THE SOVIET HISTORIOGRAPHY AND THE QUESTION OF KAZAKHSTAN’S HISTORY

THE QUESTION OF KAZAKHSTAN’S HISTORY 109
IMPORTANT ISSUES OF KAZAKHSTAN HISTORY
IN THE WORKS OF E. BEKMAKHANOV
Asst. Prof. Dr. Gülnar KARA *
Introduction
The dissolution of Soviet Union in 1991 has created different perspectives
about the history of Turkish communities that lived in this
geography. The studies and research made during the Soviet period,
with its ideological pressure, started to be questioned and the white
pages of the history started to be opened one by one. The independence
of Kazakhstan created the opportunity for historians to look
at the political, socio-economic and legal dimensions of Kazakh state
structure from a different perspective. We can say that especially the
colonization of Kazakhstan by Russia and research about the national
liberation struggle of the Kazakhs were forced to be told in different
ways. The period when Czarist Russia colonized Kazakhstan is the
time when the Kazakh community was in contradiction and also the
time when the Kazakh plains turned into one of the regional states of
neighboring countries. The liberation struggle of the community who
reacted to this is another dimension of this topic. During the early
Soviet era, the attitude and policy of Czarist Russia towards other
non-Russian communities were criticized greatly. All the resistant movements
against Czarist governance were seen as national struggles. In
the first half of 20 th century, the “trade capitalism” concept of M. N.
Pokrovskiy 168 was dominant in evaluating the foreign policy of Czarist
*
Bitlis Eren University
168 Mihail Nikolayevic Pokrovskiy, historian and politician from USSR. He was born as the
son of a customs official in 1868 and after graduating successfully from high school, he went
to Moscow University. In 1905 he became member of Russian Social-Democrat Labor Party.
He was arrested for participating in December Rebellion and in 1906 he took refuge in
France. During his asylum period he wrote his important works “Russian History from Ancient
Times to Recent Times”, 5 volumes, (Russkaya İstororiya s Drevneyşih Vremen) and “Main
Lines of Russian Cultural History (Oçerk İstorii Russkoy Kultury). After the Bolshevists took
over the government from Czarist governance in 1917, he went back to his home country and
worked in different academic institutionp. Interpreting Russian History from a perspective
tightly bound to Marxist-Leninist principles, M. N. Pokrovskiy underlined in his studies that
socialist revolution and proletarian dictatorship were the inevitable political results of Marxism
and that dialectical method was important. One of the most fundamental principles of
Pokrovskiy’s opinions was “commercial capital”, and he thought that the driving force behind
Russia’s colonizing policy was this; he also put forward the concept of “absolute evil”. After
Stalin took over the government his opinions were criticized as anti-Marxist and unscientific.
Following his death his books were collected from libraries and the representatives of