Kokchetav

a city, center of Kokchetav Oblast, Kazakh SSR. Located on the shore of Lake Kopa. Railroad junction for the Petropavlovsk-Tselinograd and Kustanai-Irtyshskoe lines. Population in 1972, 87,000 (19,000 in 1939).

Plants in the city include a machine (producing various types of scales), an oxygen-equipment, and a motor vehicle repair plant; there are also garment and furniture factories. Of the food industry enterprises there are a meat-packing combine, a dairy, and a fish-processing plant; the production of building materials is also developing. The city has a teacher-training institute and a branch of the Karaganda Polytechnic Institute, as well as machine-building, industrial-pedagogical, cooperative, and library science technicums and a medical school. There is a museum of local lore and the V. V. Kuibyshev Memorial Museum. V. V. Kuibyshev spent his childhood here (1889–98). Kokchetav was founded in 1824 as a cossack stanitsa (large village).