Children of the Central Asian Revolt of 1916

This project present the future generations of the Kazakh refugees of 1916, that settled in western Mongolia, and managed to keep their old Turkic heritage alive.

The early 18th century marked the zenith of the Kazakh Khanate, but In 1847–1864 the Russian Empire began expanding into Central Asia, by building a line of forts in the irrigated area. At one time the Russian Empire ruled more people that spoke Turkic languages than the Ottoman Turks. The attempts to settle and assimilate the nomadic Kazakh tribes were met with resentment and sparked a national movement to preserve the Kazakh language and identity. In 1916, during World War I, the Kazakhs, driven to desperation by the loss of their lands and by the ruthlessness of the wartime administration, rose up in protest against a decree conscripting the non-Russian subjects of the empire for forced labor. The rebellion assumed the character of a popular uprising, in which many colonists and many more Kazakhs and Kyrgyz were massacred. The revolt was put down with the utmost savagery, and more than 300.000 Kazakhs are said to have sought refuge across the Chinese and Mongolian frontier. Under Soviet rule in the 1920s & 1930s brought some of the darkest decades to the Kazakh people. More than a million Kazakhs died during the Soviet-inflicted famine in the 1930s when Josef Stalin's forced collectivization campaign and millions were imprisoned or exiled (the population declined by 38%).

This project present the future generations of the Kazakh refugees of 1916, that settled in western Mongolia, and managed to keep their old Turkic heritage alive.