Recasting the nation: transforming heroes of the Soviet Union into symbols of Kazakhstani patriotism

ABSTRACT

In 1997 a monument dedicated to Heroes of the Soviet Union Aliya Moldagulova and Manshuk Mametova was unveiled on the former site of the monument to Lenin in central Almaty. This case study investigates the valorization of these Soviet-era World War II heroes in independent Kazakhstan, and argues that the Kazakhstani state has recast these heroes as significant figures in the official centuries-long history of Kazakhstan. Incorporating and commemorating the Soviet experience of World War II as part of the narrative of an independent state provides an avenue for legitimating Kazakhstani nation-building efforts. Incorporating regionally important stories of women heroes through monuments and commemorative activities demonstrates the symbolic and instrumental roles that monuments in public spaces play in reinforcing officially acceptable gender roles and in structuring power relations between the regions and the centre in Kazakhstan and between Kazakhstan and Russia.

KEYWORDS:

• Nation-building
• monuments
• Kazakhstan
• memory politics

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Inscription inside the Aqtóbe Medical College named after Manshuk Mametova.

2 Khelemskii highlights these parallels in a later stanza, describing how Moldagulova ‘carried his [Zhambyl’s] lines through fights and whispered in her heart “people of Leningrad, my children, people of Leningrad, my pride”’ (Khelemskii, 1944, in Askarov 1985, 89).

3 Rukhani Zhangyru (spiritual modernization) is the name of a state-directed programme, begun in 2017, to ‘modernize the public consciousness’ as the ‘third modernization of Kazakhstan' (Nazarbayev 2017).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported in part by a US Department of State Title VIII grant administered by the American Councils for International Education.