Kazakhstan’s Small Towns & Monotowns: Key Insights into the Map

Kazakhstan’s network of single-industry towns—or monotowns—is a direct legacy of early Soviet industrialization campaigns. Today, 27 of the nation's 86 urban centers bear this official status, including major hubs like Abai, Balkhash, Zhezkazgan, Lisakovsk, Temirtau, Rudny, Ekibastuz, Ridder, Zhanaozen, and Kentau. Yet despite their numbers, sociologists and anthropologists often view these settlements as obsolete remnants of Soviet central planning. Nearly 1.5 million citizens live in these struggling towns, where state-led revitalization efforts have largely yielded poor results.

Under national criteria, a Kazakhstani monotown is defined as an urban area of 10,000 to 200,000 residents where a single anchor enterprise employs at least 20% of the adult workforce. Despite their troubles, the industrial capacity concentrated in these towns remains a primary engine of the national economy.

Intended to streamline resource deployment across remote regions with unforgiving climates, monotowns aimed for high economic efficiency at low cost. However, state planning frequently diverged from local realities. As anchor plants shuttered, numerous communities fell into severe distress.

Kentau represents the South’s only monotown. Local authorities rolled out a new master plan in 2022 seeking investors for new housing projects, public amenities, and a riverfront overhaul. Once anchored by two manufacturing giants—a transformer factory and an excavator plant—the city saw its industrial base collapse, sparking sustained depopulation. The consequences of neglected infrastructure came to a head in December 2023 when municipal grid failures left residents without light or heating. On December 13 at 8:16 PM, a transmission fault severed the power link between the central grid and the local thermal plant, knocking all four heating boilers out of service.

Only a handful of these towns are managing to develop; the rest remain in a state of stagnation, simply living out their final days. Residents in monotowns face constant job losses as industrial enterprises continually automate and modernize their operations.

Zhanaozen—a monotown in the Mangystau Region—contributes more to the national budget than many entire regions. Following the bloody Zhanaozen events of 2011, when the violent crackdown on striking oil workers made international headlines, there was brief hope for resolving the town’s deep-seated issues. Yet it was this very oil town that sparked the nationwide January 2022 protests. For years, locals have been fighting for better living conditions and municipal investment. In the summer of 2022, nearly a hundred former employees of BatysGeoPhizService and local residents gathered outside the city administration (akimat), protesting chronic unemployment and municipal inaction.

Shifting economic dynamics have resulted in severe labor shortages alongside abandoned industrial sites. Ridder, for instance, faces ongoing depopulation while simultaneously experiencing a sharp deficit of skilled workers across its enterprises. Residents complain about the decaying urban environment—dilapidated structures, crumbling facades, and cramped public services. Most critically, the region lacks qualified specialists. After years of waiting for new public buses, the fleet finally arrived last autumn, but public transit failed to improve—even the city mayor had to step in to help recruit drivers. It turned out Ridder lacked experienced Category D drivers as well as conductors. Acute staffing shortages also persist across agriculture, healthcare, and public utilities. In December 2023, following several other Kazakhstani cities, Ridder’s heating infrastructure suffered a major breakdown.

The current state of monotowns reflects not only a poor quality of life marked by systemic state neglect, but also high emigration rates and a rapidly aging demographic. A similar pattern is unfolding in Ekibastuz, which faces heating grid collapses every winter. Residents have begun leaving the city in droves to avoid freezing, forced to sell their apartments at rock-bottom prices due to a lack of buyers.

Many monotowns failed to survive the collapse of the Soviet industrial chain, turning into economic waste-lands or complete ghost towns. Zhanatas, located in southern Kazakhstan as the administrative center of the Sarysu District, was built around local phosphorite mining. Following the Soviet collapse, Zhanatas plunged into crisis—most of the population fled, while those remaining descended into poverty. As supply chains severed, the anchor enterprise could no longer sustain the town or its own workforce.

Today, Zhanatas is largely regarded as a ghost town. A small number of residents survive by collecting scrap metal for food and medicine, holding onto memories and distant hopes that life will one day return to their deserted city.

The history of the Monotowns Development Program dates back to 2012, launched immediately following an address by former President Nursultan Nazarbayev. Three years into its implementation, the standalone state initiative was shuttered and integrated into a broader regional development plan running through 2020. Yet a decade later, progress in revitalizing these single-industry towns remains completely stalled. Over recent years, public and political interest in the program has waned—or at least media reports celebrating the achievements of "monotown reformers" have grown increasingly scarce.

In his 2021 State of the Nation address, "Unity of the People and Systemic Reforms—A Solid Foundation for the Country's Prosperity," Kassym-Jomart Tokayev noted that Kazakhstan's 27 monotowns account for roughly 40% of national industrial output and house 1.4 million citizens. The administration pledged to overhaul its strategy toward monotowns that same year.
Under the updated framework, the government aims to allocate 1.7 trillion tenge to monotowns over a five-year period.

Yet the vast majority of these towns have failed to become new engines of regional growth—instead, they remain mere static coordinates on Kazakhstan's map.