(Christian Post) Chances are you haven’t visited this Central Asian country, or heard much about it apart from it being where Russian crews land from the space station. Much like Alberta or Montana, sweeping wheat fields kiss high-peaked mountains. Huge in land mass, the ninth largest in the world, but with a small population, this country of crisscrossing cultures and occupation has survived invasion and domination of China and the Russian world for 700 years. Today it stands at the edge of remarkable development.
Its life with and alongside Russia is one of its defining dynamics. While the country is Kazak, one-third of its people are Russian. Indigenous Kazak rub shoulders with Russian Kazak, which creates its own kind of tensions. These are not lessened by their 6,846-kilometer common border with big brother Russia on the north; in the 1930s, hundreds of thousands of Kazaks died under Stalin’s purge in the gulags of the country known as Karlags.
