Vol. 1, Issue No. 22 Supplement - 23 February 2000
Introduction
Prehistory
Turkish Connection
Genghis Khan
The Golden Horde
Kanate of the Kazakhhs
Russian Control
Soviet Control
Nursultan Nazarbayev
Independence
Tengizchevroil
Bechtel-Enka Joint Venture
by Charles F. Wickwire (Trey)
Working here in Kazakhhstan has given me a unique opportunity to do one of my favorite things, study cultural history. I never knew how intertwined the cultures in this region were until my arrival here a mere 28 months ago. I will now attempt to untangle the web of history that covers the Central Asian steppes and connects more cultures and peoples than you can imagine. Only the United States can rival the mixture I have seen here.
So where exactly is Kazakhhstan? Kazakhhstan is a large country that stretches from the Caspian Sea in the west to China in the east. The Russian Federation runs along the entire northern border and to the south is a collection of ex-soviet republics that have gained their independence as Kazakhhstan did in 1991. They are Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgystan and Tajikistan. Farther south finds you in Iran and Afghanistan.
Where does name Kazakhhstan come from. The ‘stan’ part means land, so Kazakhhstan is the land of the Kazakhs. Kazakh is the name given to independent wanderers in the old Turkic language. It was originally used for young men who were sent out of their village with only their weapons to find their fortunes. Until they returned to the tribe they were said to be a Kazakh.
If we go back to the Stone Age we find the steppes populated with nomadic tribesmen who wandered the area following food sources. One such culture was the Scythians who migrated out of Anatolia, modern day Turkey, in the 7th and 6th centuries BC. The tomb of two Scythian nobles was found near the village of Berel in Kazakhhstan. The nobles were buried with a dozen horses in full dress regalia around 500 BC. The horses were found buried side by side on a bed of birch bark next to the funeral chamber of the two nobles which had been pillaged. Since the burial ground was in the permafrost of the Altai Mountains the bodies were preserved. It was probably the Scythians who brought metallurgy and horseback riding skills to the Turkic nomads of the steppes.
The first well documented state in the region of today’s Kazakhhstan was a Turkic Kaganate during the sixth century A.D. I am not sure what a Kaganate is but it became a Confederation of Turkic tribes called the Qarluqs in 766 A.D. The Arabs came up from the south to conquer parts of what is now southern Kazastan and introduce Islam. During the ninth through the eleventh centuries the Oghuz Turks controlled western Kazakhhstan and the Kipchak people, also of Turkic origin, controlled the east.
The area in the southern tip of Kazakhhstan, known as Transoxiania, was controlled by the Oghuz Turks. Seljuk, a Sultan, fell out of favor with his Oghuz overlord and fled to Jand. My best guess on the location of Jand is the valley region where Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan meet to the southeast of Kazakhhstan. It was in Jand that Seljuk became a convert of the Sunni sect of the Moslem faith. This was a more orthodox form of Islam than the popular folk Islam that stressed Mysticism and magic. The Seljuks became warriors that served Moslem princes.
I would like to leave the Kazakhhstan region just for a couple paragraphs to cover a bit of Turkish history. When Seljuk left Transoxiania and founded the Seljuk dynasty he founded one of the most famous Turkish dynasties in history. Anatolia, modern Turkey, was a part of the Byzantine Empire, having fallen to the Romans in 190 B.C. In 1071 a Seljuk named Alp Arslan defeated the Byzantine army and captured their leader, Emperor Romanus IV Digenes, at the Battle of Manzikert. After this battle the Seljuks poured across Anatolia conquering Byzantine provinces one by one.
From out of the Seljuk empire a new dynasty arose, the Ottomans, named after Osman I, son of a Seljuk nobleman. The Ottomans created an empire that covered vast territories around the Mediterranean and a continuous imperial state that lasted from the early fourteenth century until 1922, just after the First World War. The Ottomans suffered one major setback when Tamerlane, a Turkish Mongol from Samarkand in what is modern day Uzbekistan, defeated Beyezid at the Battle of Ankara in 1402. The empire remained fragmented until 1413 when control was reestablished and growth resumed.
Now let’s get back to Kazakhhstan and the Steppes. Kazakhhstan and the surrounding steppe countries saw several Turkic confederacies and Arab influences until the arrival of Genghis Khan, or Chinggis as he is known here. Genghis Khan was born Temujin, or blacksmith, in what is now Siberia in 1162. His father was the leader of the Yakka Mongols but was poisoned by the rival Tatar Mongols when Temujin was young. Temujin, his mother and his siblings lived in hardship until, in 1196 Temujin was named Genghis Khan, or overlord, of the Mongol Tribes. The story of Genghis Khan is long and adventurous but I will attempt to discuss his influence on Kazakhhstan itself.
In the beginning Genghis Khan’s attention was to the east and he fought long and hard to take Northern China for the Mongols. During the time that Genghis Khan was solidifying his hold on the east, Kazakhhstan was basically two parts. Moslem Turks held the Southern Area and the Kipchak Turkes, or desert people, lived a nomadic lifestyle to the north. The Kipchaks were well versed with the Mongols and migrated east to keep ahead of them. To the south were the Turkish tribes who had converted to the Islamic faith. The Khwaresm-shahs who ruled from Samarkand to Baghdad were to be the catalyst that brought the Mongol Hordes screaming down from the steppes.
Genghis Khan was interested in trade. Moslem merchants described the wealth of Islam to him and he sent merchants and ambassadors to the nearest of the western Islamic powers, the Khwaresm-shahs. The Shah allowed the merchants to be plundered and killed and he executed the envoy sent to demand punishment for the slain merchants.
To the Mongols an ambassador is sacred and the insult of slaying one of Genghis Khans ambassadors could only be wiped out by war. Genghis Khan had a new empire to destroy, the forces of Islam. The Moslem forces expected to meet an undisciplined horde of barbarians. Instead, disciplined divisions, maneuvering in silence struck with amazing speed. The armies of the Khwaresm-shah were scattered in a few weeks and the Shah became a fugitive with a Mongol man hunt at his heels. He died on an Island in the Caspian Sea of exhaustion and terror.
The Mongol hordes swept through the Moslem cities laying waste to all they touched. They devoted themselves to the art of inspiring terror. It is said that in some places not even the dogs and cats survived the passing of the Mongol horsemen. Genghis Khan delibertely turned the rich belt of Islamic civilization into a no-mans land, putting an end to the agricultural working of the land and creating an artificial steppe more suited to the life of the Mongols.
The Mongols then went north along the western coast of the Caspian through Georgia and the Caucus mountians to attack the Kipchaks of northern Kazakhhstan. The Kipchaks were pushed further east into what is now Hungary while the Mongols ruled supreme from the Volga river to the Pacific Ocean. Genghis Khan, at the time of his death, was the sole leader of the largest land based empire the world has ever seen.
After the passing of the Great Khan his grandson Kubilai Khan became Khan over the eastern portion of Genghis Khan empire, extending it to the south and eventually incorporating all of China. To the west, Kazakhhstan became the Golden Horde, named after the golden tent of one of Genghis Khan’s other grandsons, Batu Khan. Batu Khan made his capital in Sarai on the lower Volga. The Golden Horde would endure from 1236 till the 1430’s when several separate Horde states formed. The Golden Horde remained in name until it officially ended in 1502 with the destruction of Sarai by the Crimean Khan.
In 1465 some 200,000 dissatisfied subjects of the Uzbek Khan moved into Mughulistan. The Uzbeks were a Turkish tribe that lived south of Kazakhhstan in modern day Uzbekistan. These separatists became known as Kazakh (Independent or Vagabond) Uzbeks. The Kazakh Uzbeks developed a significant differentiation between themselves and their neighboring Uzbeks to the south. The became nomadic horsemen while their cousins built cities and developed agriculture. The Kazakh tribes spread across the western steppes and were consolidated into one people by the first Kazakh leader, Khan Kasym. The Kazakhs were the masters of the entire steppe region, reportedly able to bring 200,000 horsemen into the field and feared by all their neighbors. The Khanate of the Kazakhs was to disintegrate into three separate Hordes. The Great Horde was to the East, the Middle Horde in the central steppe region and the Lessor Horde in the West between the Aral and Caspian Seas.
Russian traders and soldiers began to appear on the northwestern edge of Kazakh territory in the seventeenth century, when Cossacks established the forts that later became the cities of Oral (Ural’sk) and Atyrau (Gur’yev). Cossack is the Russian pronunciation of Kazakh. They are not racially connected to the Kazakhs of Kazakhhstan but earned their name for a similar reason. These Russian natives were outcast, criminals and wandering adventures who preferred the freedom of the steppes as opposed to the discipline of the Tsar’s cities. Also known as White Russians they became feared warriors who adopted the Mongol tradition of fighting on horseback and dominated the Russian steppes.
Russians were able to seize Kazakh territory because the khanates were preoccupied by Kalmyk invaders of Mongol origin, who in the late sixteenth century had begun to move into Kazakh territory from the east. Forced westward in what they call their Great Retreat, the Kazakhs were increasingly caught between the Kalmyks and the Russians. In 1730 Abul Khayr, one of the khans of the Lesser Horde, sought Russian assistance. Although Abul Khayr’s intent had been to form a temporary alliance against the stronger Kalmyks, the Russians gained permanent control of the Lesser Horde as a result of his decision. The Russians conquered the Middle Horde by 1798, but the Great Horde managed to remain independent until the 1820s. At that time the expanding Quqon (Kokand) Khanate to the south forced the Great Horde khans to choose Russian protection also, which seemed to them the lesser of two evils.
The Kazakhs began to resist Russian control almost as soon as it became complete. The first mass uprising was led by Khan Kene (Kenisary Kasimov) of the Middle Horde, whose followers fought the Russians between 1836 and 1847. Khan Kene is now considered a Kazakh national hero.
In 1863 Russia elaborated a new imperial policy, announced in the Gorchakov Circular, asserting the right to annex “troublesome” areas on the empire’s borders. This policy led immediately to the Russian conquest of the rest of Central Asia and the creation of two administrative districts, the Guberniya (Governorate General) of Turkestan and the Steppe District. Most of present-day Kazakhhstan was in the Steppe District, while parts of present-day southern Kazakhhstan were in the Governorate General.
In the early nineteenth century, the construction of Russian forts began to have a destructive effect on the Kazakh traditional economy by limiting the once-vast territory over which the nomadic tribes could drive their herds and flocks. The final disruption of nomadism began in the 1890s, when many Russian settlers were introduced into the fertile lands of northern and eastern Kazakhhstan. Between 1906 and 1912, more than a half-million Russian farms were started as part of the reforms of Russian minister of the interior Petr Stolypin, shattering what remained of the traditional Kazakh way of life.
Starving and displaced, many Kazakhs joined in the general Central Asian resistance to conscription into the Russian imperial army, which the Tsar ordered in July 1916 as part of the effort against Germany in World War I. In late 1916, Russian forces brutally suppressed the widespread armed resistance and thousands of Kazakhs were killed, and thousands of others fled to China and Mongolia.
In 1917 a group of secular nationalists called the Alash Orda (Horde of Alash), named for a legendary founder of the Kazakh people, attempted to set up an independent national government. This state lasted less than two years (1918-20) before surrendering to the Bolshevik authorities, who then sought to preserve Russian control under a new political system. The Kyrgyz Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic was set up in 1920. It was renamed the Kazakh Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic in 1925 when the Kazakhs were differentiated officially from the Kyrgyz. (The Russian Empire recognized the ethnic difference between the two groups but had called them both “Kyrgyz” to avoid confusion between the terms “Kazakh” and “Cossack.”)
In 1925 the autonomous republic’s original capital, Orenburg, was reincorporated into Russian territory. Almaty (called Alma-Ata during the Soviet period), a provincial city in the far southeast, became the new capital. In 1936 the territory was made a full Soviet republic. From 1929 to 1934, during the period when Soviet leader Joseph V. Stalin was trying to collectivize agriculture, Kazakhhstan endured repeated famines because peasants had slaughtered their livestock in protest against Soviet agricultural policy. In that period, at least 1.5 million Kazakhs and 80 percent of the republic’s livestock died. Thousands more Kazakhs tried to escape to China, although most starved in the attempt.
Many European Soviet citizens and much of Russia’s industry were relocated to Kazakhhstan during World War II, when Nazi armies threatened to capture all the European industrial centers of the Soviet Union. Groups of Crimean Tatars, Germans, and Moslems from the North Caucasus region were deported to Kazakhhstan during the war because it was feared that they would collaborate with the enemy. Many more non-Kazakhs arrived in the years 1953-65, during the so-called Virgin Lands campaign of Soviet premier Nikita S. Khrushchev (in office 1956-64). Under that program, huge tracts of Kazakh grazing land were put to the plow for the cultivation of wheat and other cereal grains. Still more settlers came in the late 1960s and 1970s, when the government paid handsome bonuses to workers participating in a program to relocate Soviet industry close to the extensive coal, gas, and oil deposits of Central Asia. One consequence of the decimation of the nomadic Kazakh population and the in-migration of non-Kazakhs was that by the 1970s Kazakhhstan was the only Soviet republic in which the native nationality was a minority in its own republic
The 1980s brought glimmers of political independence, as well as conflict, when the central government’s hold progressively weakened. In this period, Kazakhhstan was ruled by a succession of three Communist Party officials; the third of those men, Nursultan Nazarbayev, continued as president of the Republic of Kazakhhstan when independence was proclaimed in 1991.
In June 1989, Nazarbayev, a politician trained as a metallurgist and engineer, became head of the Communist Party in Kazakhhstan. Nazarbayev had become involved in party work in 1979, when he became a protégé of reform members of the CPSU. Soon proving himself a skilled negotiator, Nazarbayev bridged the gap between the republic’s Kazakhs and Russians at a time of increasing nationalism while also managing to remain personally loyal to the Gorbachev reform program. Nazarbayev’s firm support of the major Gorbachev positions in turn helped him gain national and, after 1990, even international visibility. Many reports indicate that Gorbachev was planning to name Nazarbayev as his deputy in the new union planned to succeed the Soviet Union.
Even as he supported Gorbachev during the last two years of the Soviet Union, Nazarbayev fought Moscow to increase his republic’s income from the resources it had long been supplying to the center. Although his appointment as party first secretary had originated in Moscow, Nazarbayev realized that for his administration to succeed under the new conditions of that time, he had to cultivate a popular mandate within the republic. This difficult task meant finding a way to make Kazakhhstan more Kazakh without alienating the republic’s large and economically significant Russian and European populations. Following the example of other Soviet republics, Nazarbayev sponsored legislation that made Kazakh the official language and permitted examination of the negative role of collectivization and other Soviet policies on the republic’s history. Nazarbayev also permitted a widened role for religion, which encouraged a resurgence of Islam. In late 1989, although he did not have the legal power to do so, Nazarbayev created an independent religious administration for Kazakhhstan, severing relations with the Moslem Board of Central Asia, the Soviet-approved oversight body in Tashkent.
In March 1990, elections were held for a new legislature in the republic’s first multiple-candidate contests since 1925. The winners represented overwhelmingly the republic’s existing elite, who were loyal to Nazarbayev and to the Communist Party apparatus. The legislature also was disproportionately ethnic Kazakh: 54.2 percent to the Russians’ 28.8 percent.
In June 1990, Moscow declared formally the sovereignty of the central government over Kazakhhstan, forcing Kazakhhstan to elaborate its own statement of sovereignty. This exchange greatly exacerbated tensions between the republic’s two largest ethnic groups, who at that point were numerically about equal. Beginning in mid-August 1990, Kazakh and Russian nationalists began to demonstrate frequently around Kazakhhstan’s parliament building, attempting to influence the final statement of sovereignty being developed within. The statement was adopted in October 1990.
In keeping with practices in other republics at that time, the parliament had named Nazarbayev its chairman, and then, soon afterward, it had converted the chairmanship to the presidency of the republic. In contrast to the presidents of the other republics, especially those in the independence-minded Baltic states, Nazarbayev remained strongly committed to the perpetuation of the Soviet Union throughout the spring and summer of 1991. He took this position largely because he considered the republics too interdependent economically to survive separation. At the same time, however, Nazarbayev fought hard to secure republic control of Kazakhhstan’s enormous mineral wealth and industrial potential. This objective became particularly important after 1990, when it was learned that Gorbachev had negotiated an agreement with Chevron, a United States oil company, to develop Kazakhhstan’s Tengiz oil fields. Gorbachev did not consult Nazarbayev until talks were nearly complete. At Nazarbayev’s insistence, Moscow surrendered control of the republic’s mineral resources in June 1991. Gorbachev’s authority crumbled rapidly throughout 1991. Nazarbayev, however, continued to support him, persistently urging other republic leaders to sign the revised Union Treaty, which Gorbachev had put forward in a last attempt to hold the Soviet Union together.
Because of the coup attempted by Moscow hard-liners against the Gorbachev government in August 1991, the Union Treaty never was signed. Ambivalent about the removal of Gorbachev, Nazarbayev did not condemn the coup attempt until its second day. However, once the incompetence of the plotters became clear, Nazarbayev threw his weight solidly behind Gorbachev and continuation of some form of union, largely because of his conviction that independence would be economic suicide.
At the same time, however, Nazarbayev pragmatically began preparing his republic for much greater freedom, if not for actual independence. He appointed professional economists and managers to high posts, and he began to seek the advice of foreign development and business experts. The outlawing of the CPK, which followed the attempted coup, also permitted Nazarbayev to take virtually complete control of the republic’s economy, more than 90 percent of which had been under the partial or complete direction of the central Soviet government until late 1991. Nazarbayev solidified his position by winning an uncontested election for president in December 1991.
A week after the election, Nazarbayev became the president of an independent state when the leaders of Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus signed documents dissolving the Soviet Union. Nazarbayev quickly convened a meeting of the leaders of the five Central Asian states, thus effectively raising the specter of a “Turkic” confederation of former republics as a counterweight to the “Slavic” states (Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus) in whatever federation might succeed the Soviet Union. This move persuaded the three Slavic presidents to include Kazakhhstan among the signatories to a recast document of dissolution. Thus, the capital of Kazakhhstan lent its name to the Alma-Ata Declaration, in which eleven of the fifteen Soviet republics announced the expansion of the thirteen-day-old CIS. On December 16, 1991, just five days before that declaration, Kazakhhstan had become the last of the republics to proclaim its independence.
In April 1993 in Almaty Nursultan Nazarbaev and Kenneth Derr of Chevron signed an agreement that formed a 40 year and 20 billion dollar partnership called Tengizchevroil, TCO for short. Over 200 Chevron employees left the US and other countries to find themselves in a multilingual world where Kazakh, Russian, Hungarian, Turkish and English speakers were among the diverse Tengiz workforce. The Tengiz Field itself was discovered by the Soviets in 1979 and has the potential to produce up to 9 billion barrels of oil over a 40 year period, comparable to Alaska’s Prudhoe Bay Field. Mobil and LUKARCO, a joint venture of Russia’s LUKoil and ARCO, have joined TCO as well. TCO has shipped oil to Azerbaijan, Georgia, the Ukraine, Finland, Estonia and even Urumchi, China. The oil moves overland, across the Caspian Sea, up the Volga-Don Canal, and through the Baltic, Black and Mediterranean seas.
Since the beginning of TCO, Bechtel has worked as part of a joint venture with the Turkish construction company, ENKA, to provide engineering, procurement, and construction services to help enhance oil field operations and to effect a large-scale transfer of skills. When production first began in 1993, the Tengizchevroil joint venture produced 60,000 barrels per day. It now averages more than 200,000 barrels per day. By 2010, it is expected to produce 700,000 barrels per day. In addition to increased oil capacity, confidence has increased among the Kazakh workforce. Bechtel-ENKA has trained more than 700 people in such construction trades as scaffolding, rigging, piping, welding and vehicle maintenance, helping ease Kazakhhstan through the shift from command economy to free enterprise.
On October 6th 1997 I arrived in Tengiz to join the Information Technology department of the Bechtel-Enka Joint Venture, better known as BEJV. While assigned to the Common Support Services Project, plans were made for the installation of a new computer network for the upcoming Train 5 Project. Time would see me transferred to the Train 5 Project to work with one of the most professional network teams around and help build the one of the most successful field networks in Bechtel history. From Train 5 I have moved on to the new Program 12 Project which will carry on into the year 2001.
Well, now you know more about Central Asia than you wanted to but I hoped you enjoyed reading it as much as I enjoyed researching it. It is incredible the amount of history that covers this area and I have only offered you a small portion of it. The Internet was a wonderful source of information especially for the more recent political events. I admit to shamelessly coping many of these facts verbatim. For the Medieval information I was able to pull some info from the Net but the bulk came from two great books that I have in my possession. One is the Encyclopedia of the Middle Ages, which my wonderful wife got me for Christmas. It has general details on most all topics that have anything to do with the Middle Ages. For more detail I went to a very old book by Harold Lamb called The March of the Barbarians. This book was published in 1940 and covers the history of Central Asia focusing on the nomadic tribes of Turks and Mongols and the peoples they influenced. One of the biggest surprises for me was the Turkic nomads. Few people know that the Mongol Empire was half Turkish. Most of the Western Mongols that played havoc in Eastern Europe were Turkish in race instead of the Eastern Mongols who held power in China until the Ming dynasty. Much of our workforce is from Turkey and have found that the Kazakh language is of Turkic origin and communication is possible immediately. Because of this we have been able to merge two workforces into a team of skilled professionals.
The Wickware - Wickwire Family Website is sponsored by the Charles F. Wickwire Family. Correspondence is welcome so please send us an email. We are always looking for more information about the family so feel free to send pictures, stories or questions.
Send email to: cfwickwi@bechtel.com
Rick and Fran Wickwire
Eric Wickwire
Trey, Kim & Elli Wickwire
Pete Wickwire