Alla Vronskaya

Located in central Eurasia, Kazakhstan was the second-largest republic of the Soviet Union by territory and is currently the ninth-biggest country in the world, bordering Russia in the north, Central Asian republics in the south, and China in the east. Yet, sparsely populated, it counted approximately 14 million residents by 1991. 

Populated by nomadic Turkic tribes since the 11th century, between the 13th and the 15th centuries, it became a part of the Mongolian Empire, a legacy that largely determined Kazakh identity and culture, including Sunni Islam religion. Russian colonization of Kazakhstan started in the early 19th century. By the 1890s, large numbers of Russians and other Slavic ethnicities, Germans, and Jews moved to Kazakhstan. After a brief period of autonomy following the Soviet revolution of 1917, Kirghiz region (which included the territory of contemporary Kazakhstan) was announced in 1919. The following year, it was reorganized as Kirghiz Autonomous Republic within Russia, with the capital in Russian-populated Orenburg (currently in Russia). In 1925, it was renamed as Kazakh Autonomous Republic and its capital was moved to Kyzyl-Orda. In 1927, the capital was moved to Almaty on the southern border of the republic. Almaty would remain the capital of Kazakhstan until 1997, when it was moved to Astana in central Kazakhstan. 

In 1936, Kazakhstan received independence from Russia and was included into the USSR as a union republic. At this time, large-scale extraction of natural resources was initiated in Kazakhstan, including the foundation of Balkhash Copper-Melting Combine in the 1930s. Kazgosproekt institute was created in Almaty 1930 to enable industrial construction; later, it expanded its activities to a full range of building types. Other institutes also participated in the planning and construction of major industrial projects. For instance, Lengiprostroy institute in Leningrad (St. Petersburg, Russia) planned the city of Shevchenko (contemporary Aktau) on the Caspian sea in south-west Kazakhstan to support the production of urbanium.

The collectivization campaign in the USSR, combined with attempts at forced “settling down” nomadic tribes, led to a devastating famine that caused between one and 1.7 million deaths in Kazakhstan between 1931 and 1933. While other republics of the USSR, first of all, Ukraine and agricultural regions of Russia, were also affected, by share of victims to its total population Kazakhstan suffered like no other region in the country. Furthermore, during Stalin’s terror, Kazakhstan became the site of exile for large groups of people deported by Soviet government, including the Germans from the Volga river, Crimean Tatars, the Greeks, the Chechens and other Caucasian nations, and more. At the same time, Kazakh elites were subjected to repression. As a result of these events and policies, by the end of the 1950s, ethtnic Kazakhs became a minority in the republic (representing 30% of the population), while ethnic Russians composed 43%.

In the 1950s, Kazakhstan became the site of Nikita Khrushchev’s “virgin lands” campaign, aimed at boosting agricultural production in the Soviet Union by allocating large swaths of “virgin” lands (steppes) for agriculture. Kazgiproselstroy institute was tasked with building the infrastructure–a network of collective farms and settlements–for this campaign. Although the campaign is considered a failure, which led to significant environmental degradation in the region, Kazakhstan remains a center of agricultural production until this day.

Kazakhstan is known as the territory of several ecological disasters: in addition to soil degradation associated with the “virgin lands” campaign, those include contamination due to nuclear weapons testing and the construction the Soviet Union’s major space-ship launching site Baikonur, and the disappearance of the Aral Sea due to irrigation projects in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. 

Almaty, which remained the capital of Kazakhstan during the Soviet period, was founded as a Russian military fort in the mid-19th century (until 1921, the city was known under the Russian name Vernyi). The settlement grew due to Russian colonization, and by the Soviet revolution, the population counted over 40 thousand people. Almaty turned into a major industrial city during the Second World War, when industries were evacuated to the city, which remained far away from the front. With its population approaching two million, Almaty still remains the largest city in the country, ahead of the new capital Astana.

The first institute of higher education in Kazakhstan, Semipalatinsk Institute of Geological Survey, was founded in 1933 in Semipalatinsk (today, Semey). Shortly after, the institute was relocated to Almaty, where it was reorganized as Kazakh Institute of Mining and Metallurgy. In 1960, the institute was reorganized as Kazakh Polytechnic Institute. In 1957, Kazakh Polytechnic Institute launched a program in Industrial and Civil Construction. In 1961, it was expanded as three departments: Department of Construction, Department of Architecture, and Department of Technical Infrastructure. In 1980, the three departments separated from Kazakh Polytechnic Institute to form Alma-Ata Institute of Engineering and Construction.

While some of the first female architects in Kazakhstan studied elsewhere (for instance, Albina Petrova in Novosibirsk and Gulzara Jakipova in Leningrad), the opening of the architecture department at Kazakh Polytechnic Institute allowed to prepare generations of local architects (among them, Zauresh Mustafina and Saule Bultrikova). Yet, the profession, and particularly leadership, remained largely masculine: the all-female team of Jakipova, Mustafina, and Petrova, who worked together on such projects as the Palace of Culture of Almaty Cotton Factory (1980), was a significant exception. In addition, architects based elsewhere in the Soviet Union designed projects for cities in Kazakhstan: examples include Leningrad-based Tatyana Safonova, who participated in the award-winning design for Shevchenko (Aktau). Like elsewhere, Kazakh women-architects often found themselves engaged in other activities, including art (Lydia Blinova and Bultrikova), interior design (Bultrikova), and historic preservation (Bayan Tuyakbaeva).