Kazakh ASSR

'Kirghiz': a Name Given by Others

From the fifteenth century the Kazakhs called themselves qazaq. The Turkic word qazaq was originally a social term for a free man who had broken away from his tribe and ruler to roam the steppe, and the name stuck to the nomads who broke away from Abulkhair Khan under Kerei and Zhanibek in 1459–1460. The same Turkic word entered Russian as kazak, the name of the armed frontier communities known in English as Cossacks.

From the eighteenth century, however, Russian official documents called the Kazakhs 'Kirghiz.' According to the historian I. Yerofeyeva, when a Kazakh delegation came to St Petersburg in 1734 to confirm the terms of its subjection, writers for the St Petersburg Gazette hastily translated a passage that in fact described the Yenisei Kirghiz (today's Khakas); printed in the government's official organ, the information was taken as true, and officials began calling the Kazakhs Kirghiz in all documents. The name spread to Western Europe as well. In 1827 A. Levshin pointed out that 'Kirghiz' was the name of an entirely different people and that the Kazakhs called themselves only kazak. In the common form 'Kirghiz-Kaisak,' he explained, the second part was the real self-designation and the first had been added by Russians to distinguish them from the Cossacks of southern Russia. The actual Kyrgyz were called separately 'Kara-Kirghiz' ('black Kirghiz') or 'Dikokamenny Kirghiz.' The 1897 census recorded 280,000 northern Kyrgyz of Semirechye as 'Kirghiz-Kaisaks' and 201,000 southern Kyrgyz of Fergana as 'Kara-Kirghiz.'

From the Kirghiz ASSR to the Kazak ASSR

Kazakh intellectuals put their own name forward before the revolution: the Kazakh-language newspaper that Akhmet Baitursynov, Alikhan Bukeikhanov and Mirzhakyp Dulatov published in Orenburg in 1913–1918 was called Qazaq. The early Soviet government nonetheless kept the old usage, and the Kazakhs' autonomous republic created inside the RSFSR by the decree of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee and the Council of People's Commissars signed by Lenin and Kalinin on 26 August 1920 was named the Kirghiz ASSR, with its capital at Orenburg. The Kyrgyz autonomous unit of the same period was called the Kara-Kirghiz Autonomous Oblast.

After the 1924 national delimitation of Central Asia redrew the territory, the capital moved on 9 February 1925 from Orenburg to Ak-Mechet on the Syr Darya, and on 6 April Orenburg Governorate returned to direct RSFSR rule. The republic's Fifth Congress of Soviets, meeting in Ak-Mechet on 19 April 1925, resolved to rename the republic and to rename Ak-Mechet Kzyl-Orda (Kazakh for 'red centre'), and a VTsIK decree of 15 June made it the Kazak ASSR (Kazakskaya ASSR). The Russian name of the people became kazaki. On 25 May of the same year the Kara-Kirghiz Autonomous Oblast dropped 'Kara' to become the Kirghiz Autonomous Oblast, and the name 'Kirghiz' at last went to the Kyrgyz.

As a result, in Russian the Kazakhs and the Cossack estate were written with the same word, kazak. A decree of the republic's Council of People's Commissars signed by Uraz Isayev on 5 February 1936 set the republic's name in Russian pronunciation and spelling as Kazakh (Kazakhskaya) "in accordance with the Kazakh pronunciation of the word 'qazaq' and its derivatives." Today's 'Kazakh,' with its kh, comes from this spelling. Some Russian-language sources describe the change as a distortion of the people's name.

Capitals and Territory

The capital was Kzyl-Orda from 1925 to 1929. A run-down town of 10,000 people had to house 83 state institutions and 1,300 employees, and the harsh climate, dust and tuberculosis soon led to the capital project being abandoned; in May 1929 the capital moved to Alma-Ata. Besides all of present-day Kazakhstan, the republic included the Karakalpak Autonomous Oblast (separated in 1930), the northern shore of the Kara-Bogaz-Gol (transferred to Turkmenistan in 1932) and parts of the later Orenburg Oblast. In 1928 the governorates were abolished in favour of 13 okrugs, and in March 1932 the republic was reorganized into six oblasts: Aktyubinsk, Alma-Ata, East Kazakh, West Kazakh, Karaganda and South Kazakh.

Collectivization and Famine

The republic's years overlap with Filipp Goloshchyokin's 'Little October' as First Secretary of the Regional Committee (1925–1933). Collectivization, 4 percent of households in 1928, reached 66 percent of households and 85.6 percent of sown area in 1932, and amid the forced sedentarization of nomads and livestock requisitions the Kazakh famine of 1930–1933 struck. Levon Mirzoyan succeeded Goloshchyokin in 1933, and Uraz Isayev chaired the Council of People's Commissars from 1929. On 5 December 1936 the new Soviet constitution detached the republic from the RSFSR and made it a Union republic, the Kazakh SSR.