History of Kazakhstan
A week after the election, Nazarbayev became the president of an independent state when the leaders of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus signed documents dissolving the Soviet Union. He quickly convened a meeting of the leaders of the five Central Asian states (Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan), raising the possibility of a Turkic confederation of former republics as a counterweight to the Slavic states of Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus in whatever federation might succeed the Soviet Union. This move persuaded the three Slavic presidents to include Kazakhstan among the signatories of a recast document of dissolution. Kazakhstan's capital lent its name to the Alma-Ata Protocol, the declaration of principles of the Commonwealth of Independent States. On 16 December 1991, five days before the declaration, Kazakhstan became the last of the republics to proclaim its independence.
Kazakhs in Russia
In Russia, the Kazakh population lives in the regions bordering Kazakhstan. The 2010 Russian census recorded 647,732 Kazakhs living mostly in the Astrakhan Oblast, Volgograd Oblast, Samara Oblast, Orenburg Oblast, Chelyabinsk Oblast, Kurgan Oblast, Tyumen Oblast, Omsk Oblast, Novosibirsk Oblast and Altai Krai regions. During the 1920s significant numbers of Kazakh families were left outside the designated Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic; after the end of the Soviet Union in 1991, they acquired Russian citizenship.