THE SOVIET HISTORIOGRAPHY AND THE QUESTION OF KAZAKHSTAN’S HISTORY

THE QUESTION OF KAZAKHSTAN’S HISTORY 49
REFLECTIONS OF THE PROSECUTION OF HISTORIAN
ERMUKHAN BEKMAKHANOV IN THE SOVIET PRESS
Prof. Dr. Danagul Mahat *
In the old Soviet Union, the Bolshevik party clearly dominated the
official adminstration and leadership positions in government. The totalitarian
regime, which strenghtened completely in the first half of the
twentieth century, subjected the administration to an ideology that
organized and exerted a powerful authority in every area of the political-environmental
life. It was also necessary that the fields of education
and science had to reflect the official ideology and obey the doctrines
as articulated by the party leaders. In Joseph Stalin’s open letter, “About
Some Issues of Bolshevism’s History”, which he wrote for the journal
‘Proletarskaya Revolyutsiya’, he aimed to elevate issues of Bolshevism’s
history, to put scientific methods into practice in order to know the
party’s history better, and he demanded that historians and other overcome
the false Trotskistes who described the party’s history incorrectly.
The life of historian Ermukhan Bekmakhanov, one of the first modern
Kazakhs to possess a doctorate degree, coincided with this gloomy period
encumbered with this totalitarian pressure. The state, suspicious of his
historical motivations, subjected the scientist to political prosecution in
order to find political-ideological defects because it questioned a man
committed to searching systematically for the history of his people. The
groundless accusations and prosecutions harmed his health and he passed
away at age 51. What remains from the historian, who devoted himself
to history science, are works that examine the substantial issues of Kazakhstan
between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries, Kazakhstan
coursebooks, and his works about pedagogy.
However, during the period of the totalitarian regime, his works
were not considered worthy. He was accused of being a bourgeois
nationalist and a scientist who interpreted history in a wrong way.
The press organs presented the propaganda of official ideology of the
communist party and played an important role during political prosecution
of the historian Ermukhan Bekmakhanov. In this study, the
political campaigns organized against E. Bekmakhanov, the role the
communist party media organs played, and the harm these campaigns
had on the writing of Kazakh history will be discussed.
*
Deputy Director of The Research Center of Otrar Library of L.N. Gumilev Eurasian National
University