THE SOVIET HISTORIOGRAPHY AND THE QUESTION OF KAZAKHSTAN’S HISTORY

THE QUESTION OF KAZAKHSTAN’S HISTORY 47
said after researching many materials and other documents in files of
the prosecutions made by the commission that many innocent people
were falsely accused and blamed with lies. He said that in the years
of 1937-8, many party members, officers, and workers throughout the
society were libeled with the title of “enemy of the people” but they
were never “enemy of the people” or “spies”. They were always loyal
Communists, but the officers who performed those investigations
slandered them with accusations that are very hard to believe.
In 1988, the President of Kazakhstan’s S. Velikhanov Institute of
History, Archeology, and Ethnology, R. Suleimenov, reinterpreted the
fate of those Kazakh intellectuals in the period of political persecution:
“The effects of the prosecution period in the 1930s-1950s are
ongoing today. The unwarranted prosecution tired our intellectuals so
much that later generations inherited the concept of fear. The young
scientists, who had never been prosecuted, became very hesitant.
With the anxiety of doing something wrong, most of them think, ‘we
must live a peaceful and quiet life without writing anything wrong’”. 62
Nowadays, the Stalinist phenomenon, which prosecuted innocent
people, is in the past. However, in the late 1980s a big problem remained
unsolved. The Alash Orda intellectuals, who struggled against the
Soviet government from the beginning, were still not rehabilitated. And,
Alash Orda intellectuals, not being rehabilitated, meant their works
remained in the shadows. It was seen, for that to be amended, serious
changes within Soviet society were needed. As late as M. Gorbachov’s
Glasnost and Perestroika era, which spurred on those necessary big
changes in Soviet society, the Kazakh Alash Movement’s leaders and
members were eventually rehabilitated. The Kazakh people had the
chance to read their books and other works. And, it proved to be evidence
of Russian colonial policies in the steppe. It was evidence that
the Bolshevik state had to be fully abolished in order to exculpate
the many individuals victimized by Lenin and Stalin’s prosecutions.
62 “Tarihtin Ar Paragı Qımbat Bizge”, Sosiyalistik Qazaqstan, 1988, 25 August.