Alash was a political party and liberation movement in the Russian Republic and Soviet Russia, and the ruling party of Alash Autonomy on the territory of present-day Kazakhstan and Russia. They advocated for equal treatment between Kazakhs and Russians and the cessation of Russian settlement on the Kazakh lands. It was notably the first modern organized political Kazakh and Kyrgyz elite group.

The Kazakhs are a Turkic ethnic group native to Central Asia and Eastern Europe, mainly Kazakhstan, but also parts of northern Uzbekistan and the border regions of Russia, as well as northwestern China and western Mongolia. The Kazakhs arose from the merging of the medieval tribes of Turkic and Mongolic origin in the 15th century.