THE SOVIET HISTORIOGRAPHY AND THE QUESTION OF KAZAKHSTAN’S HISTORY

THE QUESTION OF KAZAKHSTAN’S HISTORY 57
Kazakh history, ethnography, and culture.
It does not matter that E. Bekmakhanov did not explicitly cite the
Kazakh intellectuals’ names who had worked on Kazakh history before
October Revolution, because as he explained about the studies devoted
to this period: ‘If before the Revoloution, Russian historians’ studies
were methodologically low and if they were written with ‘High Russian
Racism’ and approached critically the sources of Kazakh historians in this
period, the bourgeois-nationalism thoughts were also clearly evident.’ 72
In the 1943 work, ‘Kazakh SSR History’, which the USSR Science
Academy, History Institute Almaty Department, USSR Science Academy
Kazakhstan Department, and the workers of the Marx-Engels-Lenin
Institute Kazakhistan Department organized together (editor A. Abdihalıkov
and A. Pankratova) he determined the facts, such as ‘The
first step to search one of Soviet East people history through Marxist
doctrine and the awakening of scientific interest to the book because
it is the first detailed study about the Kazakh peoples’ history.’
The importance of the book is its rich content and documents
regarding Kazakhstan history from ancient times to the present were
brought together systematically. Ermukhanov says that ‘The writers,
as the members of Kazakh nation, assumed serious and reasonable
criticism because of the mistakes and the wrong ideas at the time
writing the book ‘Kazakh SSR History’’ and also further criticized by
observing that ‘The writers of the book remained limited just by searching
the Kazakh peoples’ independence campaign instead of searching
Kazakhstan history through the production power and development
of power relations, social classes, and class struggle.’
Having been issued the article of E. Bekmakhanov’s analyzing the
past and the present of Kazakh science history, the first criticals came
from “Kultura i Jizn” newspaper and “Bolshevik Kazahstana” magazine.
The researcher named A.Liholat’s ‘Mixed Article About History Science
Duty’ was issued in “Kultura i Jizn” newspaper in its 35.number of
20 December 1947 edition and in the first edition of 1948s ‘Bolshevik
Kazakhstana’ magazine. It is to the point that the writer of the article
inclined only to the points that he found inaccurate by ignoring the
valued evaluation and comments of E. Bekmakhanov’s. In his article E.
Bekmakhanov examined the history science issues in detail. We will
mention about the points criticized in the press organs.
In the 6th number of the 1945 edition of ‘Bolshevik’, the writer
criticized the article from the 1943 ‘Kazakh SSR History’, which included
about the author’s methodological mistakes that resulted in
72 Ibid, p. 27.