Writing The History of the Kazakh SSR in Wartime Almaty.
Chaya Steinhalz is an MPhil (Master’s) student in Russian and East European Studies at St Antony’s College, Oxford. Her research focuses on national identity in the Soviet Union, particularly in the lead-up to and during the Great Patriotic War. She received her BA from UCL in 2024, where she studied at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies. In addition to her academic work, she is a Dahrendorf Scholar at the European Studies Centre at Oxford, where she is researching the connections and alliances between illiberal leaders in Eastern Europe and the American MAGA movement. She has been awarded scholarships by Oxford’s Global and Area Studies Department, the European Studies Centre, the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute, and a FLAS Fellowship through the Davis Center at Harvard.
In 1952, the Kazakh historian Yermukhan Bekmakhanov was sentenced to twenty-five years in a labour camp for his work on Kenesary Kasymov, the leader of a nineteenth-century Kazakh uprising against Russian rule.[i] The work that led to his arrest was published in The History of the Kazakh SSR, a text written during the Second World War in Almaty by a collective of historians led by the prominent Soviet scholar Anna Pankratova. The evacuation of Soviet institutions eastward temporarily shifted the centre of Soviet scholarship away from Moscow. In Almaty, evacuated historians collaborated with local scholars to produce the first academic history of Kazakhstan within the Soviet system. Despite the wartime expansion of republican historiography, the subsequent fate of these historians showed that this shift in focus was only temporary. Bekmakhanov was imprisoned for his controversial work, but Pankratova freely returned to Moscow and remained an influential figure in Soviet academia.[ii]
The German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941 triggered one of the largest evacuations in modern history. As Nazi forces advanced, more than sixteen million civilians and thousands of industrial enterprises were relocated eastward.[iii] The territories occupied by Germany before the Soviet counteroffensive at Stalingrad in 1943 had accounted for roughly 40% of the Soviet Union’s population and industrial capacity.[iv] The transfer of people, factories, and institutions to the Urals, Siberia, and Central Asia became central to the Soviet war effort and ultimately to its survival. Alongside industrial labour, the Soviet state relocated a significant portion of its scientific and cultural elite. Academic institutions deemed non-essential to immediate military production were moved away from the front, particularly to Almaty, Tashkent, and the Borovoye resort in Kazakhstan.[v]
For many evacuated scholars, Central Asia was unfamiliar terrain. Historians, philologists, and literary figures who had trained in Moscow or Leningrad suddenly found themselves working in what they regarded as the Soviet periphery. Despite overcrowding and wartime shortages, these cities became important intellectual and artistic centres. Almaty, in particular, hosted academic institutes, theatres and opera companies, as well as both the Moscow and Leningrad film studios.[vi]
Among the institutions relocated to Almaty was the Institute of History, headed by Pankratova. After a gruelling month-long journey to Almaty, the institute was ordered to move to Tashkent.[vii] Pankratova petitioned local Kazakh Party officials to allow part of the institute to remain in Almaty. The authorities intervened, and twenty historians, including Pankratova herself, were permitted to stay.[viii] This decision was unusual, as most evacuees had little influence over their destination and were frequently dispersed from major urban centres. The historians’ ability to negotiate their placement reflected the institutional authority they carried within the Soviet academic system.
In her petition to remain in Almaty, Pankratova argued that she and the other historians had already begun contributing to the wartime mobilisation. She noted that they were serving as “freelance lecturers for the Central Committee… on antifascist themes and on the history of diplomacy and international relations.”[ix] The mobilisation of intellectuals to Central Asia was also reflected in cultural production in Almaty, including Sergei Eisenstein’s film Ivan the Terrible, which was produced there during the war and presented a historical narrative emphasising strong centralised authority and national unity.[x]
The circumstances of evacuation led the evacuated historians, who had been prominent in fields such as Marxist or Russian labour history, to undertake the project of writing the first Soviet history of the Kazakh people and nation.[xi] As a result, The History of the Kazakh SSR, published in 1943 and written in Almaty by a collective of evacuated and local historians under Pankratova’s direction, became the first academic history of a Union republic produced within the Soviet system.[xii]
One of the most significant chapters was written by the Kazakh historian Yermukhan Bekmakhanov. His study examined the nineteenth-century uprising led by Kenesary Kasymov and interpreted it as a national-liberation movement.[xiii] This interpretation aligned with efforts to mobilise non-Russian nationalities by incorporating republican histories into a broader Soviet narrative of resistance and progress. The book was initially well received and even nominated for the Stalin Prize.[xiv]
However, after the war the political climate shifted rapidly. As the Soviet leadership increasingly emphasised the decisive role of the “Russian people” in the victory, interpretations that highlighted national resistance to Russian expansion became politically suspect.[xv] In 1948 the Academy of Sciences of the Kazakh SSR convened several days of debates that culminated in the condemnation of the book. Bekmakhanov was accused of “bourgeois nationalism,” expelled from the Communist Party, stripped of his academic degrees, and eventually sentenced to twenty-five years in labour camps.[xvi]
Pankratova, by contrast, returned to Moscow and remained a prominent figure in Soviet historiography. As one of her biographers, Reginald E. Zelnik, observed, she was “dethroned and restored more than once,” but never permanently excluded from the academic establishment. [xvii]
While the Central Asia scholar Adeeb Khalid has argued that the war was pivotal in transforming Central Asians’ sense of belonging within the Soviet system, the wartime expansion of republican historiography did not translate into lasting structural change within Soviet academic institutions.[xviii] The displacement of scholars during the war created temporary opportunities for new historical subjects and collaborations, but the postwar repression of figures such as Bekmakhanov demonstrated how firmly the hierarchy between the Soviet centre and its peripheries remained in place.
[i] R. M. Zhumashev, A. Zh. Myrzakhmetova, G. T. Edgina, and D. S. Kozhabekov, “The 1944 Meeting of Historians in the Central Committee of the All-Russian Communist Party (b) and the Development of Soviet Historiography of the History of Kazakhstan,” History, Philosophy and Pedagogy (2022).
[ii] Reginald E. Zelnik, Perils of Pankratova: Some Stories from the Annals of Soviet Historiography (Seattle: Herbert J. Ellison Center for Russian, Eastern European, and Central Asian Studies, University of Washington, 2005).
[iii] Rebecca Manley, “Escape to Tashkent: Fleeing Operation Barbarossa,” Summer 2011, https://warfarehistorynetwork.com/article/escape-to-tashkent-fleeing-operation-barbarossa/.
[iv] Mark Harrison, Accounting for War: Soviet Production, Employment, and the Defence Burden, 1940–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
[v] 74.004 Pavlador State Archive, ф708 оп5-1, д562.
[vi] 74.004 Pavlador State Archive, ф708 оп5-1, д562.
[vii] 74.004 Pavlador State Archive, ф708 оп5-1, д562, 0020.
[viii] 74.004 Pavlador State Archive, ф708 оп5-1, д562, 0021.
[ix] 74.004 Pavlador State Archive, ф708 оп5-1, д562, 0042-0043.
[x] Neuberger J. “The Filmmaker in Wartime: Sergei Eisenstein Inside and Out. Slavic Review.” 2020;79(1):76-92.
[xi] 74.004 Pavlador State Archive, ф708 оп5-1, д562, 0017-0019.
[xii] Zelnik, Perils of Pankratova: Some Stories from the Annals of Soviet Historiography.
[xiii] Zhumashev, Myrzakhmetova, Edgina, and Kozhabekov, “The 1944 Meeting of Historians in the Central Committee of the All-Russian Communist Party (b) and the Development of Soviet Historiography of the History of Kazakhstan”.
[xiv] Zelnik, Perils of Pankratova: Some Stories from the Annals of Soviet Historiography.
[xv] Joseph Stalin, “Toast to the Great Russian People,” Seventeen Moments in Soviet History, Michigan State
University.
[xvi] Zhumashev, Myrzakhmetova, Edgina, and Kozhabekov, “The 1944 Meeting of Historians in the Central Committee of the All-Russian Communist Party (b) and the Development of Soviet Historiography of the History of Kazakhstan”.
[xvii] Zelnik, Perils of Pankratova: Some Stories from the Annals of Soviet Historiography.
[xviii] Adeeb Khalid, Central Asia: A New History from the Imperial Conquests to the Present (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2021).
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