Located in the north of Kazakhstan and extending the entire width of the country, the Kazakh Steppe is a temperate grassland ideal for the mobile pastoralism Kazakhs had practiced for thousands of years prior to the Russian Empire's encroachment on the region. An occupation naturally inclined toward the use of horses, Kazakhs developed an economy, culture, and society in which ownership of and access to these animals played a central role. Their reverence for the horse, coupled with the suitability of the region toward horse breeding resulted in the Kazakh Steppe claiming the world's largest horse population by the end of the nineteenth century. However, their use of horses and understanding of the land differed fundamentally from that of the growing numbers of Slavic peasant settlers making their way to the region in the aftermath of Russian serf emancipation. The collision of these two societies and ecologies drastically altered the landscape of horse breeding in the steppe as well as Kazakh horse culture itself. During this same period, Russian authorities were witnessing a steep decline in horse breeding throughout the traditional hotbeds of the empire and began to look toward the Kazakh Steppe as a potentially limitless supply of horses for their military, agricultural, and even industrial sectors. Their vision of the steppe's potential is evident in the various campaigns to count, categorize, and "improve" the region's horse population. This imperial gaze was subsequently embraced by Soviet authorities who feverishly attempted to revitalize a decimated breeding industry throughout the 1920s and restock a depleted economy in dire need of horse power. Throughout these processes, the horse occupied a central role at the intersection of state, settler, and Kazakh power relations. Increasingly, however, Kazakhs were alienated from their animals and traditional means of subsistence. Ending with the collectivization campaigns of the late 1920s, this study of horses and horse culture in the Kazakh Steppe uncovers a tumultuous period for the Kazakh people who were, in many ways, stripped of their very identity.
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