Name: Why Kazakhstan is Insanely Empty
Uploaded: 2026-03-16T17:07:38.000Z
Duration: 47 min 11 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

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Geographically speaking, it might surprise you to hear that Kazakhstan is the ninth largest country in the world.

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It's a huge place that's roughly the same size as the whole of Western Europe, stretching from Portugal to Poland.

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And if it were placed over the continental United States, Kazakhstan's landmass would sprawl from San Diego in the southwest to St.

But despite this impressive geographic size, Kazakhstan is also one of the emptiest locations on the entire planet as well.

Whereas Western Europe is home to more than 400 million people today, Kazakhstan just recently hit the population milestone of only 20 million people this year in 2024, which, for reference, is fewer people than live in the US State of Florida, spread out across an area that is about exactly 16 times larger than Florida is.

This overall gives Kazakhstan one of the absolute lowest population densities of any location on the planet today, at just over 7 people per square kilometer.

On average the 11th lowest density of people of all the countries in the world.

And notably the second most sparsely populated country that's located anywhere within Eurasia, remaining only behind the emptiest country in the world of Mongolia.

But what's even stranger at first glance about Kazakhstan's demographic pattern is that it appears to be a sort of population void in the center of the Eurasian continent.

Literally every piece of land that surrounds Kazakhstan on all of its sides has a much denser population than Kazakhstan itself has.

Where whether it's Russia to the north and the west, Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan to the south, or China's Xinjiang Province to the east, Kazakhstan is surrounded by other lands that are much more densely populated than it in a pattern that resembles more well known inhospitable climates like the Tibetan Plateau, the Sahara Desert, or the Amazon rainforest.

Despite its huge geographic size, Kazakhstan doesn't even have the largest population in Central Asia, with Uzbekistan having nearly twice the number of people.

Despite having only one sixth of the available land that is similarly landlocked and largely dominated by the same climate types as Kazakhstan.

Of course, a great deal of Kazakhstan's relative emptiness can easily be explained by much of the country's intensely harsh climate and hostile environment.

Kazakhstan is the biggest landlocked country in the world that is thousands of kilometers away from any ocean.

And so with only limited large bodies of water nearby, like the Caspian Sea to regulate the area's climate.

Kazakhstan's climate is one of the most varied and wild in the world, with bitterly cold winters and hot summers.

Practically the entire country's landmass is dominated by either a cold desert climate across the center or a dry, semi arid climate across the north and the east of the country that resembles conditions seen in southern Ukraine or the American Great Plains region running from west Texas to North Dakota, with only scattered pockets of more easily livable climates.

But nonetheless, due to its sheer size, Kazakhstan still has a large amount of arable land and renewable freshwater resources that would normally be conducive to a much larger population than just 20 million people.

Nearly 11% of Kazakhstan's huge land area is considered arable and suitable for agriculture, largely across the Belda Prairie in the north of the country that encompasses Kazakhstan's portion of the Great Eurasian steppe.

Kazakhstan has about 296,697 square kilometers worth of arable land in total, which is not only larger than the entire land area of the United Kingdom, but

is the 11th highest amount of arable land of any country in the entire world.

To put this into perspective, Kazakhstan has more agricultural land available than tons of other countries around the world that have much larger populations than it, like Indonesia, Turkey, Pakistan, or France, and

In fact, Kazakhstan is such a major outlier here that it is by far the country with the highest density of arable land per person in the entire world, with an average of 15,456 square meters of arable land available per person in the country.

The closest competitors to Kazakhstan's arable land density are Australia, Canada, and

Argentina, which also notably all have significantly higher populations than Kazakhstan has.

In terms of other countries that have well known, sparse populations, like Mongolia, Namibia, or Libya, Kazakhstan has vastly more available arable land than any of them do, while Kazakhstan also has vastly more available renewable water resources as well.

Kazakhstan has about 108 billion cubic meters worth of total renewable water resources per year, which again outclasses many other countries that have much larger populations than Kazakhstan has, like Tanzania, Iraq, Ivory Coast, South Korea, or Afghanistan.

Kazakhstan has one very significant river, the Syr Darya, that's fed from glacial snowmelt from the Hai Tien Shan mountain range to the east in Kyrgyzstan, they used to empty into the huge Aral Sea, while the country also fully encompasses Lake Balkash, the 15th largest lake by surface area in the world.

And there are tons of smaller, more minor rivers dotted across the country as well, as Kazakhstan's population density today largely follows where the fresh water is located, like along the banks of the Syr Darya River.

But still, Kazakhstan has enough arable land and enough fresh water, despite its largely arid and cold climate, that you would expect it would have a population greater than just the 20 million people that it currently has today.

And indeed it probably would be a lot more densely populated of a place today were it not also for the fact that Kazakhstan has had its natural geography more negatively altered by mankind than perhaps any other physical location on the surface of the earth.

Because a very great deal of what makes Kazakhstan so sparsely populated today in the center of Eurasia, despite its huge amounts of arable land and freshwater, is the simple fact that the 20th century was an unmitigated continuous catastrophe for the country in just about every way imaginable.

And the Kazakhstan of today, in 2024, is still trying and struggling to play demographic and geographic catch up with the consequences of a century long handicap that most other countries in the world today simply don't have to deal with.

The idea of Kazakhstan was born in the later 15th century, in 1465, with the first emergence of the Kazakh Khanate, a nomadic steppe empire that for centuries sprawled across the Central Eurasian steppe from the Caspian Sea in the west to the Tien Shan Mountains in the east.

As the Tsardom of Russia coalesced around its core in Muscovy, around the same time, it began expanding in search of more geographically defensible terrain in every direction.

And that Russian quest for more geographically defensible borders eventually brought them to the frontier of the Kazakh steppe.

By the 1600s, the old frontier between the settled Russian society and the nomadic Kazakh society roughly followed the geographic boundary in Eurasia between the forest of the north and the treeless steppe of the south.

And to prevent nomadic raids from the steppe overflowing into Russia that had been commonplace for centuries, and

to protect their own overland trade route going into China, the Russians began constructing a series of forts along this geographic frontier between the Caspian Sea and the Tianshan mountains.

Across the 17th and 18th centuries that represented the beginning of the Russian settlement of modern day Kazakhstan.

Many of these 17th and 18th century forts developed into major modern cities of the 21st century today, and

many of them built and initially settled by the Russians are today found across the border in Kazakhstan rather than Russia.

Then, mostly across the second half of the 19th century, the Russian empire rapidly expanded its area of control across Central Asia through military conquest.

And in order to maintain their control over these newly conquered territories, the Russian Empire began encouraging a massive settlement program of ethnic Russians and Ukrainians to colonize Kazakhstan and the rest of Central Asia to shift the region's demographics to become more Slavic.

Hundreds of thousands of the Russian Empire Slavs from Eastern Europe began settling in Kazakhstan in the late 19th century, and

they began coming in even higher droves after the Russians finished constructing the Transaeral Railway in 1906, which for the first time connected the lands of Kazakhstan and Central Asia directly with European Russia by rail.

Russians and Ukrainians were especially encouraged by the tsarist authorities to settle the fertile arable lands of northern Kazakhstan.

And by the time of the Russian Empire's first census that was conducted in 1897, a total of 454,000 Russians had already settled in modern day Kazakhstan, and

they made up about 11% of the total population.

At the time, ethnic Kazakhs still made up a significant majority in Kazakhstan, with about 3.4 million people and about 83% of the territory's total population.

But as the 19th century passed into the 20th century, that balance wouldn't last for very long, as Kazakhstan would go through multiple decades of catastrophic demographic collapse triggered directly by the policies of tsarist and later Soviet authorities.

The increasing settlement of sedentary Russians and Ukrainians in Kazakhstan clashed with the traditional culture of the indigenous nomadic Kazakhs.

And resentment among the Kazakhs mounted for decades until they exploded in outright revolt in 1916.

When the tsarist regime began attempting to conscript Muslim Kazakhs to fight on the Eastern front during the First World War, the tsarist regime in Russia chose to put down the 1916 revolt in Central Asia extremely harshly.

By February of 1917, it's estimated that somewhere between 100,000 and 270,000 mostly Kyrgyz and Kazakh people were killed as a result of the ensuing violence.

While hundreds of thousands of other Kazakhs fled the chaos into neighboring China, which gave birth to the modern Kazakh diaspora.

And then, after the entire Russian empire collapsed later on in 1917 and the Russian civil war began between the Communists and the White movement, Kazakhstan was thrown into an even deeper period of chaos.

As the civil war between the Bolsheviks and the whites intensified across the former empire, catastrophic famine conditions developed across large parts of it that particularly affected Kazakhstan.

Between 1917 and 1922, this first great famine is believed to have killed anywhere from 400,000 to 750,000 more people across Kazakhstan over just those five years, which is believed to have even further wiped out roughly 10% to 19% of the entire pre famine ethnic Kazakh population, which obviously resulted in a devastating demographic setback for Kazakhstan.

These events, combined with the continued settlement of Russians and Ukrainians in Kazakhstan, led to a severe altering in Kazakhstan's demographics.

By the time of the next census in the territory that was conducted by the Soviets in 1926.

By then, the Kazakhs had shrunk to only 58.5% of the total population, down from the 83% they had once enjoyed three decades previously, back in 1897, while over the same time period, the Russian population in Kazakhstan had more than doubled to become about 21% of the population, while the Ukrainians had also grown to become about 14% of the population.

Kazakhstan enjoyed a brief era of autonomy during the Russian Civil War era before it was subsumed by the Red army into the newly established Soviet Union by the end of 1922, where it at first became a formal territorial part of the Russian Soviet Republic.

For the first 13 years of the Soviet Union's existence up until 1936, Kazakhstan in its entirety remained a legal territory of Russia's within the Soviet Union, and

Kazakhstan wasn't legally separated from Russia to become its own separate, full Union Soviet Republic until 1936.

During those 13 years that Kazakhstan was directly a part of Russia, the Soviet authorities immediately introduced the policy of collective farming to the territory that set up collective farms that were primarily inhabited by Russian and Soviet deportees from elsewhere rather than by ethnic Kazakhs.

After Stalin drafted the Soviet Union's first Five Year Plan in 1928, the Bolshevik Kazakh Central Committee officially decreed in 1930 that in order to meet the plans ambitious agricultural and industrial targets, the entire nomadic Kazakh population would be forcefully sedentarized and incorporated into Kazakhstan's system of collectivized farms.

This policy, virtually overnight, forced Kazakh herders, who had lived a nomadic lifestyle across the steppes with a diet based on their livestock's meat and dairy for literally thousands of years, to immediately abandon everything they and their culture knew and adopt a new life as farmers producing grain.

Instead of which led to what should have been predictably disastrous results, Wealthier Kazakh nomads with larger cattle herds were branded as class enemies and were forced to hand over large numbers of their cattle at gunpoint, While the increasing numbers of collective farms that were established across the country's steppe resulted in a simultaneous sharp decline in the amount of adequate grazing land available in the country for all of the remaining herds.

Between 1930 and 1931, it's estimated that Soviet authority seized at least one third of Kazakhstan's grain and cereals and another one third of Kazakhst livestock to provide food for the major urban areas in the country like Moscow and Leningrad, all as Kazakhstan's agricultural output simultaneously plummeted because of the forced collectivization policies.

This all ultimately led to One of the most catastrophic man made famines in human history, developing within Kazakhstan and other areas of the Soviet Union in the early 1930s, while Stalin's policies throughout the famine only ended up making things even worse.

Districts that the Soviets established within Kazakhstan that didn't meet the government's grain production quotas were blacklisted by Soviet authorities, which meant that they became prohibited from trading with any other districts or villages, which essentially entrapped desperate and starving Kazakhs and blacklisted villages into what effectively became vast zones of death and hunger, where it was physically impossible for anyone to locate any food.

In total, in only three years between 1930 and 1933, it's estimated that anywhere from 1.5 million to 2.3 million Soviet Kazakhstan died as a result of the catastrophic famine, including at least 1.3 million ethnic Kazakhs.

It is the sharpest population decline in Kazakhstan's entire history, as it's believed that as much as 42% of the entire pre famine ethnic Kazakh population of 1929 died, while much of Kazakhstan's ethnic minorities were also affected, like Ukrainians, who also lost roughly 36% of their entire pre famine population in Kazakhstan during the same famous famine as well.

And due to the horrendous severity of the famine during those years, it's also estimated that another roughly 665,000 to 1.1 million more Kazakhs simply fled the country with hundreds of thousands of their cattle into neighboring countries like China, Mongolia, Afghanistan, Iran, Turkey and the other Soviet Central Asian republics.

That increased the size of the Kazakh diaspora and exasperated the food scarcity and the famine in Kazakhstan even further.

All of the Kazakhs who attempted to escape from the country during the famine were branded by the Soviet authorities as class traitors and orders were given to soldiers to shoot them on sight at the border.

Thousands of Kazakhs who attempted to escape into China were shot and killed in this way by Soviet border guards as well.

And the combined calamity of all the deaths and the refugees caused by the famine led to a rapid decline in the population of Kazakhs in Kazakhstan, from nearly 60% of the population before the famine to just 38% of the population afterwards.

The two Soviet censuses conducted before and after the famine in 1926 and 1937 reveal that the number of Kazakhs in Kazakhstan crashed from 3,636,612 in 1926 to just 2,181,000 a decade later.

And in addition to the previous severe Kazakh famine of 1919-1922, Kazakhstan lost more than half of its entire population in a mere 15 year timespan due to the actions and policies of the Tsarist and Soviet authorities in the territory.

Ethnic Russians in Kazakhstan for the first time outnumbered ethnic Kazakhs.

And Kazakhs would remain an ethnic minority in their own republic for decades until after the collapse of the Soviet Union itself in the 1990s.

And throughout World War II, Stalin continued meddling with Kazakhstan's demographics even further.

That would leave behind decades of lasting influence into the modern day.

In 1941, after Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union, Stalin.

Stalin had the entire Population of 600,000 Volga Germans in Russia forcibly expelled from their homeland and exiled, with more than 400,000 of them getting deported into Kazakhstan, which introduced a large ethnic German minority to Kazakhstan in the process.

By 1959, Germans reached more than 7% of Kazakhstan's total population as a result, and

by 1989, the German population in Kazakhstan reached nearly 1 million people.

Later on, in 1944, after the Soviets retook the Crimean peninsula from the Germans, Stalin also ordered the forcible deportation of the entire ethnic Crimean Tatar population to Central Asia as well, on charges that they had allegedly all collaborated with the Nazi invaders.

This introduced a large Tatar ethnic minority into Kazakhstan as well, who eventually numbered several hundred thousand people too.

And at the same time as all of these outside populations were being transferred to Kazakhstan, more of Kazakhstan's indigenous population was dying during the Second World War as well.

The Kazakh Soviet Republic lost a total of 660,000 of its citizens during World War II from 1941 to 1945, representing another devastating loss of 10.7% of Kazakhstan's total population in only four years of war, Coming right on the heels of the devastating demographic collapses of the two previous famines in the 1930s and the 1920s, as well.

As a result of all of this chaos in Kazakhstan, the next Soviet census in the territory, conducted in 1959, revealed that ethnic Kazakhs had plummeted to only 30% of Kazakhstan's total population by then, while Russians made up the new majority at 42.7% of the total population, while Ukrainians stood at another 8.2% and Germans and another 7.1% of the total population, giving European ethnicities in Kazakhstan a combined share of about 58% of Kazakhstan's total population at the time.