Descendants of the Golden Horde. How Kazakhstan under President Tokayev is "rebranding" its history

The new historical policy is clearly aimed against the popular version of Kazakh history in Russia, according to which, prior to joining the Russian Empire and then the Soviet Union, they had no statehood and were wild nomads.

At the same time, this new perspective on history can also be seen as an integral part of Tokayev's foreign policy, which promotes the image of Kazakhstan as a Middle Power — one of the influential medium-sized states on the world stage.

Direct successor to the Horde

After Tokayev became president in 2019, Astana began actively supporting research into the history of the Golden Horde, or more precisely, the state of Ulus Jochi — the western part of Genghis Khan's gigantic empire, and then one of its successor states formed after its collapse.

In 2021, Tokayev initiated the creation of the Institute for the Study of Ulus Jochi, and also ordered the restoration of the mausoleum of Jochi Khan, son of Genghis Khan, in the Ulytau region in central Kazakhstan.

The recently published seven-volume history of Kazakhstan details the history of the Golden Horde as a predecessor to the Kazakh Khanate, which emerged in 1465.

Павялічыць

In May of this year, an international symposium on the history of the Golden Horde was held in Astana. President Tokayev personally opened it.

In his opening speech, Tokayev called the era of the Golden Horde the most important part of the "period of civilizational evolution" and said that according to Kazakhstan's new Constitution, adopted only in March, preserving continuity with the Great Steppe and its thousand-year history is a sacred duty of Kazakhs.

"Our country is a direct successor to the Golden Horde," the Kazakh president declared.

Tokayev called Ulus Jochi

"an empire that connected West and East, had a significant impact on the emergence and development of various civilizations and states, and, undoubtedly, was the most important political system."

The president said that Kazakhstan is now

"actively reviewing outdated dogmas and stereotypes that reduce once powerful steppe empires to so-called 'semi-states' and even portray nomadic peoples as a wild, barbaric force that existed outside the global historical context altogether."

According to Tokayev, in reality, the intellectual evolution of Central Asia, among other things, was based on the "energy of the nomadic world and the Turkic-Mongol heritage," and the economy of the Golden Horde combined a nomadic lifestyle, urban craft traditions, and control over the northern part of the Great Silk Road.

The Golden Horde, in Tokayev's interpretation, united different cultures into "a single system of humanitarian and political partnership," and now Eurasia, according to his vision, must fulfill its historical mission and be "an important civilizational and geopolitical pole of the world."

Annexation of Crimea as a turning point

As Zhaksylyk Sabitov, head of the Institute for the Study of Ulus Jochi, explained in a July interview with "Azattyq Asia," a division of "Radio Liberty," the situation in Kazakhstan in the 1990s was difficult, and "any aspirations towards the growth of national self-awareness could even lead to civil war."

Therefore, according to him, the Kazakh authorities refrained from emphasizing themes of historical and national self-awareness of Kazakhs. Under Nursultan Nazarbayev, the authorities paid more attention to the idea of modern independent Kazakhstan as a state created in recent times.

Павялічыць

According to Sabitov, the turning point was Russia's annexation of Crimea in 2014.

"The political elite came to understand that believing Nursultan Abishovich was the founder [of the state] was a very bad story. Therefore, interest in history before Nazarbayev grew very strongly after Crimea. In 2019, historical justice was restored. They began to pay attention to the Golden Horde. Because it preceded the Kazakh Khanate, and without it, it is impossible to understand the history of the Kazakh Khanate," Zhaksylyk Sabitov continues.

Zhamart Zhenis, deputy head of the Kazakh Institute of History and Ethnology, wrote in an article on the website of the "Vechernyaya Astana" newspaper that a Eurocentric paradigm dominated Kazakhstan for many years, but now it is capable of independently defining its "true ideological direction."

This direction, according to Zhenis,

"is based on historical facts and national values, reflects the country's status as a regional power, and can unite the people and the government and raise the national spirit."

"Nothing to be proud of"

At the same time, Astana clearly understood that its desire to position Kazakhstan as a state rooted in the times of the Golden Horde could not but provoke an irritated reaction in Russia, where historians primarily view the Horde through the prism of suffering brought by the "Tatar-Mongol yoke."

In his May speech, Kassym-Jomart Tokayev called for an objective and politically neutral study of history and to avoid a "linear view of the complex, multilayered history of the Golden Horde" so as not to spoil good relations between peoples and countries.

But such appeals do not convince many in Russia. For example, Nikita Myandkovich, author of the online magazine "Military-Political Analytics," wrote in a June article in the wake of the May symposium in Astana that Kazakhs, he argued, have no reason to be proud of the Golden Horde's heritage, because during the conquest it brought genocide to the ancestors of modern Kazakhs, and then they, in Myandkovich's interpretation, "were among the many tributaries of the Golden Horde, forming part of [...] the social lower classes in the territories subject to it."

"The cultural revival of Kazakhs," as Myandkovich asserts, began only in the 19th century, after their accession to the Russian Empire.

Some Russian commentators interpret Kazakhstan's desire to emphasize historical ties with the Golden Horde as a hidden encroachment on large parts of the territory of present-day Russia, which also belonged to Ulus Jochi and whose indigenous population is ethnically close to Turkic peoples.

"The brightest event in the history of Kazakhstan"

This departure of Kazakhstan from the Russian-Soviet version of history is welcomed, in particular, by Anatoliy Amelin, co-founder of the analytical center "Ukrainian Institute for the Future." In May, he wrote that this "reformatting of the historical narrative" has strategic importance.

According to Amelin, Kazakhstan thus "distances itself from the Soviet and 'Russian world' civilizational field." In addition, in the opinion of the Ukrainian analyst, the search for roots in the history of the Horde and Ulus Jochi will also contribute to internal national consolidation.

"The legacy of the Golden Horde unites all Kazakh zhuzes and clans under a common institutional roof that existed before the division into Kazakhs, Nogais, Tatars, and Uzbeks, which helps overcome tribalism," Amelin believes.

Marat Gatin, a historian from Russian Tatarstan, also welcomes Kazakhstan's new approach to its history.

"This is a completely normal phenomenon. In Kazakhstan, they are interested in their own national history, which they associate with the legacy of the Golden Horde. This is directly related to strengthening identity. After all, the era of Ulus Jochi is, perhaps, the brightest event in the history of Kazakhstan," Gatin said in an interview in July of this year.

But Uzbek anthropologist and political philosopher Bakhtiyor Alimjanov fears that Kazakhstan's claims to continuity with the empire of conquerors could create tension in Central Asia.

Alimjanov recalled in a conversation with "Azattyq Asia" that Uzbekistan, starting from the early 1990s, "began to promote the ideology of Timur" and assert that Uzbeks are descendants of Tamerlane, meaning the leaders of Central Asia.

"It was precisely the rehabilitation of this imperial ambition that hindered Central Asian integration. At that time, there were no such ambitions among neighbors. Only Uzbekistan had them. And now Kazakhstan is also 'sick' with it. The fact that Kazakhstan is the heir and successor of the Golden Horde, of course, creates tension in the region. Because now two similar imperial ambitions are emerging. And now they will compete with each other," Alimjanov believes.

"The process cannot be undone"

In Kazakhstan itself, many historians and political commentators enthusiastically support Tokayev's historical policy.

"To deny the connection of Kazakhs with the Golden Horde is like denying the connection of modern Europeans with the ancient world," wrote Marlena Zimanov, a columnist for the non-governmental publication Exclusive.kz, in June.

"The Kazakh Khanate did not emerge from nothing. It became a direct continuation of Jochid statehood after the collapse of Ulus Jochi. Kazakh khans came from the same Chingizid dynasty that ruled the Golden Horde. Political institutions, norms of power, military organization, and ideas about statehood were formed within the Horde world," Zimanov explains.

Kazakh political scientist Askat Dukenbayev, debating Nikita Myandkovich and other opponents in an article on the same Exclusive website, explains that Kazakh historians seek to overcome the legacy of the Russian and Soviet periods, through which the Russian popular version of the history of Ulus Jochi prevailed in Central Asia.

"Interpretations coming from Turkic and Mongol peoples of post-Soviet Eurasia — Kazakhs, Tatars, Bashkirs, Uzbeks, Karakalpaks, Turkmens, Azerbaijanis, Kalmyks, Buryat-Mongols, and other peoples whose historical and historiographical traditions are associated with the legacy of Genghis Khan and Chingizid state dynasties — were often perceived (and largely continue to be perceived) as secondary, peripheral, or politically motivated, rather than as equal versions of a common past," Dukenbayev explains.

"Nevertheless, despite the persistence of this asymmetry, which is increasingly consistently challenged by the renewed historiography of Kazakhstan and other post-imperial societies in the region," the Kazakh political scientist continues, "the peoples of North and Central Eurasia are gradually reinterpreting the Horde legacy and integrating it into their own historical narratives."

"The process of understanding and reinterpreting the Horde legacy has already become part of the historical reality of the region and cannot be undone or 'blocked' by external interpretive frameworks," concludes political scientist Askat Dukenbayev.

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