In 1723 the Dzungar Khanate launched a large campaign against the Kazakh jüzes at a moment when they were weakened by winter losses and internal division, seizing pastures and towns in Semirechye and along the Syr Darya. Kazakh tradition calls the ensuing years the Aqtaban shubyryndy, the 'barefoot flight' or Great Disaster, remembering mass movement of whole clans westward and southward with heavy loss of livestock and people, conflict with the Khivan, Bukharan and Kalmyk populations into whose lands they moved, and famine. Kazakh forces under Abulkhair and others won the counter-battles remembered as Bulanty and Anyrakay in the late 1720s, but the disaster led the Junior jüz to accept Russian protection in 1731, beginning the process that ended in Russian annexation over the following century. The claim that a third of the Kazakh population died rests on oral tradition and later national historiography, not on records; the Dzungar Khanate itself was destroyed by the Qing in 1755-58, an event recorded separately.
The Dzungar Khanate invaded the Kazakh jüzes, driving nomadic populations west and south in mass flight
No defensible denominator exists. The Kazakh khanates kept no registers, and the earliest usable counts are Russian imperial administrative surveys from more than a century later, which cannot be projected back across the disruption of the Aqtaban shubyryndy itself. Published estimates of the early eighteenth-century Kazakh population range from about one to three million and rest on assumptions about herd sizes and pasture capacity rather than on evidence.
No defensible range. Kazakh tradition speaks of the loss of a third of the people, a figure that functions as a memorial rather than a measurement; there are no records against which it can be tested.
Kazakhstan