Abstract
This research article analyses the testimonies of participants and eyewitnesses of the 1916 uprising using the example of the Dzhailmyshevskaya volost of the Vernensky uezd in the Semirechenskaya oblast (now: Karasai rayon of Almaty oblast, Kazakhstan). Based on the materials of criminal case No. 510, stored in the Central State Archive of the Republic of Kazakhstan, the work shows that the participants and eyewitnesses were not a ‘silent mass’: on the contrary, their testimony (‘voices’) had influenced the decisions of the authorities and shaped the narrative of the uprising in both colonial and Soviet and post-Soviet discourses. The interrogation protocols, despite their colonial context, reveal subjective motivations and memory of events from a ‘bottom-up’ perspective. The paper contributes to the study of everyday life, microhistory and collective memory of the colonial past of Central Asia.