KAZAKHS

Kazakhs: translation

Ethnic group. The Kazakhs are a mixture of various peoples of inner Asia, primarily Turkic, Mongol, and Indo-Aryan nomads who coalesced as a unified ethnicity in the late Middle Ages. Theirlanguageis part of the Kypchak branch of the Turkic language family. Kazakhs are nominallyMuslimwith a strong Sufi orientation; however, a significant minority converted to RussianOrthodoxyunder tsarist rule. While they are the titular majority inKazakhstan, Kazakhs are also an importantethnic minorityin the Russian Federation, numbering over 650,000. In regions contiguous to Kazakhstan, they make up a significant portion of the local population:Astrakhan(14 percent);Altay Republic(6 percent);Orenburg(6 percent);Omsk(4 percent); andSaratov(3 percent).Since thedissolution of the Soviet Union, Kazakhstan’s president, Nursultan Nazarbayev, has encouraged ethnic Kazakhs to return to their ethnic homeland in an effort to promote indigenous demographic dominance of the country, a strategy that resulted in ethnic Kazakhs obtaining a clear majority in the mid-1990s. Kazakhs, along with other Central Asian peoples, have been targeted forethnic violenceby neo-Nazi and other racist groups, particularly inMoscow. Timur Bekmambetov, the director of Russia’s first post-Soviet blockbusterfilm,Nightwatch(2004), and the Oscar-nominated Hollywood productionWanted(2008), is an ethnic Kazakh.