In the city centre of Petropavlovsk, Qasym Amangeldi cuts his customer's hair in his second barbershop, which he opened several months ago in this North Kazakhstan Region city. Originally from Shymkent, in the very south of the country, he moved to Petropavlovsk, the regional capital located 20 kilometres (12 miles) from the Russian border, seven years ago. “It's easy to start a business here: there's almost no competition! And the government can even provide financial assistance,” says the young entrepreneur, who now employs around a dozen people. 

Just like him, about 10,000 Kazakhs from the south of the country are encouraged to migrate to the north every year. Originally from the Almaty, Zhambyl, Mangistau, Turkestan and Kyzylorda regions, they are eligible for state financial assistance if they choose to settle in one of the northern regions of North Kazakhstan, Kostanai, Pavlodar, Karaganda, Akmola and East Kazakhstan.

Initiated in 2017, the programme, known as “Enbek” ( “Work” in Kazakh), issues “economic mobility certificates”. A certificate entitles the holder to 270,000 tenge (around $510) per person and housing support for the first five years of up to 50% of rent. “Enbek” supplanted the first state scheme, “Serpin”. Set up in 2014, it was specifically designed to encourage students from the south to study in the north.

Officials need people to help revitalise the economy in the north. It is collapsing year by year. “The northern regions of Kazakhstan have a low birth rate and a high death rate,” writes Kairat Bodauhan, associate professor at the Kazakh S. Seifullin Agro-Technical University in Astana, and head of a demographic study of the country's northern regions.

Petropavlovsk, sometimes called Petropavl, is located just 20 kilometres (12 miles) from the Russian border (Credit: NordNordWest, cc-by-sa 3.0 de).

On the contrary, the southern regions are overpopulated, with high unemployment. Bodauhan points to Turkestan region, which has over two million inhabitants, i.e four times as many as North Kazakhstan. 

“According to demographic forecasts, by the 2050s, the population of northern Kazakhstan could fall by as much as 30%,” notes Bodaukhan. 

In North Kazakhstan region, 5,000 people leave the territory every year. Young people there generally prefer to study in the big Kazakh cities of Almaty and Astana, or in the higher-income Russian cities of Tyumen, Omsk and Chelyabinsk, located near the border.

In 2024, the programme permitted 3,144 Kazakhs to resettle in the north, including 175 “qandas”, ethnic Kazakhs from abroad. They, too, are targeted by the government for priority settlement in northern locations.

Such was the case of Najib and Makhtap Gazak, an ethnic Kazakh couple from Iran. They settled in a village an hour and a half's drive from Petropavlovsk. With their four children, they now live through -30 degree winters and raise livestock. 

“We'd rather have gone to Mangystau, the historic land of my ancestors [in southwest Kazakhstan]. But there, relocation assistance programmes were less advantageous”, says Najib Gazak, in his small living room in a home on a housing estate built especially for new arrivals in the north, where all the houses look alike.

Despite somr slight year-on-year gains, in over 10 years, the programmes have failed to reverse the north’s demographic trend. “We have to admit that the voluntary resettlement programme from the south to the north has not produced the expected results,” acknowledges President of the Senate Maulen Ashimbaev. “We hope that the new law on migration will provide new incentives to increase labour mobility”.

Local administrations are trying to redouble their efforts. They are carrying out precise communication operations in the south, such as an offer of “bus tours for 500 people from Zhambyl region to visit tourist attractions in northern Kazakhstan made last summer,” says Arman Turegeldin, director of the “Enbek” programme in North Kazakhstan. “The aim is to show them that it's beautiful here too!”

To the settler, the north is often not short on beauty, but it is short on opportunity. A scene in Kokshetau National Park, an "island" of forests, lakes, and mountains surrounded by steppe, in North Kazakhstan and Aqmola Regions (Credit: Natgeokz, cc-by-sa 4.0).

Nature may be beautiful in the north, but the climate, and mentality, are a big change on what is encountered in the south.

Petropavlovsk, with its harsh winter climate and tsarist architecture, is a radical change of atmosphere for southerners. As is the composition of the population: here, 40% of people are ethnic Russians, who are descended from the Russians who settled in Kazakhstan at the time of colonisation. Three regions in the north have a near-majority of Russian-Kazakhstanis, even though they represent only 15% of the country’s overall population.

View of Petropavlovsk's Podgora district (Credit: Euro monitor lizard, cc-by-sa 4.0).

The Kazakhification of these regions with Kazakh-speaking arrivals appears to be an implicit objective of the relocation programmes. “The government knows it's not good to have a Russian-speaking population on its border with Russia,” observes Rustem Armanov. Working as a doctor, he also heads a project documenting the lives of relocatees in his native region, where the Kazakh language is least mastered in terms of the national population.

Armanov notes that the spread of pro-Russian opinions and actions in the north has accelerated since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine that Russia went ahead with in February 2022. In March 2023, a group of Russians from Petropavlovsk declared “their sovereignty and independence from the Republic of Kazakhstan”. This was reminiscent of the emergence of separatist movements of Russian origin in eastern Ukraine in 2014.

The  authorities try to nip in the bud any strong desire for pro-Russian separatism, aware that the northern regions are largely economically dependent on Russia. The construction of three thermal power plants in northern Kazakhstan signed for in 2023 will accentuate Kazakhstan's energy ties with Moscow for many years to come, while the Kremlin is also pushing for the supply of Russian gas to northern Kazakhstan, most of which would ultimately be routed to China.

However, local authorities deny any “politicisation of this resettlement programme”. “We don't discriminate against participants in the relocation programme: they can be ethnic Russians, Polonia, Ukrainians, Kazakhs..,” insists Turegeldin.

But from the relocatees' point of view, the Russian-speaking world of the north is a real obstacle to integration. “Many don't speak Russian when they arrive,” explains Qasym Amengeldi. He, however, has managed well with the language.  “And I learned how to drink!” he jokes.

Enbek state work and skills programmes and various NGOs haven't given up yet on making a go of the "great migration to the north", but the odds on a successful outcome are very long (Credit: government handout).

A Kazakh influencer, Burahan Daqanov, is campaigning for more people from the south to populate the northern plains. “These are our ancestral lands,” says this native of the Almaty region, who decided to settle in Petropavlovsk in 2021 with his family. To his hundreds of thousands of subscribers on TikTok and Instagram, he extols the merits of Kazakh-style living in the north, which he sees as unjustly dying out.

With his NGO “Tauqel”, the long-bearded influencer knows how integration is difficult, and would like to open a centre so that relocated people can live together and better fit into local life, without leaving just a few months after settling in, as is common. About 10% leave before the end of their resettlement contract, says Turegeldin, who sees such people as not having made enough effort.

But for social workers working with relocatees, that lack of effort is not for lack of will. Anuar Tokpanov, coordinator of the Rukh Til Zhangyru center, an organisation that helps qandas integrate, remarks that he “wouldn't say we give them a lot of money. At the centre, we have to provide them with warm clothes so they can survive the winter”.

The houses in villages reserved for arrivals are often prefabs, sometimes not resistant enough to the freezing temperatures of the long winter that takes a hold on northern Kazakhstan, as several Kazakh media have reported.

 “It has to be said that our region has the lowest wages in the republic,” says Tokpanov. The average wage is 262,248 Kazakh tenge (almost $500).

For Aiman Zhussupova, project coordinator on social studies at the Institute of World Economics and Politics in Almaty, the very essence of the programmes doesn't work. The sociologist, who last year conducted a large-scale study on south-north migration, says: “We're moving poor people who are unemployed, to regions where they'll be poor. We don't listen enough to the reasons why they leave.”

The great remigration to the north of the country has yet to prove itself.