Kunayev Entitled His Memoirs ‘From Stalin to Gorbachev’ But He Should have Called Them ‘Without Stalin or Gorbachev,’ Olzhas Suleymenov Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Jan. 8 – On the 114^th anniversary of Dinmukhamed Kunayev, who was first secretary of the Communist Party of Kazakhstan between 1960 and 1962 and again between 1964 and 1986, Olzhas Suleymenov, the Kazakh poet who was his friend and supporter, recalls how Kunayev transformed the republic from Stalin’s time only to be ousted by Gorbachev.

            Because of history, Suleymenov says, the events of Kunayev’s career mean that the former party leader should have chosen as the title of his memoirs not the anodyne From Stalin to Gorbachev but rather the more meaningful Without Stalin or Gorbachev (novgaz.com/index.php/2-news/4102-время-культурного-роста).

            As someone who lived through much of Soviet time, the poet suggests that he and others of his generation “divide” the history of their land in the 20^th century between “before the death of Stalin and after.” The former was a tie when the intelligentsia and much of the population was destroyed.

            Kunayev was “a man of great internal culture,” someone who “loved creative peoples and really supported them,” Suleymenov says. “Never before or after the Kunayev era did an artist, director, writer, or architech feel himself so needed to the people and so valued by the government.” And much of the reason for that was Kunayev’s doing.

            As a result, the poet says, “the Kunayev years were a good time of recovery for the Kazakhs, but they were followed by a disastrous perestroika which ruined the country and negatived much of what had been achieved.” And because many in Moscow wanted to act unilaterally, Kunyaev fell under attack and was ultimately removed by Gorbachev in 1986.

            In his article, Suleymenov provides numerous details about the Kunayev period and why he values it so highly relative not only to the Stalinist past but to the Gorbachev period that followed and why he hopes that Kunayev will be remembered by residents of that country for his contributions rather than forgotten as a person of the past.

            Many of these details will be of importance only to specialists on Kazakhstan, but the fact that Suleymenov is reminding everyone of them now is something those interested in the Soviet Union in its final decades should not forget but rather pay the closest attention to because such a detailed and differentiated account is necessary to avoid going from one extreme to another.

            The number of such memoir articles unfortunately is not large, but there are far more than are gaining attention either in the post-Soviet countries or among Western specialists on the USSR and its successor states. Suleymenov’s article provides the best possible argument as to why that is so.