While oral history has been a popular method in Central Asian studies for the last two decades, only recently have published memoirs begun to attract the attention of historians. One particularly neglected, indeed almost unknown, source are the memoirs of famine survivor and war veteran Baghdad Zhandosay who worked for the Kazakh-language Komsomol newspaper Leninshil Zhas for five decades.
It is one of the few book-length personal accounts of the Stalinist repression in Kazakhstan. On the one hand, Zhandosay provides valuable insights into the sufferings of Kazakhs before, during and after the famine. On the other hand, his life story invites us to reconsider some aspects of the historiographical debate over the Sovietization of Central Asia.
Baghdad Zhandosay in his old age [iii]. Baghdad was born in near the Kurti tributary of the Ili River. His father was known as Imanbek Biy and was an expert of Kazakh customary law.
His elder sister, Sara, was killed by the Bolsheviks in these years due to her links to the nationalist Alash party.
Atheistic propaganda, he writes, was the core of the Bolshevik ethos; so much so that it was the real ideology of the genocidal policies from to 57; However, idealization of a completely traditional Islamic society and adherence to the secular-modernist Alash party is not seen as a contradiction.
