History writing as agitation and propaganda: the Kazakh history book of 1943

The reconstruction of the Soviet recent past is a controversial issue in the post-Soviet republics. In Kazakhstan, the reconstruction of the past has gradually rehabilitated leading Kazakh communists, such as Zhumabai Shaiakhmetov. One of the main rationales of this rehabilitation is his support for Kazakh historical writing, which resulted in a textbook published in 1943. This work has been seen as an endeavor by ‘patriotic’ Kazakh officials and historians to defend Kazakh national heritage against the ‘Soviet colonial empire’. By presenting a broader view of the war period in Kazakhstan from the archives, this article argues that this history textbook was in fact merely an agitation-propaganda product of the Communist Party of Kazakhstan. Shaiakhmetov and others had mostly secured their career by remaining loyal to the Soviet system during the collectivization, the Great Famine and the Great Terror. Therefore, their encouragement of the publication of a national history in 1943 for propaganda purposes does not qualify them as suitable predecessors of the current generation of Kazakh rulers.