The article examines the materials of the anti-colonial discourse of the second half of the 19th - early 20th centuries, which is based on the ideas of the national intelligentsia of Kazakhstan about the status of the indigenous population of the Steppe Territory in imperial projects and colonization practices. The research of the written sources and activities of the liberal national intelligentsia revealed, that the priority was given to criticism of Russia's imperial policy towards nomadic groups of the population. This paper aims to identify the sociocultural conditions of the formation of the national intelligentsia, as well as the approaches of the early Kazakhstan historiography to the assessment of the factors of the agrarian colonization. As a result, the author found out that implementing the policy of “big Russian nation”, the Russian authorities tried to create the favorable conditions for the natural Russification of the Kazakh elite. The political measures included among the others the involvement in education and management system. Thus the emerging layer of the national intelligentsia actively participated in the imperial activity o intended to study of the colonization fund, jointly with a detachment of state officials - groups with common signs of professional identity. in the second half of the 19th century, in the period of growing popularity of separatist sentiments in Kazakhstan , the national intelligentsia, educated in the European spirit, actively perceived the ideas of Siberian regionalism, and in the early 20th century - radical leftist parties and movements, which strengthened the anti-colonial the focus of their rhetoric.