Governor Igelstrom of Orenburg and Taykara, the First Woman Landowner in Kazakhstan

A love drama comes to mind. The Catherinian grandee Count Osip Igelstrom, packed off to live out his days on a pension for his Warsaw failures, was appointed by Paul I, after the Empress's death, military governor of Orenburg.

In Orenburg the 60-year-old Igelstrom made the acquaintance of a noble Kazakh woman, Taikara, and fell head over heels in love with her. She was married to an Orenburg judicial official, a Kazakh of the khoja estate. What her marriage was like we may judge from the reports of repeated acts of violence by her husband towards women. Evidently, her family life had not turned out well.

But Taikara was a unique woman for her time: unhappy in marriage, she acquired a influential lover and changed her fate. Contemporaries write that the 36-year-old aristocrat captivated Igelstrom and in effect imposed her will on him in many political decisions. Historians would later reproach the military governor for restoring khan's power in the Junior Zhuz, a step taken exclusively in the interests of Taikara and her family.

Taikara khanym was the daughter of Nuraly, Khan of the Junior Zhuz. Her mother became Nuraly's wife by the custom of levirate, after the death in the 1760s of her first husband, Sultan Chingiz, Nuraly's younger brother. Taikara's mother was herself of high birth: her grandfather was the holy Sufi preceptor of the Kazakhs of all three zhuzes, Sayyid Muhammad-khoja. This may explain the general respect in which Taikara was held, all the more so since tsarist officials in their documents call her Princess Taikara, and since Kazakh functionaries at every level were ready to see her interests observed.

Besides restoring khan's power to her people, Taikara looked after her private interests as well. She took an elegant revenge on her abusive husband, securing through the courts a ruling that all his ancestral lands were her property. This is, of course, an unprecedented case: Taikara became the first woman landowner in the history of Kazakhstan. And, secondly, only imagine: a woman won in court, as her personal property, what were in essence communal lands that had belonged to her husband's clan for many years.