Capital Relocation and the Making of Soviet Kazakhstan, 1920-1929

UW Center for Russia, East Europe and Central Asia (CREECA) lecture series, Room 206. Coffee/tea and cookies at 3:45 pm.

media release: Maria Blackwood is an analyst in Asian policy at the Congressional Research Service, where she covers Central Asia and Mongolia. In the first decade of its existence, Soviet Kazakhstan had three different capitals, and several other cities were considered as potential political centers for the republic. These relocations were undertaken despite the fact that they were expensive and logistically complicated. Why did Soviet authorities undergo the difficulty and expense of relocating the administrative center of a sparsely populated republic not just once, but twice within the span of nine years, and what do these undertakings tell us about the early Soviet state?