The Golden Horde in Kazakhstan’s Commemorative Policy

Abstract

This article examines historical memory as a key resource in shaping national identity and state legitimacy, focusing on the continuity between the Kazakhs and the Ulus of Jochi (Golden Horde). The theoretical section shows that collective memory is closely connected with nation, nationalism, and identity. Drawing on the works of E. Smith, A. Assmann, and social psychology, memory is defined as a “mnemonic resource” that strengthens group solidarity, values, and norms, while also carrying the potential for conflict in cases of competing interpretations of the past. The article then reviews the historiography of Kazakh–Golden Horde continuity. Pre-revolutionary scholarship largely recognized a direct historical and ethnocultural link between the Kazakhs and the Horde. In the early Soviet period, scholars sought to interpret Kazakh ethnogenesis within the context of the uluses of Jochi and Chagatai; however, from the 1930s–1940s this approach was labeled “nationalist” and removed from official historiography. Soviet historical science subsequently denied a direct Kazakh–Golden Horde connection, asserting the White Horde as the sole predecessor of the Kazakh Khanate. Special attention is given to contemporary memory politics, in which the Ulus of Jochi is presented not as an object of ethnic “privatization” but as a shared heritage of the Turkic peoples, with Kazakhstan as a key historical space. This approach emphasizes a civilizational perspective, rejects the instrumentalization of “historical traumas,” and promotes an integrative model of historical knowledge. The conclusion formulates the main elements of the contemporary interpretation: the formation of Kazakh ethnicity and culture within the Ulus of Jochi, recognition of the Golden Horde as the apex of Great Steppe statehood, its decisive impact on Central Eurasian political, cultural, and linguistic processes, and acknowledgment of the Kazakhs and other Turkic peoples as its joint heirs.