Ethnic demography of Kazakhstan

In the 1890s, Russian peasants began to settle the fertile lands of northern Kazakhstan, causing many Kazakhs to move eastwards into Chinese territory in search of new grazing grounds.

This diverse demography stemmed from the country's central location and its historical use by Russia as a place to send colonists, dissidents, and minority groups from its other frontiers.

[citation needed] This makes Kazakhstan one of the few places on Earth where normally-disparate Germanic, Greeks, Indo-Iranian, Koreans, Chechen, and Turkic groups live together in a rural setting and not as a result of modern immigration.

[citation needed] After the fall of the Soviet Union, the German population of Kazakhstan (Kasachstandeutsche) proceeded to emigrate en masse during the 1990s,[5] as Germany was willing to repatriate these so-called Spätaussiedler, and many Russians went back to Russia.

[6] Some groups have fewer good options for emigration, but because of the economic situation are also leaving at rates comparable to the rest of the former East bloc.

It is estimated that close to half of the 4.5 million Soviet Germans and their Slavic kin who now live in Germany are originally from Kazakhstan.

These immigrants come not only from the southern Central Asian states such as Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, but also from the Kazakh dominated areas in Xinjiang and Mongolia.