1937...
For almost everyone alive today, this period in our history evokes a heavy sense of rejection, a national tragedy, and for the older generation, those who experienced the superstitious fear of the omnipotence of state punitive organs, a desire to explain that there were not so many "enemies," and that those who perished during this time were often not just good people, but also steadfast fighters for the ideals of October.
Among the first victims in the republic, the secretaries of the Kyrgyz regional party committee and other leaders are usually mentioned.
The living shoots of human memory are overgrown with legends and stories of the courage and resilience of true communists. Not everything can be verified today, but it is important that the people never saw their enemies among the mass of the repressed, despite the sophisticated methods of mass deception in the form of show trials from 1936 to 1938, nor the harsh techniques of ideological processing.
It is impossible to understand otherwise the current unambiguous perception of what happened as a great tragedy and the desire to pay tribute to the innocently fallen for their labor and contribution to the realization of the great dream of the oppressed.
Decisive steps towards the renewal of the Soviet Federation on the principles of equality and sovereignty of the peoples require a new understanding not only of the causes and consequences of the unitarist course but also of the social rehabilitation of a whole galaxy of state and party workers, cultural and scientific figures, and thousands of ordinary workers of the republic who were politically slandered and repressed on charges of "national deviation," "bourgeois nationalism," etc.
In fulfilling the will of the people, the directive of the September (1989) Plenary of the Central Committee of the CPSU, the party organs of the republic, the Kyrgyz branch of the NML at the Central Committee of the CPSU, and historians of the Academy of Sciences of the Kyrgyz SSR and universities are studying materials related to the artificially created falsified cases against honest and devoted people of the socialist idea in the 1930s, in order to restore to history the worthy names, many of which are a source of national pride.
The repressed party and Soviet workers, representatives of the national intelligentsia, as previous research has shown, fell victim to arbitrariness and slander in an atmosphere of artificially inflated struggles against "conspiracies" and all kinds of "centers of counter-revolutionary organizations" that did not exist.
It is currently impossible to name all the victims from 1932 to 1938 – even today, not all documents are available to researchers. According to the data from the State Security Committee under the Council of Ministers of the Kyrgyz SSR, from the second half of the 1960s to 1991, over 8,000 people were rehabilitated in Kyrgyzstan out of more than 2 million nationwide.
The scale of repression in Kyrgyzstan can be indirectly judged by party statistics, as punitive measures were primarily directed against party members. The republican party organization shrank from 19,332 members in 1933 to 6,021 members in 1938, i.e., more than three times.
The vast majority of those expelled from the party were repressed.
In the context of total "nationalization," the state does not enter society as one of the links in its structure, but society is absorbed and assimilated by the omnipotent state. Terror, in conditions of unprecedented centralization and power of the apparatus, acts almost automatically. "By terrorizing others," wrote one of the unyielding fighters against the Stalinist model of socialism, M.N. Ryutin, in his unfinished book "Stalin and the Crisis of Proletarian Dictatorship," "everyone at the same time terrorizes themselves, forcing others to be hypocritical; each is at the same time forced to perform a certain share of this 'work.' Being included in this system, many state and party workers could only attempt to resist the rampage of lawlessness at the cost of their own lives. The arrested chairman of the Council of People's Commissars of the Kyrgyz SSR, B. Isakiev, wrote to Stalin from the internal prison of the NKVD on December 4, 1937, about the special harmfulness of mass repressions for the people and the fate of creating a new society in such former outskirts as Kyrgyzstan. "So far, there is not a single director of a state farm or MTS (there are about 100 in the republic) from the Kyrgyz, not a single manager, and there are completely insufficient cultural workers, teachers, writers, translators, etc.
At the same time, counter-revolutionary nationalists (previously arrested A. Sydykov, Yu. Abdrakhmanov, D. Babakhanov, R. Khudaikulov) accuse almost all Kyrgyz republican workers of participating in the counter-revolutionary social-Turanian party. More than a hundred Kyrgyz workers have been arrested in this case, most of whom suffer completely unjustly and have been compromised. Such mass arrests are incomprehensible to the people." It is hardly that B. Isakiev believed in the nationalist counter-revolutionary nature of the people listed in his letter, with whom he had worked side by side for several years. His logic is simple and terrifying at the same time: these people have already been arrested, it is impossible to help them, he tries to protect the remaining ones by renouncing them. A factor that exacerbated the tragedy of lawlessness and mass terror of Stalinism in the republic was the remnants of tribalism and the resurgent group struggle for influence over socio-political and economic affairs in various combinations. In the late 1920s and 1930s, reorganized old, emerging, and disbanding new groupings expanded the circle of suspects and persecuted through mutual — most often fabricated — accusations of bourgeois nationalism, belonging to "right" or "left" deviations, and kinship and other ties with bai-manap elements, "facilitating" the black business of fabrications, distortions, slanders, and repressions.
Repressions in the republic on charges of national deviation began to gain momentum from 1932. It was then that the fabricated "counter-revolutionary nationalist organization" appeared, allegedly aiming to conduct terror and armed uprising. As studies have shown, this stereotypical accusation was spread to Kyrgyzstan and other republics after the fabricated case of "national deviation" against former member of the Collegium of the People's Commissariat for Nationalities M. X. Sultan-Galiev and a large group of Soviet, economic, and other workers from Tatarstan and Bashkortostan, which was orchestrated by the OGPU in late 1928. In 1930-1931, the first mass arrests and deportations of "national deviators" followed.
On the wave of the artificially inflated struggle against "national deviation," similar cases began to be fabricated in the republics of Central Asia and Kazakhstan. A direct connection can be traced not only through the wide scale of organized arrests and repressive measures from above but also through the stereotypical nature of the accusations. They seem to be almost verbatim copies of those from the first case against M. X. Sultan-Galiev, who had dared to openly and sharply criticize Stalin for his unitarist tendencies and disregard for the national interests and aspirations of the peoples.
Among those unjustly repressed on charges of nationalism, the first to be named is the chairman of the Council of People's Commissars of the Kyrgyz ASSR (from 1927 to 1933), member of the Central Asian Bureau of the Central Committee of the VKP(b) and the Central Executive Committee of the USSR, Yusup Abdrakhmanov.
Subsequent repressions were largely framed as a struggle against "Abdrakhmanovism."