Kazakhstan - Misplaced Pages

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Kazakhstan (also Kazakstan) is a country in Central Asia. It has borders with Russia, China, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan and has a coastline on the Caspian Sea.

Kazakhstan is the ninth largest country in the world by area, but has a population less than that of Australia. At last estimate, the population stood at less than 15 million people.

In part because of the country's enormous deserts, the Soviet government used Kazakhstan as its nuclear testing site, and this, along with near-absent pollution controls, has contributed to an alarmingly high rate of disease in many rural areas. Kazakhstan has identified two major ecological disasters within its borders-- the shrinking of the Aral Sea and radioactive contamination at the Semipalatinsk nuclear testing facility. The Central Asian Regional Environmental Center is located in Kazakhstan, which fosters regional cooperation on environmental issues.

Kazakhstan possesses the Soviet equivalent to the United States' Cape Canaveral, where they have launched their version of the space shuttle and the well-known space station Mir. Russia currently leases approximately 6,000 sq km of territory enclosing the Baykonur Cosmodrome space launch site in south central Kazakhstan.

Kazakhstan, once colonised by Czarist Russia, was absorbed into the Soviet Union following the Russian Revolution of 1917, led at that time by V.I. Lenin. For the next half-century, Kazakhstan suffered under the mismanagement of the Soviets, especially in agrarian policy and cattle-raising.

Kazakhstan proclaimed its independence in the early 1990s, immediately following the breakdown of the U.S.S.R. Its current President, Nursultan Nazarbayev, was a former high-ranking communist who currently possesses much of the nation's real power; he is also one of the wealthiest members of the society. His daughter died in 2001 from a likely drug overdose.

In 1997 the capital of Kazakstan moved from the southern city of Almaty to the near-Siberian city Astana.

Kazakhstan is a signatory to the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species.

Kazakhstan appears, ludicrously, in the movies Air Force One (with Harrison Ford), The World is Not Enough (James Bond), and the 2002 flick, Rollerball (with Jean Reno).