The territory now known as Kazakhstan was home to nomadic peoples for centuries. Contact with imperial Russia was minimal until the early 1700s, when Russia built forts in southern Siberia and northern Kazakhstan. The Kazakhs accepted protection from czarist Russia only because they were threatened by other outsiders. In the 19th-century race for territory and influence between Britain and Russia, Russia gradually gained more control of the area. Kazakhstan officially became a Soviet republic in 1936.

The Soviets forced collectivism and basically eliminated the traditional nomadic way of life. During WWII, hundreds of thousands of ethnic minorities from European Russia were deported to forced labor camps and cities in central Kazakhstan. When the Soviet Union broke up in 1991, Kazakhstan declared independence.