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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.
Kazakhstan achieved independence through administrative means that transformed its ast 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...