Ethnic demography of Kazakhstan

Kazakhstan is multiethnic country where the indigenous ethnic group - the Kazakhs, comprise the majority of the population. According to the 2016 census there are two dominant ethnic groups in Kazakhstan: ethnic Kazakhs (66.48%) and ethnic Russians (20.61%) with a wide array of other groups represented, including Ukrainians, Uzbeks, Germans, Koreans, and Uyghurs.

Kazakhstan's dominant ethnic group, the Kazakhs, traces its origin to the 15th century, when a number of Turkic and some Mongol tribes united to establish the Kazakh Khanate. With a cohesive culture and a national identity, they constituted absolute majority on the land until Russian colonization.
Russian advancement into the territory of Kazakhstan began in the late 18th century, when the Kazakhs nominally accepted Russian rule in exchange for protection against repeated attacks by the western Mongolian Kalmyks. In the 1890s, Russian peasants began to settle the fertile lands of northern Kazakhstan, causing many Kazakhs to move eastwards into Chinese territory in search of new grazing grounds.

A big factor that greatly shaped the ethnic composition of Kazakhstan were major famines of the 1920s and of the 1930s, caused by intermittent droughts. According to different estimates, in the 1930s up to 40% of Kazakhs either died of starvation or fled the territory. Official government census data report the contraction of Kazakh population from 3.6 million in 1926, to 2.3 million in 1939.

By the mid 20th century, Kazakhstan was home to virtually all ethnic groups that had ever come under the Russian sphere of influence. This diverse demography stemmed from the country's central location and its historical use by Russia as a place to send colonists, dissidents, and minority groups from its other frontiers. From the 1930s until the 1950s, both Russian opposition (and Russians who were "accused" of being part of the opposition) and certain minorities (especially Volga Germans, Poles, Ukrainians, Crimean Tatars and Kalmyks) had been interned in labor camps, often merely due to their heritage or beliefs, mostly on collective orders by Joseph Stalin. This makes Kazakhstan one of the few places on Earth where normally-disparate Germanic, Indo-Iranian, Koreans, Chechen, and Turkic groups live together in a rural setting and not as a result of modern immigration.

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Wikipedia