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Abstract
Between 1991 and 2024 more than eight hundred rural settlements in Kazakhstan changed their names. This article treats that record not as a series of routine administrative acts but as a sustained reworking of symbolic and linguistic space after independence. The study draws on the full corpus of 1188 official renaming decisions, of which 824 concern rural settlements. A clear pattern emerges. Ideological and personal names of the Soviet period were withdrawn and replaced by Kazakh names taken mostly from landscape, local history and cultural tradition. The work was carried out by regional representative and executive bodies. The evidence shows that renaming went well beyond administrative form, because local history was restored, historical narratives were rewritten and the official framework of spatial self-understanding was reshaped. The process was uneven in time and across regions, ranging from 34,5% of the settlement of Turkestan to under 4% in the northern regions. The article argues that rural renaming amounts to an institutional reshaping of the memory space.