Kazakhstan’s symposium on the Golden Horde opens, in formal institutional terms, the question of where the country locates its statehood. Held in Astana on May 19–20 under UNESCO patronage, it brought together more than 300 scholars and experts, including 120 foreign researchers from more than 20 countries. Its title was “The Golden Horde as a Model of Steppe Civilization,” with history, archaeology, culture, and identity named as focal points of inquiry.
The initiative places Kazakhstan’s history outside the narrow frame of post-Soviet chronology, treating the medieval past as a problem in the formation of Central Eurasia. Kazakhstan’s turn to the Golden Horde is not a decorative appeal to the medieval past, but a claim about statehood. It seeks to place Kazakhstan’s sovereignty within older Eurasian traditions of exchange, law, political authority, and movement across the steppe.
President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev has put the claim in explicit form. In 2024, he described Kazakhstan as a successor to the nomadic civilization of the Great Steppe and called the Ulus of Jochi, known internationally as the Golden Horde, a pinnacle of state-building in Central Eurasia. At the Astana symposium, he returned to the same line, presenting the Golden Horde as an empire connecting East and West and influencing the development of civilizations and states. The point is not identitarian but genealogical: the recovery of a statehood tradition, not the retroactive conversion of a medieval formation into the present-day republic.
The Golden Horde’s significance is as a political form whose relevance lies in rule, exchange, law, and mobility: this is where steppe history becomes state history. The symposium’s official framing emphasized the political, economic, cultural, and spiritual heritage of the Ulus of Jochi. Its final resolution was more specific, identifying the Golden Horde’s role in political traditions, international trade and diplomacy, legal institutions, numismatics, craft production, and the interaction of nomadic and urban societies. The Golden Horde thereby moves out of the narrow category of conquest and into the practical grammar of political and social order: administration, circulation, law, and exchange.
The inherited Russian imperial and Soviet frame did not simply neglect the Golden Horde; it organized the question from outside Kazakhstan’s own statehood. A recent study in Nationalities Papers identifies a Soviet paradigm in which the Golden Horde was treated as foreign, destructive, and external to the emergence of the Kazakh Khanate, while the Ak Orda was favored as the more acceptable predecessor. This view did not disappear with independence. Under Nursultan Nazarbayev, the Golden Horde remained comparatively marginal in official historical narrative, even as Kazakhstan celebrated the Kazakh Khanate and the broader nomadic past. Ideological categories narrowed the possible interpretations of the past. The issue today is not reinvention but reordering.
Presidential declarations provide the catalyst, not the machinery. The machinery is supplied by historians, institutes, universities, and conferences. The Nationalities Papers study describes historians as memory actors helping to move the Golden Horde from contested or marginal status toward official endorsement. It also identifies a dispute between older and newer schools of interpretation over whether the Ak Orda or the Golden Horde should carry greater genealogical weight in Kazakhstan’s medieval past. The turn to the Golden Horde is less abrupt when seen from inside this scholarly debate.
The goal is not to nationalize the Golden Horde retroactively, but to restore Kazakhstan to a history from which Russian imperial and Soviet categories partly displaced it. Tokayev warned at the symposium against distorting history for self-admiration or turning common heritage into a national monopoly. The symposium resolution emphasized the Golden Horde’s multicultural character and its ethnic and religious diversity. State officials have likewise framed Kazakhstan not as the sole inheritor of the Ulus of Jochi, but as one of the heirs. Asserting the shared character of the inheritance allows Kazakhstan to enter a broader historical field without making exclusive national assertions about a political and social formation that generated several successor traditions.
At issue is not just memory but the institutions through which memory is formed and preserved. The symposium, the institute, and the academic history are not accessories to the argument. They are its institutional form. Tokayev has pointed to the Institute for the Study of the Ulus of Jochi and to the preparation of a new academic history of Kazakhstan with a separate volume devoted to the Ulus of Jochi. The Astana symposium added an international forum, an exhibition, and a resolution calling for scholarly cooperation. Its program drew the disciplines required by the subject: medieval history, archaeology, oriental studies, Turkology, Mongol studies, numismatics, epigraphy, political science, and diplomacy.
Recovery of historical memory becomes serious when it produces editions, translations, chronologies, archives, and trained scholars. The Ulus of Jochi Institute, officially registered in April 2022 and funded from February 2023, carries a research scope extending from the emergence of the Ulus of Jochi in 1224–1225 to the rule of Kenesary, the last all-Kazakh khan, in 1847. Its reported work includes publications on the Chagatai Ulus and Moghulistan, translations of medieval sources including Yuanshi, Mingshi, Zubdat al-Fikra, and Sheibani-nama, and contributions to Kazakhstan’s academic history.
Kazakhstan’s participation in the existing conversation also seeks to relocate part of it. The field has too often been organized elsewhere. This is not a claim against scholarship produced elsewhere, still less a claim to interpretive monopoly. Today, however, Kazakhstan is building institutions through which its archives, scholars, sites, and historical questions can shape the field more directly. The symposium’s participant field showed the breadth of that ambition: attending scholars represented neighboring Central Asian states, Tatarstan, Mongolia, Russia, China, the United States, India, Pakistan, Japan, Egypt, and Europe.
The deeper target is the assumption that Kazakhstan’s statehood begins with Soviet administrative geography. Blanket assertions do not refute that assumption; research, institutions, and a more adequate chronology can weaken and nuance it. The Golden Horde does not provide a simple line of uninterrupted continuity to the Republic of Kazakhstan. It does, however, provide a deeper genealogy of rule, mobility, law, exchange, and political culture in the territory and historical world from which Kazakhstan emerged. This is the disciplined, unexaggerated claim that resists both the Soviet reduction of Kazakhstan to an administrative formation and the opposite temptation to convert medieval inheritance into a closed national myth.
The strongest version of the Golden Horde turn is not mythic possession but the disciplined recovery of memory. Kazakhstan’s most persuasive claim is to be one heir within a shared history, while building the institutions to study it. The Astana symposium points beyond memory politics toward the harder work of making historical knowledge durable and transmissible. The success of that work means restoring Central Eurasian statehood to a history in which the steppe was not a margin of empire, but one of the places where Eurasian order was made.
