The title translates to "The Village of Boo-Terek."

Boo-Terek (until 2001 — Klyuchevka) is a village in the Bakai-Ata District of the Talas Region of Kyrgyzstan

It is the administrative center of the Boo-Terek rural district.

Population

In 1999, the population of the village was 4,662 people (2,320 men and 2,342 women). According to the 2009 census, the village had a population of 5,596 (2,789 men and 2,807 women). Currently, there are 5,290 people.

The village of Klyuchevka (Boo-Terek) was founded in the Kumushtak area by settlers from the Kursk province. The same name is given to the gorge in the Talas Range, as well as to the river that flows through this gorge. The toponym Kumushtak translates as silver mines or silver throne, and it can also be translated as silver trace or silver spot. According to Bartold, silver was indeed mined here in the 10th century. By the way, there are indeed silver deposits in Kumushtak.

There are several contradictory accounts regarding the founding date of Klyuchevka. According to some sources, Klyuchevka was established in 1892. The Encyclopedia of the Talas Region states that all Russian villages in the Talas Valley were founded between 1876 and 1883. Local historians consider the founding date of the village to be 1883, which generally coincides with the date indicated in the encyclopedia. The book "Monuments of History and Culture of the Talas Region" states that the Klyuchevskaya Church was built in 1889, which means the village was founded in that year or earlier, as the church could not have been built before the village was established.

There are also archival data that date the founding of the village to 1891. The village was named Klyuchevka due to the abundance of springs that still flow in the vicinity of the village. Today, it is one of the largest villages in the Talas Valley, stretching along the Taraz – Talas highway for more than 8 kilometers.

The settlers chose the location for the village themselves. They were peasants from the Kursk province, the Khodeev family and two families of Belykh, who were not relatives. Moving along the Talas River from west to east, they approached the Kara-Su River. On the other side of the river stood poplars planted by one of the local residents. This was a summer pasture of the Tuma clan, part of the Saruu tribe. The settlers decided that further on began someone else's property. The Russian peasants who came to Central Asia were, of course, completely unfamiliar with the nomadic lifestyle and, in their naivety, believed that if the land was not sown, it simply belonged to no one. They did not realize that uncultivated land could also be someone's pasture. Therefore, the settlers decided to stop here.

The first street ran from the school to the church. The school was built in the same year as the church. The first teacher was Ivan Dmitrievich Tsekotov. Initially, there were 17 students in the school. The teachers' work was paid for by the village community, and the education was conducted according to the state program and specially published textbooks. Specialists from Auliye-Ata (now Taraz) were invited to build the church and school, with the help of local residents, and state funds were used for the construction of these buildings.

The proper planning of the streets, parallel and perpendicular, is owed to the Russian settlers; before this, houses in the villages were arranged haphazardly. Houses were built along roads, irrigation ditches, and mountain rivers. Usually, in traditional Kyrgyz villages, there was one street lined with poplars.

All so-called Russian villages were, in fact, multinational. They were mainly founded by Russians and Ukrainians, with Ukrainians often outnumbering Russian settlers in many villages. In this context, Klyuchevka is one of the few villages in the Talas Valley where, from the very beginning, the majority of the residents were Russian. Out of 859 people, 637 were Russians, 189 Ukrainians, 10 Uzbeks, 9 Germans, 9 Tatars, and 2 Poles. There were no Kyrgyz in Klyuchevka at that time.

On December 27, 1929, Stalin proclaimed the slogan of "liquidating the kulaks as a class." The year 1929 went down in the history of our country as the year the mass collectivization began. Collective farms started to be established across the country. In the village of Klyuchevka and its surroundings, an agricultural artel called "Frunze" was created.

The kulaks actively resisted the Bolshevik policies. They engaged in sabotage, destroyed livestock, buried grain in the ground, and switched to moonshining. The Soviet power dispossessed and exiled those who opposed the reforms. However, there were also kulaks who collaborated with the Soviet authorities. For example, in the village of Klyuchevka, kulak Sablin Ivan voluntarily exceeded the grain delivery quota at a price even lower than that set by the government, for which he was awarded red revolutionary trousers.

On June 22, 1941, the Great Patriotic War began. Many residents of the village went to fight and heroically battled on the fronts of this war. Lyho Makar from Klyuchevka was a pilot during the war. He was shot down, burned in the plane, and became disabled. He returned home on one leg, severely burned. After the war, he worked as the director of the village club, organized musical amateur performances, and, possessing excellent vocal abilities, participated in these performances himself. When he, covered in burns and on crutches, went on stage and sang: "I gaze at the sky, pondering, why am I not a falcon, why do I not fly!" it had a tremendous emotional and aesthetic impact on the audience. Poluektov Boris Trofimovich, a resident of Klyuchevka, reached Berlin and was awarded orders and medals. After the war, he worked as a geography and history teacher at the school.

Shatilov Evgeny was called to the front in July 1942, and already in August of that year, his wife, Shatilova Ekaterina Trofimovna, received a death notice. Ivanov Semyon Fedotovich fought on the Leningrad front during the most difficult blockade years and later reached Berlin.

He was awarded the Order of the "Great Patriotic War" and two Orders of "Glory," as well as other orders and medals.

In the early 1950s, at the initiative of N.S. Khrushchev, a policy of consolidating collective farms was initiated. In 1954, the collective farm "Kumushtak" was created by merging with the agricultural artel "Frunze," which had been established in the Russian village of Klyuchevka back in 1939, along with the collective farms: "Kosh – Aryk," "Red Plowman" (Kyzyl Bakyr). All the lands of Klyuchevka were incorporated into the collective farm "Kumushtak." The name of the collective farm comes from the name of the area where Klyuchevka is located.

This term also refers to the gorge in the foothills of the Talas Range and the river that flows through this gorge.

In 1976, new telephone stations were put into operation in the villages of Kirovka and Klyuchevka.

In the same year, following the example of the collective farm "Kumushtak," irrigators organized round-the-clock irrigation of corn and alfalfa. Special huts were set up in the fields for this purpose. The work was conducted under the slogan "In ten days, we will exceed the commitments for laying silage."

The best irrigation workers were regularly awarded traveling pennants.

As mentioned earlier, this was a contradictory time. Reports were constantly made about the commissioning of new enterprises, but the economic effect from them, under the cumbersome planned bureaucratic system and the lack of material incentives for workers, was minimal. From 1970 to 1984, in the Klyuchevka collective farm "Kumushtak," a new milk commodity farm (MTF), a large new school (now named after Beishen Satybekov), and vocational school No. 41 were built.

Despite all this, in 1982, only 30.1% of first-class milk was supplied from the "Kumushtak" collective farm. In 1984, in the aforementioned collective farm, the cost price of a kilogram of beef was 445 rubles, instead of the planned 182 rubles, mutton 246 instead of 134, wool 878 instead of 615, and milk 32 rubles instead of 29. By 1984, the "Kumushtak" collective farm owed the state 5 million 290 thousand rubles. Of all the graduates of the 10th grade, only one expressed a desire to stay in the native collective farm.

Interruptions in the supply of bread and other products to stores became a common occurrence. The previous year's grain harvest of 35 centners per hectare (with a planned 41) was clearly insufficient to meet the demand for flour products.

By 1990, the days of the Soviet Union were already numbered. The national self-awareness of the residents of the national republics was growing. In Kyrgyzstan, the issue of renaming settlements was raised. Villages with originally Russian names were decided to be renamed after the names of the areas in which these villages were located. The village of Klyuchevka was renamed Kumushtak in 1990 by a decision of the village assembly. And in 1992, by a decision of the Bakai-Ata District Council, the village was renamed Boo-Terek.

Shatilov Oleg Petrovich, graduate student at the Kyrgyz National University named after J. Balasagyn, Bishkek (Kyrgyzstan)