Аңдатпа
Allen J. Frank's Kazakh Muslims in the Red Army, 1939–1945 examines the wartime experience of Kazakhs, one of the largest ethnic minorities of the USSR, who at the outset of Soviet involvement in the Second World War numbered approximately 3.1 million (5). While not denying the collective experience of Soviet citizens, regardless of their ethnic origin, the author explores more purposefully the diversity of the USSR and the Red Army, showing how culture and history informed the Kazakh wartime experience. Tapping into new sources that have yet to be utilized, the author employs the New Social History approach, which emphasizes “history from the bottom up.”1 In this sense, the research aims to acknowledge elements of the Kazakhs’ wartime experience that were “unique to them and perhaps more broadly to Central Asian Muslims” (4).The book consists of two parts. The first, “Kazakh Society and Literature before the Second World War,” consists of three chapters that discuss the historical background of wartime Kazakh society and characterize the type of source material that the author used—namely, Kazakh letter-poems written during the years of the war. The author shows that by World War II, nomadic Kazakhs had undergone profound collective and individual trauma. This began with the entry of Russian peasant colonies into Central Asia, which then set off a pattern of pastureland depravations and mass population loss, through the political cataclysms of the twentieth century, including the revolt of 1916, the Russian Civil War (1918–22), famine (1931–33), and political repressions. By this point, Kazakhs had suffered more than fifty consecutive years of social and economic mayhem.The introductory chapters provide insight into the economic, social, and religious life of Kazakhs. Frank employs the wartime correspondences of Kazakh conscripts to examine traditional Kazakh social structures based on a blood kinship and lineage system, the Soviet assault on those structures, and the destruction of Muslim religious institutions among the Kazakh auïl community, which prior to the war had experienced vast collectivization reforms. Before the imposition of mandatory military service in 1927, most Soviet Kazakhs had little direct exposure to modern military service. Yet during World War II, approximately 450,000 Kazakhs were mobilized, of which 125,000 became casualties (36). Even still, the proportion of Kazakhs who served was notably less than their share of the overall population in the USSR, which Frank attributes to prejudice against the loyalty of Central Asians to Soviet power. Thus, it's no secret that Kazakh soldiers felt socially and culturally isolated within an organization disproportionately dominated by Russians.Of great interest is Frank's analysis of the wartime letter-poems, referred to in Kazakh as khat-öleng or khat-shïgharma (letter-composition), which form the primary sources used in this study. Described by Frank as “verse letters sent from the front, and then commonly set to music by their recipients and sung within family circles, or sometimes outside of the family” (6), letter-poems emerged among Kazakhs early in the twentieth century as a means of conveying wartime experiences. The term khat-öleng is linked with a uniquely structured song (öleng) that typically consists of four-verse stanzas forming two grammatically complete sentences. Similar genres exist among the Turkmens, Uzbeks, Kyrgyz, and Turkic Muslims of the Volga-Ural region. Frank proposes that the Kazakhs learned this tradition of describing the trials of conscription and warfare from Tatars and Bashkirs who composed songs called bäyet or bayt in the nineteenth century (45). The first autobiographical Kazakh-language wartime poem, Yāpōn Ṣōghïshī (the Japan war), was written by a Tatar named ‘Ārif Qurmānūlī from Kökpekti in the Kazakh Steppe and was published in Kazan in 1906–7 (49). Written in Arabic, Latin, and Cyrillic scripts, letter-poems would go on to become the most widespread epistolary genre among Kazakhs during World War II. Frank's thoughts and observations on the authorship, common structural and thematic elements, circulation, censorship, preservation, and publication of the letter-poems help to reproduce the literary and social context of their proliferation. He argues that the popularity and universality of letter-poems was a direct consequence of the total mobilization of Kazakh society for service in the Red Army, in labor units, or as civilian and industrial workers on the home front. While Kazakh letter-poems were published during and after World War II, their study began in the late Soviet period. In the 1980s and 1990s, the Kazakh ethnomusicologist Gülsim Bäytenova collected 1,600 compositions in northern and northeastern Kazakhstan as well as locations within the vicinity of Tashkent in northeastern Uzbekistan, out of which five hundred were songs and poems.The second part of the book, “Kazakh War Experience through the Lens of the Letter-Poem,” consists of five chapters that present Frank's analysis of the letter-poems. They discuss respectively such issues as: (1) the stages and events of the wartime experience with descriptions of conscription, leaving home, battles, weapons, the loss of comrades, and the distribution of rations; (2) the experiences of being wounded in combat, receiving treatment at hospitals, and dealing with permanent injury; (3) the ethnic and religious (Muslim) identity of Kazakh soldiers in the Red Army; (4) kinship relations, separation and unity, and the bonds experienced between soldiers in a violent conflict; and finally (5) a range of political dimensions, including local, Kazakh, Soviet, and Islamic patriotisms, German camps and perceptions of the enemy, Soviet labor camps (gulags), and so forth.Drawing from postcolonial studies, Frank concludes that despite the attempts of Soviet authorities to merge Soviet and Russian patriotism as a mobilizing force throughout the war, the Kazakhs never considered themselves “Russians” and “expressed Soviet patriotism on their own terms, based on the specificities of Kazakh political history, religion, and social organization” (200). In this regard, the research materials also allow for a more refined perspective on “Soviet Islam.” Traditionally measured by the number of mosques, madrassas, and Islamic scholars, in Frank's account Soviet Islam is instead measured by ancestry and community links. In doing so, Frank contributes to a long-standing debate over whether the Soviet Union should be considered an empire and if the Soviets exercised “colonial” rule over Kazakh and other non-Russian populations. Here, Frank argues that Soviet Muslims indeed were fully integrated into Soviet society: that they were full citizens of the USSR, that they were well represented in the ruling Communist Party, and that they served in the Red Army like citizens of any other ethnicity. Therefore, Frank concludes that Soviet Muslims cannot be compared with Muslims of colonial France or the British Empire, and that the USSR as a political union resembled neither. Rather, Soviet rule over non-Russian regions should be depicted on more equitable terms.2It is worth mentioning that although all observations and discussions in the book are well illustrated by quotations from extracts of the respective letter-poems, the texts are given only in English. Kazakh transcriptions of verses would be useful for experts in Kazakh and Central Asian studies. Another shortcoming of the research is the absence of a comparative perspective: Kazakhs participation in World War II is represented without reference to the experience of Russians or soldiers of other ethnic origins.In summary, Frank's book not only offers an excellent analysis of the wartime experience of Kazakh conscripts and their family members but also introduces unique oral and written sources, opening the door to new perspectives and further studies of the social history of Soviet Kazakhstan.