ABSTRACT
A batyr is a folk hero among pastoral nomadic Kazakh tribes, who achieved the title by his heroic deeds. In most cases, these heroes were prominent figures only in a particular region of the vast Kazakh steppe. When Kazakh national history was constructed under Soviet rule, batyrs were incorporated into the narrative as national heroes. Although there were numerous batyrs in the long history of the Kazakh steppe, the national history focused on those who who led uprisings against Russian colonial expansion in the nineteenth century. Current literature, however, does not explain how Soviet nation-building in Kazakhstan used them. Instead, it is assumed that nineteenth century anti-Russian uprisings that took place on the Kazakh steppe were undesired and even prohibited topics in the Soviet historiography. There were two developments in the Soviet Union that support this assumption. The first development was the strong emphasis on Russian national identity after 1936. This emphasis also brought the famous ‘lesser evil’ formula, which explained the Russian expansion in Ukraine and Georgia as a better option for these territories than for them to be incorporated into Poland or Turkey respectively. 1 This shift in the western borders of the Soviet Union was extrapolated into Kazakh history writing. It is assumed that anti-Russian uprisings were removed from the Kazakh national narrative in order to establish an imaginary Russian- Kazakh friendship in history. Second, this position of the literature is also based on the condemnation of Kazakh historian Ermukhan Bekmakhanov (1915–66). Bekmakhanov was a bureaucrat and historian who was denounced as a nationalist and jailed in 1951 for writing on an anti-Russian uprising led by Kazakh Khan Kenesary Kasymov in the nineteenth century. 2 This literature on the Soviet treatment of batyrs complements the post-Soviet Kazakh narrative, which defines the Soviet period as merely a repressive period for the Kazakh nation, and the independence period after 1991 as the sole episode when its national heritage was promoted.
