Kazakhstan has enshrined the “thousand-year history of the Great Steppe” in its Constitution and declared itself a direct heir to the Golden Horde. Behind academic symposiums and the restoration of ancient mausoleums lies Astana’s quietest geopolitical operation: dismantling Russia’s version of Kazakhstan’s past. The Kremlin sees what is happening but remains silent, because an outspoken response would come at too high a price.
On May 19, 2026, at the Palace of Independence in Astana, Kazakhstan’s President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev undertook a task rarely associated with heads of state: explaining the origins of his country’s national currency. The tenge, he told scholars from more than 20 countries, traces its ancestry to the Horde’s danga, a silver coin minted in the realm of Jochi. According to the specialists cited by the president, approximately 28 million silver coins were minted in the Horde. The figure is difficult to verify independently, since it rests on extrapolations from coin hoards and minting sites, but its political significance is unmistakable. Shortly before the symposium, the National Bank issued 1,000 commemorative silver coins dedicated to the Golden Horde. Kazakhstan had literally begun minting its own historical pedigree.
The same speech contained the declaration for which the audience had effectively been assembled: “Our country is the direct heir to the Golden Horde.”
Twelve years earlier, on August 29, 2014, Vladimir Putin was answering a female student’s question about Kazakhstan’s future at the Seliger youth forum. The Russian president praised Nursultan Nazarbayev for creating a state “on territory where no state had ever existed” and added: “The Kazakhs had no statehood.” Five months had passed since the annexation of Crimea. In Moscow, the remark was considered a compliment. Astana heard a warning. Its response unfolded over the next 12 years, until it was finally written into the preamble of Kazakhstan’s new Constitution in March 2026.
This is not a dispute among medieval historians over dates. Kazakhstan is systematically stripping Moscow of its monopoly over the interpretation of Kazakh history while simultaneously laying a foundation for the current political system that predates every living politician.
The Seliger Remark Astana Never Forgave
The chronology of that August reveals more than any memoir could. On August 24, 2014, five days before the Seliger forum, Nazarbayev gave an interview in Ulytau in which he effectively outlined the continuity between the Kazakhs and the Golden Horde. During the same conversation, he warned that Kazakhstan would not join any union that threatened its independence. The treaty establishing the Eurasian Economic Union had been signed in May, and the union was scheduled to begin operating on January 1, 2015. There was little doubt about whom the warning was intended for.
Putin’s remark fell on ground that had already been prepared. On December 31, 2014, Kazakhstan’s government adopted Resolution No. 1448 on celebrating the 550th anniversary of the Kazakh Khanate. Approximately 100 events were planned for the anniversary, a 20-episode television series was commissioned, and the estimated cost of a single monument reached 501.8 million tenge. Announcing the anniversary, Nazarbayev characteristically hedged his position. The khanate, he acknowledged, might not have been a state “in the modern understanding of the term, within its present borders.” The caution of the man known as the Leader of the Nation was understandable.
Kazakhstan in the 1990s was navigating a demographic minefield. The 1989 census recorded a population in the Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic that was 39.7% Kazakh and 37.8% Russian. A republic in which the titular nationality and the former “elder brother” accounted for nearly equal shares of the population could not afford an assertive historical policy without risking an ethnic rupture. Zhaksylyk Sabitov, the current director of the Research Institute for the Study of the Jochid Ulus, puts it plainly: any surge in national consciousness during those years threatened to provoke a civil war. Nazarbayev chose a different formula. Kazakhstan was portrayed as a young state born in 1991, with the First President as its founder. Convenient and safe.
According to Sabitov, the turning point came after Crimea. The elite realized that clinging to the myth of Nazarbayev as the founder of the state was “a very bad idea.” Let me translate that from political language into ordinary English. A state whose history begins in 1991 can, whenever circumstances become convenient, be declared a historical accident. Crimea demonstrated that Moscow was perfectly willing to make such declarations and back them with military force.
Meanwhile, demographic changes were working in Astana’s favor. The 2021 census showed that Kazakhs had reached 70.4% of the population, while Russians accounted for 15.5%. A country where the titular nationality constitutes more than two-thirds of the population, and where the Russian share has more than halved over three decades, can speak about its past in a different voice. It no longer has to calculate how every word will sound in Petropavlovsk, Ust-Kamenogorsk, or Moscow. Tokayev has begun speaking in precisely that voice.
An Ancestor Older Than the Leader of the Nation: Why Tokayev Needed Genghis Khan’s Son’s Tomb
Kassym-Jomart Tokayev came to power in March 2019 as the successor designated by the departing leader. For nearly three years, he governed in Nazarbayev’s shadow, while his predecessor retained the chairmanship of the Security Council and the title of Leader of the Nation. The Golden Horde project began during that very period, quietly and under the outward guise of tourism development. Speaking at a tourism forum in Ulytau, Tokayev lamented that few people, either in Kazakhstan or abroad, knew that Genghis Khan’s eldest son was buried on Kazakh soil. He demanded that the mausoleum be transformed into a major attraction.
In January 2021, Tokayev published his article “Independence Above All,” which laid the groundwork for a new seven-volume academic history of Kazakhstan. That same year, at a conference in Atyrau dedicated to the 30th anniversary of independence and titled “The Great Ulus: The Golden Horde,” Education and Science Minister Askhat Aimagambetov announced the establishment of the Research Institute for the Study of the Jochid Ulus. The institute’s chronological framework is revealing: from the emergence of Jochi’s realm on the territory of present-day Kazakhstan in 1224–1225 to 1847, when Kenesary, the last khan to rule over the Kazakhs as a whole and himself a descendant of Jochi, was killed. Near the mausoleum, on the left bank of the Kengir River, the Jochi Khan historical and cultural complex was built, complete with a museum and monument.
Then came January 2022. The bloody events known as Bloody January claimed 238 lives, according to official figures. On January 6, peacekeepers from the Collective Security Treaty Organization entered the country for the first time in the organization’s history. Tokayev took control of the Security Council from Nazarbayev. A referendum that June removed the First President’s special constitutional status, and in September the capital regained its name, Astana. Ulytau became a separate region in 2022. The symbolism is unmistakable: as the founder of the state established in 1991 was being pushed out of political life, a new region appeared on the map containing the tomb of the founder of a state dating back to the 13th century.
What followed was systematic work. In 2023, the authors of the seven-volume history decided to dedicate the entire third volume to the Golden Horde. The project is led by academician Meruert Abuseitova, while its editorial board is chaired by Yerlan Karin, one of the key ideologists in the presidential administration. Approving the manuscript, Karin declared that “Kazakhstan is developing its own distinct scholarly school for the study of Golden Horde history.” In January 2024, Tokayev recalled that 800 years had passed since the establishment of the Jochid Ulus on the country’s territory. He personally opened the May 2026 symposium, “The Golden Horde as a Model of Steppe Civilization: History, Archaeology, Culture, Identity,” held with UNESCO’s support.
The culmination came in March. A Constitutional Commission was established by presidential decree on January 21, 2026. The draft was published on February 12 and submitted to a referendum on March 15. Of the 12.48 million eligible voters, 73.24% went to the polls, and 87.15% of those who voted supported the proposal. The preamble to the new Constitution opens with these words: “We, the united people of Kazakhstan, strengthening statehood on the ancestral Kazakh land, preserving the continuity of the thousand-year history of the Great Steppe, reaffirming the unitary character of the state, the inviolability of its borders and its territorial integrity...”
Consider the placement of those words. A thousand years of history stands immediately alongside the inviolability of national borders. That juxtaposition contains the central legal meaning of the entire Golden Horde campaign.
On June 4, at the State Flag-raising ceremony, Tokayev explicitly stated what had remained implicit at the symposium: “The modern presidential model of government, firmly established in Kazakhstan, traces its origins to the political system created during the Golden Horde era.” In my view, this sentence provides the key to the entire project. Nazarbayev’s legitimacy was personal: the state as the creation of one man. Tokayev’s legitimacy rests on institutions and tradition, because strong presidential authority is now presented as the continuation of an 800-year-old political practice, no longer dependent on the charisma of any particular officeholder. Tokayev has replaced the founding father with a founding ancestor who can neither be discredited nor forced into retirement.
What Soviet Textbooks Left Out: The Horde Without the “Yoke”
My generation studied the Horde through three dates: the Battle of the Kalka River in 1223, the Battle of Kulikovo in 1380, and the Great Stand on the Ugra River in 1480. Between them lay the “Tatar-Mongol yoke,” complete with tribute collectors, raids, and the humiliating journeys Russian princes made to Sarai to obtain patents confirming their right to rule. The term itself became firmly established in Russian historiography relatively late, largely thanks to Nikolay Karamzin in the early 19th century. Soviet schools inherited it along with the central interpretive framework: the Horde existed so that Russia could eventually liberate itself from it.
The Kazakh interpretation looks at the same map from the opposite bank of the Volga. Around 1224–1225, Genghis Khan granted his eldest son, Jochi, a domain in the steppes of present-day Kazakhstan. In 1269, at the Talas assembly, Khan Mengu-Timur effectively freed Jochi’s realm from subordination to Karakorum. This explains Kazakhstan’s anniversary calculations: the Horde’s 750th anniversary was celebrated in 2019, and Nazarbayev had already announced that date in November 2018 in his article “Seven Facets of the Great Steppe.” Under Khan Uzbek, who ruled from 1313 to 1341, the Horde adopted Islam and reached its economic peak. According to estimates cited by Tokayev, the realm at its height covered more than 6 million square kilometers, while the northern branch of the Great Silk Road was under Horde control. The president described this system as a “proto-global market.”
Within this historical framework, the Kazakh Khanate did not emerge out of nowhere. Its founders, Kerey and Janibek, were descendants of Jochi through Tuka-Timur. In the late 1450s, they led their clans away from Khan Abulkhair into the Seven Rivers region. The officially recognized founding date is 1465. The Chinggisid hereditary nobility remained the highest aristocracy of the Kazakh steppe until the Russian Empire abolished khanly authority in the 1820s.
One detail cannot be uncovered in a minute of casual searching, yet it changes a great deal. For decades, Soviet and, to some extent, post-Soviet historiography described the White Horde as a separate state on the territory of Kazakhstan, a kind of provincial appendage to the “real” Golden Horde on the Volga. Sabitov and his colleague Aibolat Kushkumbayev demonstrated that in Turkic sources, the term “White Horde” referred to the khan’s headquarters rather than an independent state. The correction might appear to be a minor philological distinction. In reality, it moves the Kazakh steppe from the periphery of the Horde’s world to its center.
I readily acknowledge that Astana’s critics have arguments of their own. The Mongol conquest of Kazakh territory began with the devastation of Otrar in 1219–1220, and the ancestors of the Kazakhs were among the conquered before becoming part of the new empire. Claiming the legacy of a conqueror is always an ambiguous undertaking. Yet there seems to be no way around that ambiguity. The English do not renounce William the Conqueror, even though the Harrying of the North in 1069–1070 devastated entire counties, and the British monarchy still traces its succession of kings back to 1066. A Kazakh commentator expressed the same thought more succinctly during a debate in June: denying the connection between the Kazakhs and the Horde is like denying the connection between Europeans and classical antiquity.
Another precedent is closer in both blood and language. In July 1932, Ankara hosted the First Turkish History Congress, which endorsed the so-called Turkish History Thesis. Atatürk’s republic, having severed its ties with the Ottoman past, constructed a historical genealogy reaching back to ancient steppe and Anatolian civilizations. In 1936, this thesis was supplemented by the Sun Language Theory, which proclaimed Turkish the primordial language of humanity. That theory was abandoned relatively quickly and quietly. The lesson is twofold: historical narratives can unite a nation, but they can also easily descend into self-parody.
Judging by his May speech, Tokayev has learned that lesson. He specifically warned that history does not forgive lies told for the sake of self-glorification, any more than it forgives attempts to turn a shared heritage into an exclusively national possession. Two days later, while presenting awards to cultural figures, the president went further, warning against “illiterate information frenzies” surrounding the Golden Horde. The warning had two audiences: domestic enthusiasts eager to declare the Kazakhs the heirs to virtually everything, and northern neighbors ready to ridicule every such attempt.
Moscow Recognizes Itself in the Mirror: The Golden Horde Rebranding Strikes at the Heart of Russian Ideology
Official Moscow remains silent. Neither the Russian Foreign Ministry nor the Kremlin has publicly commented on Kazakhstan’s historical policy. Experts and commentators are speaking on their behalf, and their arguments fall into two categories.
The first is condescending. Shortly after the May symposium, a Russian analyst who has long specialized in Central Asia wrote that the Kazakhs had nothing to be proud of. According to his interpretation, the Horde brought genocide upon the ancestors of the Kazakhs during the period of conquest. Subsequently, they supposedly found themselves among countless tributary peoples and the lowest social strata, while their genuine cultural revival began only in the 19th century, after their incorporation into the Russian Empire. I would classify this article as a valuable document of its time. Here, in its purest form, is precisely the interpretive framework Tokayev has called obsolete: the steppe represents barbarism, Russia represents civilization, and everything that existed before the empire arrived is merely prehistory.
The second category is alarmist. Some Russian commentators perceive the Golden Horde narrative as a concealed territorial claim against present-day Russia. A glance at the map makes the logic of their anxiety understandable. Sarai, the Horde’s capital, stood on the lower Volga. Kazan, Astrakhan, and Crimea belonged to Jochi’s realm, and the indigenous peoples of those territories speak Turkic languages. No Kazakh official has made territorial claims against any of these regions, while the constitutional preamble, with its insistence on the “inviolability of borders,” works in precisely the opposite legal direction. The passage concerning borders was written by people who clearly remember December 2020, when Kazakhstan’s Foreign Ministry delivered a diplomatic note of protest to Russia following remarks by State Duma deputy Vyacheslav Nikonov describing Kazakh territory as a “gift.” The fears of Moscow’s commentators reveal something else: Russia knows all too well how history can become an argument for revising borders, because it has used precisely that argument itself.
The most interesting part comes next. Russia has long claimed the Golden Horde’s legacy for itself, and has done so longer than anyone else. Ivan the Terrible, after conquering Kazan in 1552 and Astrakhan in 1556, gathered the territories of the former Horde along with the titles of its khans. In 1925, Prince Nikolai Trubetzkoy published The Legacy of Genghis Khan while living in exile, explicitly portraying Russia as the successor to the Mongol Empire. During the late Soviet period, Lev Gumilev developed this idea into a popular theory of Russian-steppe symbiosis. In his 2012 address to the Federal Assembly, Putin discussed passionarity, a concept borrowed from Gumilev. Meanwhile, Kazakhstan’s principal university, the Eurasian National University in Astana, has borne Gumilev’s name since 1996.
Language reveals the relationship even more explicitly. The Russian word for money derives from the same Turkic root as the tenge. The Russian words for treasury and customs, the latter derived from the Horde’s system of customs seals, reached Moscow from Sarai, along with the relay postal system. When Tokayev linked the tenge to the danga, he could just as easily have reminded his Russian counterparts where the word for the money in their own wallets originated. He chose not to, and that restraint speaks more eloquently than any verbal confrontation.
For years, Eurasianism served the Kremlin as a means of explaining why Russia was something greater than a European country and why it possessed special rights in Central Asia. Kazakhstan’s interpretation pulls the foundation out from under that entire construction. If the Horde is the ancestor of Kazakh statehood, Kazakhstan becomes a direct heir, while Russia becomes merely one of the many fragments left by its disintegration, and a former tributary at that. The empire that portrayed itself as the liberator becomes a former dependency of the Horde.
Why, then, is Moscow silent? The answer lies in trade statistics. According to Kazakhstan’s Ministry of Trade and Integration, bilateral trade in 2025 totaled $27.4 billion, a decline of 3%, while the Russian side puts the figure at $28.7 billion. The $1.3 billion discrepancy is typical of the mirror statistics maintained by neighboring countries and does not alter the fundamental picture. Kazakhstan’s trade deficit with Russia grew from $9 billion to $11.1 billion in a single year. China, with bilateral trade of $34.2 billion, has already overtaken Russia as Astana’s largest trading partner. Yet approximately 80% of Kazakhstan’s oil exports still pass through the Caspian Pipeline Consortium to Novorossiysk, leaving them dependent on a terminal whose operations a Russian court attempted to suspend in the summer of 2022 on ostensibly environmental grounds.
Astana is physically dependent on Moscow, while Moscow is politically dependent on Astana. Kazakhstan remains Russia’s largest partner in Central Asia and a pivotal member of both the Eurasian Economic Union and the Collective Security Treaty Organization. An open confrontation over Batu Khan and Tokhtamysh would cost both sides more than the historical dispute itself is worth.
Tokayev’s approach to managing tensions is easily recognizable from another episode. In June 2022, at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum, he sat on the same stage as Putin and refused to recognize the Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics, describing them as quasi-state entities. Four years later, in Astana, he demanded an end to the practice of calling the steppe empires “so-called semi-states.” The symmetry of the terminology is unlikely to be accidental. Tokayev denies statehood to entities Moscow created through force while demanding recognition of the statehood of a civilization Moscow spent centuries describing as a yoke.
Two Empires, One Steppe: Tashkent Chose Tamerlane, Astana Chose His Mortal Enemy
Uzbekistan embarked on this path a quarter of a century earlier. In 1993, an equestrian statue of Amir Timur was erected in central Tashkent on the site of a monument to Karl Marx. The year 1996 was declared the Year of Timur, and ever since, Uzbek state ideology has treated Tamerlane as the founder of its national tradition. An Uzbek anthropologist and political philosopher has warned that the rehabilitation of imperial identity in Tashkent was precisely what hindered Central Asian integration during the 1990s. Now, instead of one imperial narrative, the region may find itself confronting two competing ones.
The concern appears reasonable until we recall the relationship between the historical heroes adopted by the two capitals. Timur was the mortal enemy of Tokhtamysh, the last great khan of the united Golden Horde. In April 1395, Timur defeated Tokhtamysh on the Terek River and subsequently burned Sarai. Tashkent and Astana have chosen as their national forebears two rulers who fought each other to the death.
The irony does not end there. The Shaybanid dynasty, which ruled Transoxiana in the 16th century and brought the name “Uzbek” to the region in its modern meaning, was also descended from Jochi through his son Shiban. The Kazakh Khanate emerged from a split with Abulkhair, the grandfather of Muhammad Shaybani. Both peoples grew from the same Golden Horde trunk, yet their national mythologies are now being constructed around different branches.
I do not expect a conflict along these lines. Trade between Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan reached $4.8 billion in 2025, while Tokayev and Shavkat Mirziyoyev have established what are arguably the warmest relations between Astana and Tashkent in the entire history of their independence. Competition between the two imperial narratives will remain confined to museums, television series, and historical debates. At the border, the real concerns will be water from the Syr Darya and transit.
Kazan has reacted more calmly than might have been expected. A historian from Tatarstan described Kazakhstan’s interest in the Golden Horde’s past as entirely natural and called the period of Jochi’s realm perhaps the most remarkable chapter in Kazakh history. As early as 2009, the Marjani Institute of History published the third volume of its seven-volume History of the Tatars, devoted entirely to the Jochid Ulus. Speaking in Kazan, Sabitov rejected the very notion of a competition over historical inheritance. Kazakhstan’s campaign objectively benefits the Tatars: the more prominently the Golden Horde is discussed in a neighboring sovereign state, the harder it becomes for Moscow to dismiss the subject as marginal within its own borders.
Ukrainian analysts view Astana’s shift primarily as an attempt to distance itself from the “Russian world.” I find their second argument, concerning Kazakhstan’s internal dynamics, considerably more persuasive. The Golden Horde’s political framework existed before the emergence of distinct Kazakh, Nogai, Tatar, and Uzbek identities, and transcended the division of Kazakh society into three major tribal confederations. The narrative of this shared historical structure brings together elites who still remember their ancestral and clan geography and distribute positions accordingly.
A Khan’s Seal of Legitimacy for a Middle Power
The foreign policy dimension of the project is evident in Tokayev’s own vocabulary. A former director-general of the United Nations Office at Geneva, he has spent recent years consistently promoting Kazakhstan’s identity as a middle power. In an interview reviewing 2024, Tokayev said that Kazakhstan was regarded as a middle power “in the West and throughout the world,” and that this status imposed an obligation to behave responsibly on the international stage. Zhomart Zhenis, deputy director of the Institute of History and Ethnology, explicitly connected the two issues. In his view, after many years of a dominant Eurocentric paradigm, Kazakhstan is finally capable of independently defining an ideological direction consistent with its status as a regional power.
Historical depth matters to a middle power just as much as oil and transit infrastructure. Turkey draws on its Ottoman heritage, Iran on its Persian heritage, China on five millennia of civilization, and India on its ancient Vedic traditions. Until recently, Kazakhstan’s principal offerings to the world were Baikonur and its uranium reserves.
In Tokayev’s interpretation, the Golden Horde is the ideal national brand for a country that earns revenue from transit. An empire that transformed the steppe into a secure corridor between East and West provides an almost ready-made advertisement for the Trans-Caspian International Transport Route, which runs from China through Kazakhstan, across the Caspian Sea, and onward through Azerbaijan and Georgia to Turkey and Europe. A UNESCO-supported symposium bringing together researchers from China, Mongolia, the United States, India, Pakistan, Japan, and Egypt transforms national history into an international scholarly agenda. And an internationally recognized scholarly agenda offers more effective protection than any diplomatic note.
For Azerbaijani readers, there is another dimension to this story. The southern boundary of Jochi’s realm ran near Derbent, and the Horde fought the Hulaguid Empire for decades over Azerbaijan’s pastures. In January 1263, Khan Berke’s forces defeated Hulagu’s army on the Terek River. Nearly a century later, in 1357, Khan Jani Beg captured Tabriz, and in 1385 Tokhtamysh devastated the city again. For us, the Golden Horde is the history of a neighbor that came from the north through the Derbent Pass.
Astana’s method, however, requires no translation in Baku. Azerbaijan, too, spent decades living within a historiographical framework in which the origins of its statehood were traced to decisions made in foreign capitals. It understands the price of such dependence. A people that does not tell its own history becomes the object of other people’s maps and territorial claims. The Armenian revisionist narratives of the 1990s demonstrated this with exhaustive clarity. Today, ferries departing from Aktau and Kuryk carry cargo to Baku along a route that the khans of the Golden Horde and the Hulaguids once sought to control by force. Now it is governed by agreements, and history serves those agreements.
In a debate with Russian opponents, a Kazakh political scientist observed that the historical interpretations advanced by the Turkic and Mongol peoples of post-Soviet Eurasia, from Kazakhs and Tatars to Azerbaijanis and Buryats, had for decades been dismissed as secondary and politically motivated. His conclusion is uncompromising: the reinterpretation of the Golden Horde’s legacy has already become part of the region’s historical reality, and no external interpretive framework will be able to stop it. I agree with that conclusion entirely.
A Mausoleum With Modern Glaze
The direction of the project can be predicted from the mechanisms already set in motion. The seven-volume history will be published, and by September 1, 2027, Kazakh schoolchildren will receive history textbooks presenting the Golden Horde as the direct predecessor of the Kazakh Khanate, rather than a historical interlude defined by raids. The Kremlin will make no official statement on the matter at the presidential or Foreign Ministry level before the end of 2027. Instead, the response will come through Russian textbooks, television broadcasts, and expert commentaries. Construction of a monument honoring the civilization of the Great Steppe, announced by Tokayev on June 4, will begin in Astana before the end of the first half of 2027. If even one of these predictions fails to materialize, it will mean that I overestimated Astana’s determination or underestimated Moscow’s patience.
One question remains, and I do not have an answer to it. At least five parties are competing for the Horde’s inheritance: Kazakhstan, Russia, Tatarstan, Uzbekistan, and Mongolia. What will happen when two of them simultaneously ask UNESCO to recognize them as custodians of the same historical monument?
The mausoleum of Jochi Khan, on the banks of the Kengir River, was first mentioned in the writings of Hafiz Tanysh in the 16th century. It was restored in 1998 at a cost of nearly $1 million, and archaeologists still criticize the restorers for selecting the blue glaze of its dome without regard for the original tiles. The mausoleum was granted the status of a monument of national significance in April 2020, and several years later officials had to explain why its walls were becoming damp. Today, the dome above the tomb of Genghis Khan’s eldest son shines more brightly than it did in Jochi’s own lifetime. Kazakhstan is constructing its Golden Horde in much the same way: on an authentic foundation, but beneath a fresh layer of glaze designed to impress those looking from afar.