When Kazakhstan declared independence in December 1991, it inherited not only the Soviet state’s institutions but also its historical frameworks. The first major post-Soviet history of the country, published in 1997, reproduced the Soviet paradigm almost unchanged. Ak Orda, presented as a vassal state within the Golden Horde that fought for its independence and eventually gave rise to the Kazakh Khanate in the 15th century, remained the official foundation of the nation. The Golden Horde itself was treated as foreign history: a conquering empire with no direct lineage to Kazakh civilization. For nearly three decades, that framework defined how Kazakhstan explained its origins to its own citizens. Kazakhstan is now revising that explanation – not by rejecting the milestone of 1991, but by making it considerably less significant than it once was.

There were practical reasons for making 1991 the starting point of Kazakhstan’s statehood. It reflected the genuine constraints of a country building itself from scratch. At independence, ethnic Kazakhs accounted for just 39.7 percent of the population, making Kazakhstan the only Soviet republic to enter independence without its titular nationality forming a majority. Ethnic Russians represented 37.8 percent of the country’s population, concentrated mostly in the industrialized north. Linguistic divisions ran deep. Under the conditions of the 1990s, a civic nationhood model represented the most practical means of building a new state and preventing fragmentation in a diverse society. 

Kazakhstan’s first president, Nursultan Nazarbayev, long regarded as the architect of independent Kazakhstan but largely sidelined from politics after the January 2022 crisis, reinforced that framework through nation-building efforts that became inseparable from his own persona. Official commemorations, educational curricula, state media, and public symbolism converged on a single image: Nazarbayev as the founding father of the modern republic. 

That approach helped deliver stability during a turbulent period. But the historical narrative it generated was deliberately compressed. Independence stood triumphant at the center, while earlier periods served largely as a backdrop. The Soviet era was treated as formative rather than contested. This was a functional model for the early years of independence, but it left one question unanswered: where did Kazakhstan’s statehood really begin?

An off-color remark from Russian President Vladimir Putin at a youth forum in August 2014 injected fresh urgency into that question. Putin offered his view that Kazakhstan had never possessed genuine statehood before independence, claiming Nazarbayev had “created a state in a territory that had never had a state before.” The remark exposed a vulnerability in Kazakhstan’s official historical narrative. It was not an isolated comment. Senior Russian officials and politicians have periodically questioned Kazakhstan’s territorial integrity and the legitimacy of its borders. The implicit message has been consistent: Kazakhstan’s statehood is conditional, recent, and dependent on Russian goodwill.

Nazarbayev’s initial response to Putin’s statement was to elevate the Kazakh Khanate as the principal historical precursor of modern Kazakhstan. The large-scale celebration of its 550th anniversary in 2015 became one of the most important symbolic events of the late Nazarbayev era, signaling that Kazakh statehood predated both the Soviet Union and the Russian Empire. But the new official narrative lacked a preamble. It took a change of president for that chronology to be extended further.

Kassym-Jomart Tokayev brought to nation-building the same caution that has long characterized Kazakhstan’s foreign policy. In his first State of the Nation Address in September 2019, less than three months after his election in the wake of Nazarbayev’s resignation, Tokayev announced the commemoration of the 750th anniversary of the Golden Horde’s formation. It was the first time a Kazakhstani president had formally incorporated this sprawling medieval empire into the national narrative. The commemoration was aimed at a domestic audience, but the signal it sent traveled considerably further.

In 2022, Kazakhstan established a research institute in Astana dedicated to the study of the Ulus of Jochi – the Golden Horde’s formal designation. The government has restored the long-neglected Jochi Mausoleum complex in Ulytau, central Kazakhstan, now one of the country’s most prominent sites of historical memory. Tokayev moreover chose Ulytau as the venue for the inaugural meeting of the Ulttyq Qurultay (National Congress), his signature consultative assembly, a gesture that connected contemporary governance directly to the medieval steppe landscape. A UNESCO-backed forum in May 2026 drew 300 scholars from over 20 countries, where Tokayev described the empire as “the Rome of the Steppe.” Such a description is bolder than it might first appear. Russian historiography has long portrayed the Golden Horde as the “Tatar-Mongol Yoke,” a dark age of foreign conquest and suffering. 

Kazakhstan’s new seven-volume national history, produced by more than 250 scholars including a substantial contingent of foreign experts, devotes an entire volume to the Golden Horde period. Six of the seven volumes are now approved and nearing publication.  

The trend has reached popular culture too. “The Golden Empire,” a dramatic series on Jochi Khan, is currently in production and bound for Netflix. So is the seven-volume national history, with both projects under the purview of Erlan Karin, one of Tokayev’s senior officials responsible for the ideological policy. “The Golden Empire” is not an outlier. In 2024, Kazakhstan’s film output grew by 58 percent, with domestic productions accounting for half of the country’s top ten box office releases – a surge Tokayev had demanded at the Ulttyq Qurultay.

If the shift was top-down, then long-term demographic and cultural trends have prepared the ground for it to take root. Kazakhstan’s 2021 census recorded ethnic Kazakhs at 70.4 percent of the population – up from 53.4 percent in 1999 and 63.1 percent in 2009. State statistics show a steady increase in the number of citizens claiming proficiency in Kazakh, and two-thirds of school graduates now sit their national university exam in Kazakh, a share that has grown consistently since independence. Across television, print, and digital platforms, Kazakh has become the dominant language of media consumption – a reversal that would have seemed implausible to anyone who knew Kazakhstan in the 1990s. In late 2023, the government approved a Concept for the Development of Language Policy for 2023-2029, setting targets that include raising Kazakh-language proficiency among non-Kazakh school graduates from 45 to 75 percent by 2029.

Even in 2019, before Astana had fully committed to the Golden Horde project, a survey found that only 24 percent of Kazakh citizens identified 1991 as the starting point of national statehood, and nearly 45 percent viewed the Golden Horde positively. The state’s investment since then has only accelerated those trends. A separate survey conducted in 2023 found that younger citizens, many of whom have no lived memory of the Soviet period, are more inclined to view the country’s history through pre-Soviet rather than Soviet reference points.

How the Golden Horde is being presented matters as much as the fact that it is being promoted. Tokayev has consistently presented the empire as a multiethnic and multilingual political system emphasizing governance, diplomacy, legal administration, and Eurasian connectivity rather than ethnic exclusivity. This matters because Kazakhstan continues to define itself as a multiethnic civic state. Kazakhstan’s new constitution, which went into effect on July 1 following a March referendum, retains Russian as an official language in state institutions, but notably demotes it from “equal” to “alongside” Kazakh, a carefully calibrated revision that Moscow accepted without protest. Ahead of his May 2026 state visit to Astana, Putin published an article in a Kazakh newspaper calling the new constitution “in line with the spirit of the times.”

Whether that consensus proves durable is a separate question. What matters for Kazakhstan’s nation-building project is that the Golden Horde is being invoked not as an ethnic homeland, but as a historical precedent for a diverse and interconnected state. That distinction reflects the demographic and political realities of a state that cannot afford ethnic nationalism.

Some three decades after independence, Kazakhstan’s official story is being extended, not replaced. Independence remains the cornerstone of the modern republic, but it is now framed as one chapter in a much longer story – one that begins not in 1991, or even with the founding of the Kazakh Khanate in 1465, but with the Golden Horde more than two centuries earlier.