I noticed a country on a map I have from 1923 called the Kirghiz Republic that is located on the South West border of Russia around the Caspian Sea where Kazakhstan is today. It's hard to figure out its borders because it is on the very edge of my map.
I did some brief research and all I could really find is that the Kyrgyz are a people with their own language but they were part of the Russian empire until the revolution and then became part of the Soviet Union. So I'm wondering why they are labelled as their own republic with their own borders on my map. Thanks!
Hi, just came across this while looking up some old search terms.
What you're looking at is the Kirghiz Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic. At the time, this was a sublevel unit of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic. It is unusual that they were labeled as an independent republic, being subordinate not even just within the Soviet Union, but subordinate to Russia at the time--unlike full-level SSRs, they did not have the right to secede. (Great Soviet Encyclopedia 1973)
I can only speculate as to why the map labelled it this way, but other atlases of the period (for example, one in my possession from 1927), take great pains to explain the new political structure of the Soviet Union, and your map, being from 1923, was published with the Russian Civil War (and proximate independent Bolshevik revolutions and counter-revolutions) still being fresh. Western atlases may not yet have reflected an understanding of the national sublevels under the Soviet government.
As to the name--"Kirghiz" and "Kazakh" people at the time were named interchangeably by Russians (both were successor kingdoms to Turkic states that went on to be conquered and annexed by the Russians), so Kirghiz was officially used to refer to what is now Kazakhstan while Kara-Kirghiz (Black Kirghiz) was used to refer to Kyrgyzstan. A few years after your map was published, their council of ministers elected to rename themselves the Kazakh ASSR. A decade after that, they were elevated to full Soviet Republic status.