THE SOVIET HISTORIOGRAPHY AND THE QUESTION OF KAZAKHSTAN’S HISTORY

THE QUESTION OF KAZAKHSTAN’S HISTORY 191
KAZAN TATARS’ ETHNIC BACKGROUND QUESTION:
A REVIEW ON THE EFFECTS OF SOVIET HISTORIOGRAPHY
Dr. Liaisan ŞAHİN *
What is history? Simply speaking, history is the sum of past events. On
an individual basis, in other words, speaking from the aspect of an individual’s
psychology, we observe that the memories of the past constitute
the core of our consciousness. All spent days left a trace in our minds.
Accumulated traces and their memories create our personality. A scholar
asserts: “In each moment, we are the sum of our all previous moments.
We are the results of our all past experiences. [...] Recalling past is vital
for our identity awareness: Knowing ourselves verifies our existence.” 345
Let us suppose that we lost our memory along with our all memories
as a result of an accident. As medical cases demonstrate, the
personalities of the patients suffering from memory loss degrade.
Those patients get isolated from the society as a result of the decline
in emotional capabilities and reasoning power. 346 Under the light of
these data, we can conclude that our memory creates our personality.
Similar to the dependence of the individual personalities to the
memory, collective personalities depend on the perception of the
past. Communities amass memories of past events. These memories
were recorded with oral history methods before (narratives, legends
etc.). In modern times, events are recorded via several mechanisms.
The science of history rises on the basis of these records; that is,
recording the past becomes an expertise. In the past, poets pioneered
the protection of collective memory; whereas, in modern times, they
are replaced by professional historians.
If historians are not allowed to conduct their research without
disturbance and to search the truth and if their spiritual world is
restricted with the narrow boundaries of a certain ideology, the loss
of collective memory becomes inevitable and this leads to a serious
trauma. There are several significant events resembling this loss in
Soviet-era historiography. This article will focus on the Soviet historiography’s
destruction of the history of Kazan Tatars and its societal
consequences. This discussion will be evaluated on the basis of Kazan
*
Marmara University, Institute of Turkish Studies.
345 Lowenthal, D., Past is a Foreign Country, Cambridge, NY: Cambridge University
Press, 1985, pp. 185; 197.
346 Ibid, pp. 197-198.