30% Russians, with smaller minorities of Ukrainians, Germans, Chechens and Koreans. Dzhezkazgan has an extreme continental climate. The average temperature ranges from +24 °C (75 °F) in July to −16 °C (3 °F) in January. Today the city is the headquarters of the copper conglomerate Kazakhmys, the city's main employer. The company has subsidiaries in China, Russia, France and the UK and is listed on the London Stock Exchange. Cement Cement was a major product in both the cities of Shymkent and Dushanbe in the south of the region. Hydro-electricity By the early 1970s, the Soviets had started to build some of their hydroelectric power stations in Eastern Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan as part of an overall development strategy. The waters of the Ili River and of Lake Balkhash are considered to be of a vital economic importance to Kazakhstan. The Ili river is dammed for hydroelectric power at Kaptchagayskoye, and the river waters are heavily diverted for agricultural irrigation and for industrial purposes. In Tajikistan, the Vakhsh River, main tributary of the Amu Darya, is dammed multiple times, including the Nurek Dam (highest dam in the world at time of construction) and the still-under-construction Rogun Dam. Cotton The Soviets began to grow cotton in Uzbekistan after the Virgin Lands project and the mass use of the isolated and now shrinking Aral Sea for desert irrigation in the early 1960s. A massive expansion of irrigation canals during the Soviet period, to irrigate cotton fields, wrought ecological carnage to the area, with the river drying up long before reaching the Aral Sea which, as a result, has shrunk to a small remnant of its former size. Baikonur Cosmodrome The Baikonur Cosmodrome was founded in Kazakhstan on 2 June 1955, during the Cold War, as one of many long-range nuclear missile bases in the region, but diverged into space travel. On 8 June 2005 the Russian Federation Council ratified an agreement between Russia and Kazakhstan extending Russia's rent term of the spaceport until 2050. Culture, religion and ethnicity Following a series of migrations, mostly predating Soviet rule, that displaced the autochthonous Iranian peoples, most of the inhabitants of Soviet Central Asia were speakers of either Kipchak languages (such as Kazakhs), Uyghuric languages (Uzbeks) or Oghuz languages (Turkmens). Those populations were nomadic and settled, respectively. There remained traces of some settled farming and urban Iranian communities like the Tajiks and Bukhara in the