Authors

Discussion

This project seeks to explore contemporary narratives on legacy of the GULAG camps in Kazakhstan and trajectories of their post-independence revisions through the analysis of school history textbooks and other publications. The rationale behind this project is that while the GULAG system was the biggest project of its kind in world history and Kazakhstan hosted the second highest number of prisoners after Russia, the legacies of this system remain largely understudied in Kazakhstan. This paper is also part of the bigger project exploring how the geographies and practices of punishment had historically on the economic and social development of Northern and Central Kazakhstan.  

This paper uses data from the content analysis of school history textbooks, state-endorsed academic history publications in both Russian and Kazakh languages as well as interviews with history teachers and residents in the towns and villages of the territory of Karlag. Main question is whether the narrative in Kazakhstan’s history discourse has departed from the Soviet framing and approaches, and the paper seeks to explain why a thorough reassessment of history remains relatively limited in Kazakhstan. As such, this article also aims to contribute to the discussion around post-colonialism in Central Asia by exploring whether the post-independence history narrative in Kazakhstan has tried to critically reassess and reflect on the Soviet legacy.  The main findings point to a huge challenge for the official historiography of Kazakhstan: on the one hand, Kazakhstan still has (relatively) close diplomatic ties with Russia; yet, building a new, national narrative on the past inevitably raises questions about the Russian Empire, Soviet Union and their legacy, including some of the darker pages.