lives (some put the figure at over 4m) and caused about 1m more to flee to China and other places. The suppression of various Kazakh revolts under Russian tzarist rule led to hundreds of thousands more deaths and more migration.

After independence in 1991, Kazakhstan saw an outflow of a large number of ethnic Russians and Germans, about 2m altogether.

A high birth rate among Kazakhs and a policy of inviting back ethnic Kazakhs from China, Mongolia, Uzbekistan and elsewhere have gradually changed the population dynamic towards growth.

According to the latest official statistics, as of 1 October the country’s population was 19.97m. Also, according to official figures, the average monthly birth rate in the country since the start of 2023 has been about 30,000.

The government predicts that by 2050 the country’s population will reach between 23.5 and 27.7m people.

The tzarist policy of resettling large numbers of peasants to Kazakh territories after the abolition of serfdom, and the Soviet policies of deporting Germans, Chechens and other “enemy ethnic groups” to Kazakhstan, as well as bringing large numbers of Russians and others for industrialisation and other projects, had made ethnic Kazakhs a minority on their own soil.

In 1959 ethnic Kazakhs made up 29 percent of the Soviet Kazakh republic’s population, and in 1989, two years before the Soviet collapse, about 40 percent.

Currently the Kazakhs make up about 80 percent of the overall population. The growing proportion of ethnic Kazakh citizens is helping to reduce the use of the Russian language.

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