ABSTRACT
Nursultan Nazarbaev, son of Abis, was born in 1940 in the village of Chemolgan, near the city of Alma-Ata, in what was then the Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. He was educated locally and in the Ukraine city of Dneprodzerzhinsk, where he completed a technical school in 1960. Upon graduation, he returned to Kazakhstan to work as a metallurgist in the Karaganda Metallurgical Combine in Temirtau. Nazarbaev's upbringing was very Kazakh, but it could not be called traditional because by 1940 the age-old nomadic lifestyle of the Kazakhs had been shattered by tsarist and Soviet policies that between 1916 and 1935 had killed or forced into emigration more than 3 million Kazakhs, or nearly 70 percent of the population. All of the Soviet republics were peculiar hybrids of Stalinist politics and age-old ethnicity, but Kazakhstan might have been the most peculiar of all.
